Lovehoney: Making the most of TV publicity

Until recently Lovehoney was one of the most successful online retailers people had never heard of. We’ve grown and been profitable in every year since our boot-strapped launch in 2002, but have never achieved the poster-child profile of similar sized ecommerce businesses such as Figleaves or Firebox. Then last week Channel 4 dumped 1.2 million telly viewers on our doorstep. Problem solved.

The hour-long documentary More Sex Please, We’re British went behind the scenes at Lovehoney to see how we deliver sexual happiness to the nation while grappling with the turnaround of erotic boutique Coco de Mer and attempting to realise our ambition of Going To America. If 15 minutes of fame is the usual allocation, this was more than our fair share.

Minutes after the show when on air, visits to the Lovehoney website spiked to 10 times what we’d expect for a Tuesday night. Our chief technical officer (never did think of an interesting job title for him) Geoff Parkhurst had assured us that the servers would cope, but for a gut-wrenching 20 minutes they couldn’t handle the sheer weight of traffic.

Twitter went mad. The show’s hashtag, #moresex, trended second worldwide, alive with people marvelling (quite understandably) at the double dongs and posting wonderfully positive comments about the Lovehoney team. 

We had three customer care staff working a late shift until 1am to deal with live chat and email enquiries. The next day we took three times as many phone calls as normal, though admittedly half a dozen were hoax calls from the same joker asking for two-inch condoms. (We’ll soon be selling condoms in 95 different sizes. No, really.) Viewers obviously liked what they saw. We took one order every few seconds in the 20 minutes after the programme, our fastest ever rate of sales. The day after the doc was our biggest sales day ever, the week our busiest week thanks to a combination of people discovering the category and discovering (or being reminded of) Lovehoney.

We couldn’t have asked for a better portrayal of our (at times bizarre) industry, our business and our happy, hard-working staff. We couldn’t have hoped for a better response from the public, whether expressed in orders, job applications, suggestions for solving our Happy Rabbit’s waterproof problem, or questions about where I got my Morrissey cat T-shirt (York gig, June 25, 2011).

But 15 minutes of fame (or an hour on Channel 4) is not why we’re in business. It’s great to be in the limelight (the lady in the sandwich shop recognised me) but the important thing for Lovehoney is to make the most of this unprecedented publicity. The real work – customer service, new product development,web, mobile, international – is only just beginning.

That’s the best way of really making Lovehoney a name that people have heard of. A name that stands for something – sexual happiness – and that will live on long after I’ve gone to the great Morrissey gig in the sky. Infinity minutes of fame – is that too much to aim for?

• Richard Longhurst is co-founder of Lovehoney