Best Sex Writing 2010 (12 page)

“Kimono as a name is a Japanese silk robe,” said Mayer at his office in downtown Berkeley. “But that was all part of our marketing when we started…to try to communicate more that condoms can be silky and thin and sheer and elegant—and something that women might approach as a kimono versus as a Trojan.”

Mayer lowered his voice disparagingly on the word “Trojan,” the U.S. industry’s dominant brand, which he considers to be the Exxon-Mobil of condoms. He’s repelled by the military imagery bound up in the Trojan name and the phallic metaphors in its advertising language. (After all, Trojan’s perennially popular Trojan Magnum XL just happens to share its name with the handgun used in
Dirty Harry.
) “I just think they’re marketed more toward men,” Mayer said of Trojan and other industry big boys like Durex and LifeStyles. “You know, race cars, high-performance sex. Women aren’t interested in that, but it tends to hit a different demo.”

Indeed, the American condom industry is anything but demure. In fact, it’s often quite cutthroat. Companies routinely appropriate one another’s terminology and brand identities. They send litigious letters to one another and race to beat one another to the trademark office.

Mayer and Kimono have gone against the grain in marketing their products, basing their brand identity on the apparently radical notion that there are other ways to market condoms besides affirming the penis size of the buyer. Instead, Kimono markets its condoms as being so thin and silky that they’re practically not there. In short, the company appeals not only to women, but also to a different side of male vanity—the squeamish impulses that make many guys resistant to using a condom in the first place.

Kimono may look like a sensitive girly-mon in the condom world, but it’s allowed Mayer to grow his business by cultivating a market that all the big boys now seem interested in infiltrating. Ironically, Mayer did this by claiming to sell the country’s thinnest condoms—a concept that seems to be at cross purposes with the very function of condoms, which is to provide reliable protection from pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases without breaking.

Now, it seems like the whole condom industry is fighting over who makes the least-condom-like condom.

Mayer Laboratories is located in a pristine downtown Berkeley office complex, home to insurance salesmen, lawyers and a popular local artist who illustrates
New Yorker
covers. The place is bright and well-ventilated, and a pebble garden in the foyer could have been transplanted from any high-end department store in Union Square. The lab looks like any other office space. There aren’t any Willy Wonka-type condom machines spitting colored disks of latex onto a conveyor belt; nor are there any seedy adult ads on the walls. Rather, it’s antiseptic, with cubicles and a large conference room in the back where, on a recent Tuesday afternoon, Mayer laid out his whole arsenal of products.

Arrayed on the long table were six packages of condoms from Mayer’s line Kimono, along with packages of other Mayer products such as Aqua Lube, Digitex gloves, and the fc female condom. In the condom world, these are all considered to be high-end designer products: more elegant, more expensive, and more feminine than the average Trojan or Durex contraceptive. For Mayer, they hold sentimental value, symbolizing his effort to carve out a distinctive brand identity that could sustain a small Berkeley condom-maker. They also illustrate Mayer’s seemingly counterintuitive quest to popularize the world’s thinnest condom.

Few people in the world can boast a condom history as long as that of David Mayer. In 1978, he launched National Condom Week as a freshman at UC Berkeley, spent several years working in teen programs in the Contra Costa County Health Department, and traveled to Haiti in 1984 to promote public health and family planning. Mayer describes himself as having a history of “male involvement in family planning,” and says that even if he had never spawned his own condom line, his impact would still be felt in the contraceptive world. The American Social Health Association still plans National Condom Week events every year (although after thirty years, Mayer said it has kind of gone the way of Valentine’s Day).

When Mayer launched Kimono in 1987, the AIDS epidemic had generated a surge in consumer demand, and companies just needed to fill the pipeline. By then, most condom companies had product lines with contoured tips, ribs, studs, and splashy colors. But Mayer thought he knew another type of aesthetic that could get people to buy more condoms.

From his company’s inception, Mayer sought out Japanese manufacturers. His reasoning was that Japan had higher quality standards and looser restrictions on condom thickness. Because Japan didn’t legalize oral contraceptives until 1999, its market for other forms of birth control was quite advanced. Mayer said Kimono’s reliance on more-advanced Japanese condom-making technology helped his company push up against the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s .03 millimeter (or 30 micron) minimum-thickness limit. Mayer conceptualized his brand accordingly.

Even before Kimono began cultivating the super-thin market, competitors paid close attention to its products. In 1988 Mayer Laboratories introduced the Kimono Maxx, a special plus-sized condom with extra head room (2.34 inches in diameter) and
an additional .2 inches of length. Roughly seven months later, Trojan unleashed the Magnum XL, an 8.5-inch “King of the Big Boys” that has become the gold standard for large-sized condoms (given that it’s name-checked in rap songs and worthy of its own Wikipedia definition).

Not to be outdone, Kimono shifted its focus to thinness and delicacy. In 1992 it came out with the Kimono MicroThin, which the company claims is 20 percent thinner than the original Kimono. For sixteen years, Kimono has claimed that MicroThin is the thinnest condom sold in the United States. According to Mayer, regular Kimonos—at 55 microns of thickness—were already 20 percent thinner than most other brands. The new MicroThins measured 49 microns, Mayer said, “So now we are really ahead of our competition offering that really thin, sheer experience for users.”

The product was groundbreaking, according to one local retailer. “I do believe they were the first people to bring in ultrathin condoms that were strong and comfortable, but offered the maximum sensation that allowed people to feel like they weren’t wearing anything at all,” said Coyote Days, senior buyer at the adult store Good Vibrations, which has carried Kimono for well over ten years. “They’re a premium line; they have different contours and different sizes. A piece of their own marketing was that they were Japanese-made, and that stood for a high quality.”

Before Kimono hit the market, Days said, there wasn’t much incentive for big companies like Trojan (now eighty-eight years old) or Durex (now ninety-three years old) to enlarge their brands or expand their customer base. But slowly that’s changing. “It’s ‘the way we’ve always done it’ versus ‘the way we’re gonna do it now,’” Days said. “Someone comes in with a new idea, a strong brand, and something you don’t have, you’re gonna feel a little
threatened and you’re gonna step up to the challenge.”

And step up they did. Although Mayer says it took his competitors several years to acquire the ability to produce super-thin condoms (which they too accomplished by sourcing from Japan), they began appropriating his company’s language right away—even for condoms whose thinness he claims is questionable.

“Now it’s ‘Sensi-Thin,’” said Mayer, referring to the new thin condom category from Durex, “but before that they had ‘Ultra Sensitive,’ ‘Extra Sensitive.’ Those would be the terms they would use, but it would more or less be the same condom.… And then Trojan came out with a line called ‘Ultra Thin.’ They came out this year with ‘Thintensity.’ And then ‘Magnum Thin.’”

In fact, there’s no shortage of “thin,” “sensitive,” or Japanese-styled condoms on the market. Visit the popular Web retailer
RipnRoll.com
and you’ll find—in addition to the aforementioned Trojan and Durex products—Lifestyles Skyn condoms, Lifestyles Ultra Thin, Paradise Super Sensitive, Intellx spiral-shaped Inspiral, and Okamoto’s Beyond Seven with aloe (another Japanese import).

Mayer recently began appending a bar graph to Kimono packages claiming that even its regular Kimono Thin condoms are as thin as Durex Extra Sensitive and thinner than Lifestyles Ultra Thins. And Kimono claims that its MicroThin beats everyone—including the super-stretchy Trojan Ultra Thin condoms—by several microns.

“We’ve been calling ourselves ‘Microthin’ since the beginning, and now one of our other competitors, Trojan, they came out and started using the ‘Microthin’ for their condoms,” said Mayer. “Now we’re having to look at, do we need to take them to task?” Mayer says Trojan appropriated the “Microthin” label last year, right around the time its “Thintensity” condom line
hit drugstore shelves. The company also took Kimono’s tack of manufacturing the Microthin condoms in Japan. “They went to one of our competitors,” he said, bitterly. Mayer concedes, however, that Kimono never got around to trademarking the term Microthin until April of 2008, sixteen years after it first started using the phrase.

Mayer says the word “microthin” appeared on Trojan Ultra Thin packages in 2007, which advertised the new Ultra Thin condoms as being “made with ‘microthin technology.’” “In some ways it was a concession,” said Mayer, alluding to the use of his brand name to describe a competitor’s product. Although these words no longer show up on Trojan’s website, their occurrence in consumer product forums suggests that Trojan did indeed use them. But then, “micro” is a ubiquitous adjective, recycled again on a package of Trojan Supra “Microsheer” Polyurethane Ultra Thin Lubricated Premium condoms.

Meanwhile, a couple months ago, one of Mayer’s customers informed him of some new marketing material from Durex, which advertised its new “Sensi-Thin” condom as “the thinnest in the world.” When the product hit stores a month later, Mayer got a pack and read the marketing claim, which he said was specious. Mayer said Durex alleged that the Kimono MicroThin was 59 microns thick, while falsely advertising itself as being 45 microns thick. Not true, said Mayer, who insisted that MicroThin had always stuck with its official 49 micron measurement. He was incensed, to say the least.

“We went and tested several boxes of their product. They had this interesting language that claimed they were the thinnest condom in the world… based on what they called the mass method of measurement.” According to Mayer, this measurement standard is seldom used by manufacturers. “What it is, you take
your weight of your condom, divide it by your length of your condom, divide it by some other things, and it comes out with a calculated thickness.”

So Mayer measured the Kimonos against the “Sensi-Thins,” using both the Durex method and his own, which takes the thickness of the condom walls at three points using a micrometer caliper (an instrument accurate enough to measure the width of a single hair). In both cases, he claims, Durex’s claims were wrong. Mayer wrote a letter to Bill Siegel, the president of Durex, asking him to cease and desist. Mayer said Siegel replied with a promise to rescind the “world’s thinnest condom” slogan, although he defended Durex’s data. (In fact, Sensi-Thins are still advertised as “the thinnest latex condom in the world” on several websites.)

Durex representatives did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Asked to comment for this story, Siegel of Durex replied with this canned statement: “As the world’s number one condom brand, Durex® leads the way in research, innovation, and technology which allows us to offer a wide range of high quality condom options for consumers all over the world. We do not feel it’s appropriate to discuss competitors in the media and are therefore not in a position to respond further to your inquiries.”

In any case, shortly after his exchange with Siegel, Mayer sent a press release advertising this tit-for-tat as a “David vs. Goliath story.” An attached picture showed the Durex Sensi-Thins package with the slogan “World’s THINNEST latex condom!” circled and crossed out.

For Mayer it was a small victory.

Condom advertising is more visible today than ever before, and it’s not uncommon to turn on a Top 40 radio station these days and hear one of the new ads for Durex, Trojan or Lifestyles.
Among the far more adventurous Web commercials are a Trojan Olympic sport called “pelvic power lifting” and the alleged “president” of Durex slamming his wang with a car door.

But despite the macho swagger of ads such as these, the industry’s commercial imagery has softened and even grown a little more sophisticated over three decades, which might be related to the gradual feminization of condoms. Clearly, there’s an overwhelming interest in thin condoms. Days of Good Vibrations says it’s no accident. “Both women and men buy them in massive amounts. We sell tens of thousands of Kimonos a year, and of the super-thin condoms in general.”

Trojan spokesperson Nyla Saleh said the competition to sell America’s thinnest condom is driven by consumer demand. “People want something that’s gonna have more of a natural feel, and Ultra Thin condoms are able to provide a lot of consumers with that,” she said in a phone interview. “We also have very extensive focus groups that we have for each product. We take into huge account consumer reactions and personal testimonials to all of our products.”

But is “thin” really what consumers are looking for, or are companies just rebranding their existing products? A random survey of current and former condom buyers suggested that men and women have a wide range of reasons for buying a particular brand of condom.

Some consumers unequivocally champion thinness. In an online discussion entitled, “What’s the thinnest, least ‘intrusive’ condom on the market?” at the website MetaFilter, one anonymous commenter described the thinking of many condom buyers. “I’m pretty tired of my penis being encased in what feels like an inch of rubber. I’m not concerned about STDs because I’m in a monogamous relationship and we’ve both recently had
STD panels, but I’d really prefer not to have little anonymouses around. Any suggestions on really super-thin or super, um, sensation-transferring condoms?”