Meet the woman who designs and tests sex toys for a living
words by laura roscioli
“A vibrator is a man’s teammate, not his competition.”
Laura Roscioli is a Melbourne-based sex writer and host of the podcast The Sex That Changed My Life. Her monthly column on Fashion Journal is here to make sex (and the conversations around it) more accessible and open-minded. She believes the best learning comes from lived experience, and she’s here to share hers – and other people’s – with you.
I still remember the first sex toy press release that landed in my inbox. I’d already worked in media for four years and thought I’d seen every type of product launch imaginable. I had not.
It was Lily Allen’s collaboration with Womanizer: a hot pink and orange vibrator designed to mimic oral sex. At the time, I’d never used a sex toy or written about one, and I certainly hadn’t imagined there were entire careers built around designing them.
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Fast-forward five years, and I don’t bat an eyelid when a new vibrator lands on my desk. It’s a weekly occurrence! The sexual wellness industry is exploding, but what interests me most isn’t always the products themselves. It’s the people making them.
A little while ago, I met sex toy designer Molly Berry at an industry event. She was launching her new baby, The Enchant, out into the world. I remember thinking how comforting it was knowing there are women behind the products designed to get women off.
It’s a bit like seeing a queer actor play a queer character. You trust the authenticity because you know it’s coming from lived experience. But it also left me wondering, what does a sex toy designer actually do?
I imagined moodboards. Sketches. Conceiving new ways in which a woman could achieve mind-blowing orgasms. Turns out, it’s actually much nerdier than my dreamscape.
Most of Molly’s day is spent analysing sales data, looking at what’s selling (and what isn’t), talking to manufacturers and figuring out where the next gap in the market might be. On any given day, there are prototypes scattered across her desk waiting to be tested, tweaked or sent back.
Recently, she’s been working on a range of scented massage oils. Which sounds lovely, until she tells me: “You do not want to know the heartburn you can get when you have a stomach full of different lubricants with varying formulas.”
Ouch. Perhaps unsurprisingly, working in sex toy manufacturing means your threshold for ‘weird’ adapts pretty quickly.
“I’ve been here for six years now, so a lot of the weirder aspects of my role have become white noise,” Molly says. “But there are definitely still moments where you catch yourself laughing at the absurdity of a conversation.”
Like discussing the pros and cons of your latest masturbation session with your colleagues.
“As much as we try to keep these conversations professional, using phrases like, ‘the product performed as expected’, when you break it down, you’re really just describing the last time you masturbated to your workmates.”
I mean, it sounds iconic to me. As someone who wholeheartedly believes we should all be talking about sex a lot more than we do, it’s refreshing to hear. “The number of toys I’ve tested must be well into the hundreds now,” Molly says. “So work from home for me usually means I’ll be in bed doing practical product testing.”
I’d kill to know what their Slack channel reads like.
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Designing a new sex toy is all about the customer, she tells me. Every new product at her company, Wild Secrets, starts with feedback. Molly reads reviews, trawls Reddit, analyses sales data, chats to customer service and hands prototypes to friends and family to road-test. Some of her best ideas come from people completely outside the industry.
“You can very easily fall into the trap of thinking things that feel basic to us are completely foreign to someone who’s never tried a sex toy before.”
“The confessions I hear from friends and family once they’ve had a cocktail or two…” she laughs. “They can be very honest about their product feedback.”
What it all comes back to is this idea that designing a sex toy goes far beyond something that just feels good. It’s about making a product that feels intuitive, approachable and ultimately, something women actually want to use.
Which, Molly says, is exactly why having women designing these products matters. “We can draw from our own experience with our bodies.” She points to one of her latest releases, which was designed around the shape of the entire clitoris, not just the small external part most of us were taught about in high school.
It’s the kind of detail that feels obvious once someone tells you, but truthfully, we’ve been living in a world where women have not led women’s pleasure. Molly is a great example of how that is changing.
Ironically, though, becoming an expert in female pleasure hasn’t exactly made her dating life easier. When Molly tells men what she does for work, they usually fall into one of two camps. “The first response is that they get defensive,” she says. “‘Well, I guess you don’t need me then.'”
“The second is that they hear the words ‘sex toy’ and suddenly think that gives them licence to be really sexually aggressive.”
She laughs it off, but I can’t help but roll my eyes.
“A vibrator is a man’s teammate, not his competition.” That’s the Wild Secrets motto, and one we should be screaming from the rooftops for the sake of female pleasure.
Dating apps and disappointing men aside, she wouldn’t trade her job for anything. “When I hear that one of our toys has improved someone’s intimacy with their partner, or simply gives them something to look forward to when they get into bed at night, it makes me proud that I’m able to contribute, in a small way, to bringing more pleasure into people’s lives.”
This makes me smile. In a world that still has so much to learn about sex, there are women like Molly doing everything they can to design products that bring moments of confidence, intimacy and joy to someone’s pleasure journey. And she’s out here talking about her work with pride. To me, that feels like progress.
For more content like this, follow Laura here.
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