Page 62 - AVN July 2016

by SHARANSTREET
Tapping Into Topco
New COO talks about what’s next for the venerable brand
product industry, Topco Sales has seen many
One of the “big five” companies in the pleasure
changes over its 40-plus years in business. And
that’s especially been true since 2012, when the
company was sold to WSM Investment. Though two
members of the founding family still remained on the
scene—Scott Tucker, son of Marty Tucker, and Michael
Siegel, Marty’s nephew—the next four years brought a
lot of changes at the company, including a move from
Chatsworth to Simi Valley.
This spring, upheaval continued with the departure
of Siegel back in May. And within a couple of weeks
another change came. On June 3, Topco Sales announced
that it would be sailing off in a new direction in the wake
of appointing industry veteran Autumn O’Bryan as its
new chief operating officer.
For those who don’t know O’Bryan, suffice to say that
over more than two decades in the pleasure product
industry, she has explored almost every aspect of the
business. And that’s fortunate because, according to a
company release, O’Bryan’s new job is “to reestablish
Topco Sales as a leading manufacturer focused on
building trust, promoting quality, and bringing a fresh approach to the next phase
of the brand’s historic legacy.”
Piece of cake, right? Well, not really. But after talking to O’Bryan, it’s clear that
Topco’s new COO has knowledge of the industry that is both deep and broad. And
as a Topco alumna, she’s a passionate cheerleader for the venerable brand.
O’Bryan’s path through the adult industry began in 1994 when she started a
home party business in New England called Midnight Madness, which she sold to
UndercoverWear in 2004. After consulting with the new
owners for a time, she moved to New Orleans in 2005 to
partner with Ann Sanders, who was then the president
of Fantasy Lady, a home party company. O’Bryan and
Sanders were going to do wholesale distribution to party
plans—and then six weeks after she moved to the Big
Easy, Hurricane Katrina washed their plans away.
“At that point,” O’Bryan recounted, “Marty Tucker,
who was a mentor of mine and owned Topco Sales,
called me and asked me to fly out to California to
interview with them, and I got the job as executive
director of product development for Topco Sales and
then I stayed there through 2008.”
After that O’Bryan explored another sector of the
industry when she joined CNV.com, also known as
SexToy.com, the pioneering ecommerce giant founded
by Dave “Sex Toy Dave” Levine. From 2008 until earlier
this year she worked at that company as vice president
of sales, marketing and business development.
O’Bryan’s resume shows her familiarity with myriad
aspects of selling and making pleasure toys. “Obviously
with Topco I did the manufacturing side,” O’Bryan said,
“and working with CNV I had been a customer, a vendor, ecommerce, omni-
channel, so I’ve pretty much covered it all. Brick-and-mortar is the only area that
I’m lacking in, but I have a pretty good understanding of it.”
When O’Bryan spoke with AVN via Skype from her home office in New
England, she’d been on the job for just three weeks, commuting from the East
Coast to Southern California. Over the course of our talk, O’Bryan shared some
details from her past and also painted a vision for the future.
I need to reestablish the brand: the trust, the integrity and the
quality, the delivery and the relationships.
— Autumn O’Bryan, Topco COO
we’re starting to pull that back a little and get back to
basics. ...
People are much more familiar with what is body-
safe and so I think that’s important ... listening to the
consumers and creating really good products, quality
products, that are body safe. However, for Topco Sales
and a lot of the bigger companies, that has not been
our focus. A lot of the smaller manufacturers, that is
their focus and I applaud them. I think it’s going to
be a longer process for [a company of Topco’s size] to
get there because we still have the PVC and the staple
items and the inexpensive items, because there are still
wants and needs for those. These items still sell. But
we can make sure that even those are the best quality
that we can make them.
How did you end up returning to Topco?
The [Topco FEATURE
What was it that drew you to the pleasure product
industry to begin with?
I went to school to be a warden of a prison—that
was my dream—and so I got my degree in human
services and then I was going for criminal justice. I was
working in the prison system as an intake counselor
and I went to my first home party. The consultant
said it was the most she had ever sold—we had done
thousands of dollars in sales. So I asked her how
much she made, and she told me, and I asked her, like
everyone does, what’s involved in that? She told me,
and it seemed really simple. ... I bought a kit and my
first party did really well and I thought, “Hmm, why
would I give someone else my money?” So I created my
own company, and within the first year I had a hundred
reps. And I left the mainstream job behind because the
home party industry was just growing so fast.
What did you like about home parties?
I loved meeting with people and being an authority on
what would fulfill their fantasies. Back in those days, a
lot of women had never had orgasms. They’d been in
long-term marriages and they were ashamed, and this
gave them an open forum to discuss and they had a lot
of fun doing it. The toys just rolled off the shelf. And at
that time there weren’t as many brands, there weren’t
as many products, there weren’t as many companies,
the internet wasn’t big—so was easy money. It was a
lot of money.
You’ve been selling sex toys for a long time. How
has the market shifted?
Back when I was doing sex toy parties, women
would not say they were going to a sex toy party.
It’s very different now, where adult toys are in the
mainstream—Walgreen’s and Wal-Mart and so forth.
We have come a long way, and I think it’s much more
female-oriented, which it wasn’t before, and so I think
a lot of the development needs to be aimed toward
females and couples. The technology has certainly
come a long way; however, I’m concerned that the
technology is getting too far advanced for sex toys. ...
It’s not iPhones and it’s not software and hardware—
it’s still this really impulsive experience that you have
with yourself or your partner. So I think we’ve gone
really far out with technology and what I’m seeing is
Sales] CEO, the largest shareholder of
WSM Investments, is William Wu, and he is the
owner of Lovers Health, which is a large Chinese
manufacturer of adult products. They also own stores,
very big in Asia, and he used to be one of my top
vendors when I was at Topco Sales back in 2005 to
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