Meet the makers crafting sex toys with soul

Ffion Harman worked as a window dresser at Harrods before making an unusual career swerve into the world of erotic toys. This early experience provided surprising creative fuel. ‘Looking at Harrods' Wedgwood and Royal Doulton pieces heightened my appreciation for design objects,’ she recalls. In 2019, when she launched her sex toy business, Fine Bone Ltd, she was still pondering those classic tea sets. ‘I wanted to make a very British-feeling porcelain massager: quite traditional, like a tea service.’ In drawing on this everyday British pastime, Harman’s mission was to make handmade, beautiful toys that were less alienating than the often grotesque plastic items on the market, and so began a long design process. ‘I moulded 50 or 60 different prototypes in polymer clay to try out,’ she says. ‘I’d discuss them with my flatmates around the kitchen table afterwards.’ Gradually, iteratively, she hit upon the right shapes. It was, as she puts it, ‘a labour of love and self-exploration’.

Today, her brand sells the result of those experiments: Prudence, a slip-cast porcelain dildo glazed in a cool celadon blue, which comes with the tagline ‘Good. Hard. Fun.’ Each is handmade by ceramicist Alf Kurstjens at his Utrecht studio. Recruiting a ceramicist to realise the design was a challenge. ‘Ceramic is quite a traditional medium – a lot of potters didn’t feel comfortable talking about objects for sexual pleasure,’ she says. Undeterred, she launched a successful crowdfunding campaign and set up shop.

When Harman entered the sex toy business, she joined a small but growing band of makers and designers turning their talents to all things titillating. They are responding to an increased demand for high-quality, handmade tools for pleasure, and helping to break down the stigmas surrounding the industry. Ceramic artist Adele Brydges is an established maker on the scene, who began creating toys while studying the Ceramic Design BA at Central Saint Martins. ‘One of the reasons I do this work is to erode the taboo and shame around sex, pleasure and masturbation,’ she explains, adding: ‘So many sex toys are made by men for women. They lack soul. That’s what I’m trying to bring.’

Today, Brydges crafts her porcelain pieces from her east London studio. Each design is modelled in clay or plaster, carved either by hand or on a lathe, before being used to make a plaster mould. This is filled with both pigmented and plain porcelain slip to create a swirling marbled effect, or filled with white slip to provide a surface for decorative enamel decals. The aesthetic ranges from minimal to vintage Victoriana, and Brydges can tailor the finish to personal tastes. It’s all a far cry from the environment-polluting, cheap plastic toys that proliferate on the market (Poundland even offers its own range) and often end up in landfill.

Brydges sells her toys through Coco de Mer, founded by Sam Roddick (daughter of Body Shop founder and activist Anita Roddick) in 2001. When Roddick opened the brand’s first store in London’s Covent Garden, it marked a turning point. Coco de Mer was one of the first to offer luxury erotic accessories, many of which were handmade: an antidote to the tawdry tat on sale in nearby Soho. Crafted offerings include glass, ceramic and cast-metal dildos and anal plugs, alongside handmade leather bondage wear. ‘Why should we have to forgo aesthetics in order to have products that work?’ asks Coco de Mer’s managing director Lucy Litwack. ‘These objects are going to be used in our most intimate moments and should fit seamlessly into the design of our lives. They are beautiful as well as functional. They look gorgeous on a mantelpiece and fire up all the senses.’

The epidemic of loneliness and enforced celibacy caused by covid-19 restrictions has sent demand for sex toys soaring. Vibrator brand Womanizer reported that it smashed its pre-pandemic forecasts for 2020 by 50% and its sales increased the greatest in the countries hit hardest by the virus. In Britain, an intimacy-starved public snapping up sex toys comes as no surprise: Litwack reports a 45% uplift in Coco de Mer’s sales since March 2020. Brydges adds: ‘The last months have been busy for me. People want something pleasurable in their lives at the moment.’

Brydges also runs popular ‘Decorate a dildo’ workshops that enable people to personalise their toys with decals in a safe space where they can share intimate stories. ‘One of my participants said that it was like therapy for her,’ she says. ‘The conversations I have with customers are often emotional – they share things with me that they wouldn’t necessarily share with their partner or closest friend.’ Her workshops and the interactions taking place both on- and offline help challenge preconceptions in ‘a gentle, fun and creative way, encouraging a healthy attitude toward sexuality and ownership over our own pleasure,’ she adds.

By producing handmade toys in small batches, makers can keep adjusting shape and size according to feedback, and vary their ranges. And while a ceramic toy might evoke nightmare visions of chips or breaks, such fears have little basis in reality, assures Brydges. ‘Solid porcelain has a really high stress point, especially when you fire it to high temperatures. I’ve dropped pieces on a concrete floor before, and they’ve bounced.’ Harman agrees, while pointing to the hygiene benefits: ‘Ceramic products are actually more body-safe than plastic toys that degrade over time, because ceramics are inert.’ Added to this, they are hypoallergenic.

Such a choice of material also has sensual – as well as aesthetic – advantages. ‘There are functional benefits, including the opportunity to indulge in temperature play with glass, ceramic and metal designs,’ says Litwack, who counts ‘collector’s bedroom art’ (read: sculptural dildos) by Fornicouture among its handcrafted stock. Each piece is made from glass, brass and even 24-carat gold, and some come with a swishing tail of hand-cut leather. Where Brydges’ and Harman’s offerings sit around the £90-200 mark, Fornicouture toys range between £500-900. Bespoke orders up the ante. ‘I once had a client who wanted a 29-carat ruby set into a stimulator,’ recalls Fornicouture’s founder, who goes by the initials AHH. ‘They even flew over from Sweden to give it to me.’ Keeping production levels low enables customers to commission pieces tailored to their wishes or physical abilities. ‘Anything is possible,’ she says.

AHH studied sculpture at the Royal College of Art, where she specialised in casting metal and glass. This experience has influenced the brand’s high-concept design approach. ‘I think of these items as artworks,’ she says. ‘They’re artisanal, not mass produced. Each has an idea behind it, and form follows concept.’

Offerings include the Volcanic Series: translucent glass toys in fiery hues, inspired by, say, Mount Fuji or Manoa Loa. The visual drama is undeniable. ‘Many clients say to me, “I’ve left them out on display, even when my mother-in-law comes round”,’ says AHH. ‘Beautiful objects harmonise with their environment.’ Each piece goes through a series of processes requiring up to five UK craftspeople, before heading to AHH in Switzerland for checking. It’s a painstaking process, driven by an obsession with quality. No detail is too small: for leather trims, she chooses ethically-sourced kangaroo hide as its non-porousness helps the toy to stay in good condition.

It’s unsurprising, then, that Fornicouture’s items don’t come cheap – despite AHH deliberately underpricing her products. ‘If I priced things correctly, they would cost three times more,’ she says. ‘My business isn’t about maximising profits – I keep it going because I think it’s important that it exists.’ Her customers share her enthusiasm: Fornicouture has a long waiting list, indicative of a thriving market for luxury accessories. Other designers catering to it include Betony Vernon, who creates decadent silver and gold ‘erotic jewellery’ (think chunky rings that double as massage tools), and Shiri Zinn, whose quartz crystal dildo is on sale for an eye-watering £1,338.

For more accessible pieces, makers are choosing humbler materials and processes. Wood is carved then sanded to a silken sheen by brands such as the US-based NobEssence ($60-175) or Swiss designer Dee Lee Doo (€80-150). Silvia Picari’s colourful, lathe-turned wooden designs (€100-240) are handmade in her native Italy and playfully recall both the Bauhaus and Playmobil. As Picari puts it: ‘Wood is a warm and familiar material, which is perfect for a slow and explorative approach to pleasure.’

For those with a taste for the darker side of sex, a number of leatherworkers offer a bespoke approach to BDSM accessories. The London-based leather designer Mary Wing To began her career making equestrian bridles, saddles and accessories using traditional techniques before setting up a parallel practice. ‘The transition into erotic leather pieces came naturally when I began making whips and was asked if I made them just for horses or for humans, too,’ she says.

Wing To undertook an apprenticeship with the Queen’s saddler and harness-maker at Buckingham Palace’s Royal Mews, before a QEST Leathersellers’ Company Scholarship allowed her to study with master whip-maker Dennis Walmsley. Needless to say, her kinky leather accessories represent quite a departure from equestrian goods, but, for Wing To, they make sense in tandem: ‘Leather, being skin and animal, has always been sexually charged.’ Other leather-lovers making kinky collections include London brand Fleet Ilya and Irish designer Paul Seville.

In common with many such makers, Wing To sells through her website, where she receives bespoke orders, while stocking a growing number of retailers worldwide. Like others, she wants to expand the choice available, and normalise conversations around sexual pleasure. But beyond this, makers of erotic toys are compelled by the same fundamental reasons that motivate most craftspeople – to create items that bring joy and are made to last. ‘The throwaway attitude to products, and all this latex and plastic, just don’t sit well with me,’ says AHH. ‘I’m a believer in buying things that have an inherent value and looking after them. We should treasure objects that are special.’

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