Page 26 - AVN August 2013

INTERVIEW | By Sherri L. Shaulis
From Bullet Vibes to Bulletproof Vests PriveCo founder Tom Nardone’s entrepreneurial past an interesting one
Tom Nardone has sold some interesting things via
the internet in the past 15 years. After starting out
with a site that carried some of the more embarrass-
ing items sold in a drugstore (think hemorrhoids
and yeast infections), the Detroit-based entrepreneur
moved on to selling vibrators and eventually added
bachelorette items. Now he has returned to his roots,
in a sense, with his newest venture: selling bullet-
proof vests online (which he’s wearing at left).
“These things just sort of come my way, and it
product to the site without being charged, so we
decided to add a basic, simple vibrator.”
Not knowing where to start, Nardone did some
research on the adult industry and found that adult
novelty distributor Nalpac operated in the same
town.
“We couldn’t believe it,” he said. “To this day, we
use Nalpac as one of our distributors for many of
our sites.”
And while selling pharmacy items and vibrators
in a 1999 articl e. They said we were
doing the internet retail thing all
ADUL T WHO’S WHO
wr ong. But all the sites they
”Money Magazine called us ‘e-losers’
mentioned as winners are no longer
ar ound, and her e we ar e, still going
strong, 14 years later
26 | AVN.com | 8.13
makes me very happy,” said the founder of PriveCo,
ShopInPrivate.com, Vibrators.com and now
BulletSafe.com.
There is some logic to the interesting—if
somewhat twisty and curvy—path that led Nardone
to selling the specialty vests.
A former ballistics tester for hydraulic tanks on
helicopters (a job he noted is “considerable less
exciting than it sounds”), Nardone took a different
career path in 1998 when he started selling
products on the internet.
“I sort of backed into the adult industry by sell-
ing things like hemorrhoid creams on the internet,”
Nardone told AVN. “Wow, that was a bad pun!”
In 1998, Nardone and his partners walked the
aisles of local Detroit pharmacies—including
Target, Walmart, Rite-Aid and CVS—looking for
the items they felt people would be too embarrassed
to purchase in person.
“We had a retail website that allowed us to show-
case 50 items, so we made a list of the 49 most
embarrassing products and put those up for sale,”
he said. “We had them up on ShopInPrivate.com,
which is still online today. In fact, I think the only
person who has been doing this longer than me is
Dave Levine [of SexToy.com fame].”
Nardone said the idea for ShopInPrivate.com was
to give customers complete privacy when making
their purchases, so the site never asked for contact
information; nor did it ask customers to sign up for
newsletters and the like.
“We let people know that if they were buying
from us, we would never contact them again,” he
said. “It was because of that policy that Money
Magazine called us ‘e-losers’ in a 1999 article. They
said we were doing the internet retail thing all
wrong. But all the sites they mentioned as winners
are no longer around, and here we are, still going
strong, 14 years later.”
While ShopInPrivate.com didn’t have access to
customer’s personal information, it did have access
to what they were looking for.
“We had a search bar, and we used it to see what
people were looking to buy on the site; we still use
it today,” Nardone said. “And not long after we
opened the online store, we saw people were
searching for vibrators. We could add one more
were fun and kept Nardone and his partners and
staff busy for a few months, there was definitely a
lull after Valentine’s Day.
“We started wondering what else we could sell,
partly because we were bored,” he said with a laugh.
“We had spent all these weeks and months filling
orders, and now we had nothing to do. We needed
something to fill our time.”
That’s when Bachelorette.com was born.
“We had been doing well enough to hire people,
and one of them was someone who had worked at
Nalpac,” Nardone said. “We asked him what they
did after Valentine’
s Day, and he said bachelorette
items were pretty good to sell in the spring
months.”
But for all his success, Nardone admitted, he was
simply selling other people’
s products. Recently, he
said PriveCo decided to start looking for a product
and brand they could control.
Nardone does quite a bit of volunteer work in
Detroit: In 2010 he spearheaded the Detroit Mower
Gang, a volunteer group that uses their personal
lawn mowing equipment to tend the grounds at
abandoned parks and playgrounds throughout the
city. The mowing—which sometimes takes place in
later hours in sketchy neighborhoods—prompted
him to get his pistol permit. In addition to being a
gun owner, he’s also an avid target shooter. His
interest in guns helped him notice a unique shop
while on a business trip to Las Vegas recently.
“I was in the Chinatown section and noticed in
the strip mall there a store that was selling bullet-
proof vests,” he said. “I thought that was an odd
product and an odd place to be selling it.”
Nardone said he’s been hunting (no pun
intended) for a new product, and had a list of seven
criteria he wanted any potential items to meet
before he started selling them.
“These vests meet all of my criteria,” he said.
So for the first time in 14 years, Nardone is
selling directly from a manufacturer to retailers,
making the move from B2C to B2B.
“It
’
s a big change,” he admitted. “But I think we
have a plan that will work.”
From testing bullets on helicopter tanks to
testing bullets on bulletproof vests, Nardone really
brought things full circle.