Carol Queen is the staff sexologist of Good Vibrations, a women-owned, worker-owned sex toy retailer and publishing house headquartered in San Francisco. The company was founded in 1975 by Joani Blank. For more information, read: Good Vibrations: The tale of a women-owned sex toy co-op.

Q: Tell me a litte bit about how Good Vibrations started and has grown

Joani Blank actually started the publishing arm of the business first, in 1975. Things were slow until the 90s, when we definitely published much more. We added a video department and an audio publishing division a few years ago. It has always been the smallest part of the total business, but an important part of our emphasis on sex education and great for our outreach.

There was only one store for the first 15+ years of our business. Then we opened a store in Berkeley (in 1994); just a couple of years ago we added another in San Francisco, nearer the cable cars. (The original store has always been in the Mission District.) The mail order department got rolling in the mid-80s, and in the mid-90s we added our website, goodvibes.com.

Initially the store helped support the mail order catalog, but gradually, particularly once the website entered the mix, it began to hold its own. Unlike many e-commerce start-ups in the '90s, we turned a profit on the site from the first month of its operation, because the call center and the warehouse were already there, ready to support it. We have just added a wholesale department to our mail order mix, so that we can also serve the new crop of smaller stores, websites, and erotic boutiques that have come up over the last few years.

Q:It sounds as if Ms. Blank followed her vision and created a company along the way. What is your advice to women entrepreneurs who want to turn their talents and visions into a company? Is there a checklist of questions they need to ask themselves first?

Absolutely right. And vision is such an important part of establishing an individual company. It makes work inside the company meaningful for the visionary and her staff; plus it helps your customers diffentiate you from the pack.

I'm not sure about a checklist of questions, but I would say that such visionaries should assess their own business experience and savvy, and if that is lacking, get help from consultants, get more training, or get a partner. Many of us at Good Vibrations have learned about business as we went along, which is valuable, but there is a knowledge base about running a company and having access to it is very valuable as well.
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Q:What is your advice for women business owners on how
to manage employee relationships. Is there a key to
success in that arena?

I think workers want to be treated with respect no matter what the gender of their boss; they like to feel as though they are part of a worthwhile enterprise, however that is defined in the company.

The boss has to be able to share her vision and help each employee feel connected to the whole, no matter where in the business they work. This can have economic ramifications sometimes, of course, but there are other reasons to go to work in the morning than just money. At Good Vibrations our staff tends to be attracted either to our co-op structure, our sex-positive mission, or both, which gives our jobs added value and meaning; then later we hope for a healthy check when the profit from a good year is shared among the worker-owners. No one is at this business for money alone, probably, which may not be true of all companies.