The Story of Os

How a homemaker-turned-entrepreneur found success and satisfaction by making sure that The Rattler lights your fire, Nympho Niagara overflows with excitement, and G-Wiz hits the spot.

By Linda Vaccariello

Patty Brisben knows what you want in bed. Maybe not you specifically. And maybe not what precisely. But after two decades spent listening to thousands of women share their most intimate desires, she has some suggestions.

She wasn’t always so confident. On a quiet afternoon in 1983, Brisben faced her future, which had just arrived in a box full of unfamiliar merchandise. The contents were items she had never actually used herself; products she barely understood but that she, in a burst of uncharacteristic chutzpah, had decided to sell. And not just sell. She would be required to demonstrate these novelty products with grace, aplomb, and inexhaustible enthusiasm if she was going to be successful.

And boy, did she want to be successful. She had four kids, one failed marriage, and a burning desire to amount to something. So she shook off her anxiety, summoned up a perky dose of her Inner Mary Tyler Moore, and plunged ahead.

FAST FORWARD TO 2006. Brisben’s Loveland-based company, Pure Romance, did more than $60 million in sales last year. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a whole lot of sex toys. Pure Romance is now the nation’s largest home-sales purveyor of the kind of items that your grandmother might have called “marital aids.” The company has a 47,000-square-foot corporate headquarters. It has 14,000 sales consultants across the United States. And it has a new president—Chris Cicchinelli, Brisben’s 32-year-old son—who believes he can grow the business to $250 million or more in annual sales.

Pure Romance also still has Patty Brisben, its 51-year-old founder and CEO, who is no longer baffled when she faces a box of bondage gear, candy bras, or battery-operated stimulators. The company is hers. It is Brisben who has set the squeaky-clean standards at Pure Romance; who develops new products and courts new sales representatives; who has launched a nonprofit foundation and works with university researchers; who leads sex talks with cancer survivors and presides over celebrity bridal showers. Twenty-four years ago, she was a nice woman trying to make her way in the naughty novelty business. Today she’s reshaping an industry. The world of sex accessories has emerged from the back pages of cheesy magazines and sleazy bookstores; that’s partly because the culture has changed and partly because technology has changed. But it’s also because Patty Brisben, who once upon a time barely knew the difference between strawberry jam and K-Y Jelly, has spent years figuring out what women want.

“EVERY WOMAN SHOULD have a good lubricant. Period.” When Brisben says this over lunch, I immediately understand the secret of her success. It’s not just because she can sit there and talk about sexual lubricants as matter-of-factly as another woman might discuss chicken piccata. It’s because of the way she says it, her confident insistence. It’s very...adult. Not in the X-Rated-Movie sense of the word, but in the Well-Equipped-Household sense. Like a gentle version of Martha Stewart explaining that every cook needs a good set of knives, or a petite female edition of the Queer Eye guys stressing the importance of a good hairstyle. Yes, you can get along without it, but why should you? Why, when this one small investment—a good carving knife, or a haircut, or a dab of Sweet Seduction (“slippery and long-lasting,” according to the Pure Romance online catalog)—can make cooking or dressing or lovemaking more pleasant.

And there’s something else in her pronouncement. Tiny, blond, and genial, there is nothing remotely intimidating about Brisben. But it’s evident when she talks that she has no patience for anyone ignorant enough to try to make her customers embarrassed about using her products. These items play an important role in women’s lives. Period.

Still, embarrassment and discomfort have, to some extent, made her business what it is today; she knows that. She sells many things you can’t find in your local drug store, things you probably wouldn’t pick up there even if you could. Sex toys, for instance. “I don’t think I’d ever feel comfortable buying something like that at Target,” she muses as the server refills our water glasses.

She was home on maternity leave—it was 1983 and daughter Lauren had just been born—when it all began. She’d seen a segment on The Phil Donahue Show about a home sales operation called Fun Parties that sold sex aids. Something about the business struck an entrepreneurial chord in her. She started calling friends. If she gave one of these parties, would they come? “I invited 20 people,” she recalls. “I ended up with 40 at my house.”

At the time Brisben worked as a medical assistant in a pediatrician’s office. She had married at 17, and when her first husband left, he told her he wanted to spend his life with someone who was going to be successful. Even though she had remarried, the insult still stung. She wanted to do something bigger with her life, to live down that humiliation. Fun Parties was a way to earn extra money without taking time away from her children; it was also a way to prove her worth.

She did, however, experience a moment of terror when her first box of merchandise arrived and she realized that her understanding of sex aids was stuck in the Eisenhower Era. “I knew K-Y Jelly,” she recalls. “I knew it was something they used at the gynecologist.” But, she says, “by the time my first party was over, I realized that I didn’t have to know everything.” The women who came were full of questions and seemed happy just to have a place where they could ask “Does your husband do that, too?” without feeling stupid. She didn’t have a lot of answers, but she learned what she could from gynecologists, and from the wave of sex reference books spawned in the ’80s. “I was hooked,” she says.

She wasn’t going into homes to hawk cleaning products or life insurance or Tupperware canisters. Her product was pleasure. It was intimacy. It was relaxation, communication, entertainment, self-discovery, reproduction...all the things that sex is. Which meant that her work was, virtually by definition, exciting. She remembers once, early on, she found herself in Northern Kentucky, bumping down a desolate dirt road to the tiniest house she’d ever seen. When she pulled up, the party guests exploded onto the rickety front porch, pointing and cheering. “I felt like a rock star,” she says.

When you work in home-party sales, part of the job is selling, and part is recruiting others to sell. By 1993, Brisben had a “downline” of more than 50 Fun Party consultants working under her. Unfortunately, while she and her associates were going great guns, the parent company was foundering. Merchandise was on back-order, and Brisben found herself with nothing to sell. Even worse, she felt responsible for the sales consultants she’d recruited—women who were making their livelihood from Fun Parties. Desperate to locate merchandise, she drove to Cleveland to plead with a distributor that carried adult novelties. She recalls an intimidating boardroom encounter with men who were amused at the idea of an army of salesladies peddling vibrators at tea. They suggested she open a chain of stores. Even today, she groans at the idea. “I didn’t want stores,” she laments. Instead, she started Slumber Parties—her own home sales company—scraping together $5,000 to invest and working directly with manufacturers to get stock, packing orders in the basement of her Milford home, and dragging starter kits up the stairs to send off to newly recruited sales consultants.

She owned the new company in partnership with another woman based in Louisiana; that arrangement ended in 2002. Brisben ceded the Slumber Parties name to her former partner and rechristened her company Pure Romance. The old name was confusing and she wanted to get rid of the “party” image, she says. But most of all, she didn’t want to jump through legal hoops to keep it. “I could have sat in court forever,” she says. “I know: I have two divorces.”

Call it ironic, but the woman who, according to a promotional video, is “changing the world one orgasm at a time” does not have a significant other. She and her second husband split in the mid-1990s. Since then—well, ask any middle-aged businesswoman how hard it is to meet Mr. Right. Especially if you make it your business to keep men out of your, well, business.

IT'S SATURDAY NIGHT on a Burlington cul-de-sac, where a groom-to-be and his friends are unloading packing cases from the trunk of a Dodge Magnum, carrying them inside a brick split-level, and depositing them near the dining room table, which has been laid with snacks, punch, bridal shower napkins, and a party cake shaped like a giant penis, iced the color of Pepto-Bismol. Before the men can so much as tug on their ball caps, they are ushered out the door by the mother of the bride.

No men are allowed at Pure Romance parties. None. Don’t ask, don’t even think about asking. B.J. Jones, the Pure Romance consultant booked for the evening, will not proceed if there are men present: It’s Brisben’s policy. Nor will she begin in front of girls under 18, or children: It’s the law.

Nor will she use sexual slang or terms that might make a guest uncomfortable. And at the end of the evening, when she meets privately with each young woman to discuss Pure Romance purchases, Jones will treat the conversation with the utmost discretion.

In the small living room the party guests wait for stragglers and watch My Super Sweet 16 on the wide-screen that dominates one wall. The bride wears a T-shirt identifying her as the bride and everyone wears low-rise jeans. Most do not bring gifts; a percentage of what’s spent at the party will be credited to the bride, so she can choose the Pure Romance products she wants. The dozen women who have gathered are young and achingly lovely. A generation ago they might have bought new dresses for the occasion, got their hair done, and presented the bride with fondue pots, butane candles, and blenders purchased in the firm belief that small appliances are the key to marital bliss. But times change. A fondue pot? Get real.

Jones is 48—tall, slim, and elegant. She started with Brisben 14 years ago; before that she sold Amway, Tupperware, “lots of things,” she explains as we wait for the party to begin. As a top seller, Jones gets a car allowance (it’s her Magnum in the drive) plus bonuses, and her commission is high—60 percent of what she sells. She has close to 100 sales consultants in her downline, which, she says, generates a check of $9,000 to $11,000 a month. When she started with Pure Romance, it was her goal to do five events a weekend, running from bridal showers to neighborhood get-togethers nonstop. She’s slowed her pace in the past few years. “I consider myself retired,” she says.

When everyone has arrived, Jones starts with party games. Give yourself a point, she says to the guests, if you’ve had sex in the past 24 hours. If you’ve ever had sex in the water. If you’ve ever used an edible topping on your guy. “Give yourself extra points if it did not contain sugar,” she says. “Sugar promotes yeast infections.”

The exercise is more than an ice breaker; she’s learning who she’s dealing with at this party. “We’re going to be talking about some things you might try in the future,” she says to the bride’s younger sister, dead last in points. Before the evening is over, Jones will have mentioned, among other things, yeast infections, antidepressant side effects, petroleum products, and the importance of the pubococcygeus muscle, demonstrating the latter with her clasped hands.

Jones has the women push up their sleeves for sniffing and tasting. She puts a drift of Dust Me Pink, a corn starch–based body powder, on each woman’s forearm. It tastes like cotton candy. “Tie him down, dust him all over, then lick him clean,” Jones suggests. She brings out spa products that contain pheromones and an aromatherapy mist to spray on pillows. The latter is called Dream and it’s supposed to help you relax. Jones says it also seems to help men who snore.

Many of the Pure Romance products are championship multitaskers. There’s a linen spray that smells good and makes your sheets feel like satin. Plus, Jones says, you can squirt it on the wet spot and it dries right up! Bosom Buddy, a balm in watermelon and strawberry flavors, softens lips and sensitizes nipples. “Feel the tingle?” Jones says as the guests dab it on their mouths. “It’s also good for conditioning rough elbows.”

Even the one-function products take a little explaining. Pure Romance sells six different kinds of lubricants, including one that’s waterproof, one that’s fragrance free, and one that gets hot when you blow on it. Jones puts a dab of the product—it’s called Sensations—on each woman’s arm and instructs them to follow her lead.

“Taste it.”

It’s butterscotch. Really. It’s like a sundae.

“Now rub it.”

It’s getting warm. Very warm.

“Now go haaaaaa...” She blows.

Haaaa...Holy cow, this stuff’s hot!

Echoing Brisben’s mantra, Jones explains that lubricants are important for “dry times.” “When you’re tired,” she says, “or after the baby.” But no one’s listening; they’re too busy putting checkmarks next to Sensations on their order forms.

Jones introduces Nympho Niagara, X-Scream, and Ex-T-Cee—topical compounds that contain menthol and peppermint oil to increase genital sensitivity. Then there’s Time in a Bottle—a Benzocaine-based prolonging cream for men. When Jones explains what it’s used for, a quiet young woman springs to life, grabs her order form, and whoops “Check! Check!”

Jones brings out more spa products, sexy card games, an erotic massage book, and a feminine shaving cream. Then she takes a short break. While the guests sip punch, Jones sets up for the second half of the evening. Putting away the lotions and oils, she pulls out the bedroom accessories—beads, balls, rings, and stimulators made of translucent silicone gel in festive Mardi Gras colors.

Meanwhile, the bride is in the corner, her cell phone tucked to her ear. “They’ve got,” she announces, breathless with excitement, “stuff to make him stop snoring!”

THIS IS HOW Chris Cicchinelli learned what his mother does for a living. “I was in seventh grade, waiting at the bus stop,” he says. “And some high school kid came over and said, ‘Your mom’s the sex toy lady!’” Cicchinelli didn’t really know what that meant, but he figured it wasn’t good. “I got into a fight and ended up in the principal’s office,” he recalls. When his mother came, he blubbered out the story and waited for her indignant denial. Instead, he says, “She told me, ‘You know how your dad and I fought? And now we’re not together? Well, I’m trying to help other people make up, so that they can stay together.’”

Cicchinelli, a Moeller grad who played football at Mt. Union College, occupies the non-pink president’s office at Pure Romance’s peachy-pink headquarters. Not only does he work with his mother, but his siblings—Nick Cicchinelli, Matt Brisben, and Lauren Brisben—are part of the company too, his former stepfather works in the warehouse, and his dad occasionally serves as a corporate consultant.

He didn’t plan it this way. Out of college, he’d fast-tracked his way into management with a home decor dot-com in Atlanta. In 2000, he was moving to a new firm in St. Louis when his mother asked him to come home for a couple of weeks between jobs and consult with her. Take a look at the company financials, she said. What could she be doing better?

He was stunned to discover that the funky little operation his mother used to run out of their basement was doing $1 million-plus a year in sales. More surprising: he saw that it could be doing a lot better if his mother wasn’t stretched so thin. He stayed. The following year, sales were $8 million. “We just kicked it into high gear,” he says, “and we have not looked back since.” Today Brisben focuses on training and product development; Cicchinelli, on finance and growth.

It’s a couple of weeks before Valentine’s Day when I meet with him and Brisben at the company headquarters in a quiet industrial park in Loveland. Brisben has told me that this is generally their busy time, and when we sit down, her son says that they just got 300 requests for parties in response to one day’s worth of advertising. In an average week there are 10,000 Pure Romance parties across America. In an average year, three million women attend one.

The company has spent nearly $4 million on media promotion in 40 markets—advertising to get women interested in hosting parties, recruit sales consultants, and brand Pure Romance as a leader in the relationship enhancement industry. In 2000, Cicchinelli says, radio stations would only run ads for adult-oriented material between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m.—not the best time to reach a homemaker. “One of the first things I did was negotiate with Clear Channel,” Cicchinelli says. He made his case to the radio giant: Yes, the company is in the adult-product business. But Pure Romance was “the classy side,” he assured them, explaining the nature of his mother’s work. Eventually Clear Channel agreed to run Pure Romance’s national ads with the company’s carefully crafted marketing theme—“We put the O in Romance.” Once Cicchinelli was able to buy midday advertising on Clear Channel stations, “we started really growing the market,” he says.

Pure Romance hit $60 million in sales last year, and Cicchinelli’s aim is to have the company selling a quarter to half a billion dollars of product in five years. By now, Brisben is well established as the spokeswoman for “the classy side” of bedroom accoutrements. How do we know? Because in 2004, at the height of the nation’s fascination with Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey, Simpson called on her to host a bridal shower for Simpson’s personal stylist. Afterward, when reporters hounded Brisben for information about what the pop star purchased for herself, Brisben was polite but mum. That’s class.

WHAT KIND OF women sell Pure Romance products?

Women from 18 to 75, with race, sexual orientation, and religious identities similar to overall U.S. demographics. “Really, just like the general population of women,” says Debra Lynne Herbenick, Ph.D.

Wonky details: Herbenick knows them because she did the research. She’s an instructor and researcher in the Department of Applied Health Science at Indiana University. Her area is public health, and she’s been studying Pure Romance consultants. “There’s a long history in public health of looking at the way lay people provide information about health,” Herbenick explains. “Beauty salons, barber shops, the old woman in a rural community who knows everything—there’s a lot of public health research into the kinds of lay people who have become experts that people go to. This”—sales consultants—“is a group that hasn’t been studied before.”

What Herbenick found out is that consultants regularly field questions about condom use, safe sex, sexual pain, orgasms, and menopause. Indiana University has developed an instructional CD about sexual health for consultants, and Herbenick and her colleagues are working closely with Brisben to prepare consultants to answer questions and refer customers to therapists and doctors. Researchers in IU’s Sexual Health Research Working Group continue to use Pure Romance consultants and their customers in studies, and Brisben’s eight-month-old nonprofit—The Patty Brisben Foundation—is now helping to fund a research project that focuses on vulvodynia, chronic vulvar pain.

It’s curious, but even in a culture where women seem highly sexually aware—and more than willing talk about it on The View—they still don’t take their questions to their doctors. They will, however take the advice of friends. Herbenick points to the example of The Rabbit on Sex and the City. The episode aired in 1998. “Still today,” she says, “it’s the most requested vibrator.”

You can’t deny the Sex and the City factor: Pure Romance has been helped along by the winds of change, in particular that cyclonic HBO series. In the first season (Episode Nine, “The Turtle and the Hare”), when Miranda introduced Charlotte to a vibrator called The Rabbit, a cultural icon was born. Overnight millions of American females learned that such a thing exists and that hip young women in uncomfortable shoes use it.

“Women drive the sex toy business now.” So says Al Bloom, who has been in the business since the Nixon Administration. Bloom is marketing manager (and the token male) for California Exotic Novelties, a female-owned firm on the West Coast. One reason that more women are buying these products is simply because they know more about them. “There’s a lot of information available online,” he says, “and there are programs like [cable TV’s] Talk Sex with Sue Johanson.” The products are more appealing, too, with items designed for couples to use together and better materials such as silicone—warm, yielding, hygienic (“which is important to women,” Bloom says), and more lifelike than the larger/harder/faster novelties that were standard when the industry was dominated by men.

Bloom met Brisben when her home party business was starting to take off. “At the time, our products were only sold in adult bookstores,” he points out. “I saw [party sales] as a great thing.” Now “romance stores,” home party companies, and Internet sales are the saviors of Bloom’s business. With community groups and zoning laws squeezing them out, adult bookstores “are dropping like flies,” he says.

These days, California Exotic manufactures toys sold by Pure Romance, including products made according to Brisben's specifications for color, material, function, and features. Pure Romance pioneered the practice of bringing out private label sex toys at home parties, Bloom explains. And when California Exotic has new items that could appeal to that market, he says, “[Brisben] gets first option on what they want to use.”

When Brisben started with Fun Parties, among the merchandise that was thrust upon her to hawk was a vibrator that had the sensual allure of a battering ram—an immense, heavy thing. “No woman was ever involved in developing that,” she snorts. Now that she’s running the show, there’s no place for duds. She listens to feedback from customers and sales consultants, and she has an advisory panel whose happy duty it is to try every item, alerting her to gels that irritate, liquids that taste funny, and toys that fail to thrill. “Every year we vote products off and put new products on,” she says. That’s the reason there are, for example, six different Pure Romance lubricants. Personal products are all about personal preference.

ALL THAT SAID, sex aids are not for everyone. Try this: tell your friends you’re going to a Pure Romance party. Some will gurgle “For God’s sake, why?”; others will beg for samples. And you may be amazed at who does which.

According to the company’s sheet of “Fun Facts,” the women of Des Moines, Iowa, spend 10 times more on Pure Romance products than those in New York City. In the Bible Belt, the company’s top sellers include the five-inch, dual-action B.O.B. (Battery Operated Boyfriend: “a perfect toy for the woman who is hard to please”), while West Coast customers prefer discreet, tuck-in-your-purse pleasures like the Petal Pleaser. Brisben says one of her most successful consultants lives in the predominantly Mormon state of Utah. Mormons don’t divorce, she points out—“It’s important for them to keep their relationships together.”

Brisben is in the relationship business. She knows—perhaps better than most, in fact—that there’s more to a good marriage than good sex. But she believes the reverse is also true; a good marriage doesn’t automatically mean good sex. “Anybody who just thinks they can own a piece of paper that says you’re husband and wife and that it’s going to last forever is absolutely crazy,” she says. “When we own a car, we maintain the car. So why would you think if you didn’t maintain your relationship, keep it going and keep it interesting, that it’s going to last?”

With her son’s arrival on the scene, Brisben has expanded her vision for the company. Her foundation has made grants to the American Heart Association and to breast cancer research. She’s also invested the company in breast cancer issues. Working with the American Cancer Society, Pure Romance has developed products for women who are dealing with the effects of breast cancer and its treatment—“Pink Ribbon” items to help women cope with vaginal irritation, atrophy, and loss of sensation—and the company has trained and certified a group of select consultants to present “Sensuality, Sexuality, Survival” programs for patients nationwide.

Brisben did one of the first of these in the winter of 2006 when she was part of the national Young Survivors Conference presented by the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation. During the Q&A portion of the program, one of the first to speak was a young woman who explained that she’d just had surgery and was in chemotherapy. “She says, ‘I’m 20 years old,’” Brisben recalls. “‘I just turned 20. I had no time to start a relationship. My doctor tells me that I need to use a vibrator so the vaginal wall doesn’t collapse.’ Then she says, ‘Can you help me?’

“Twenty. With breast cancer. My heart just...” Brisben pauses. “I have a daughter that age at home, and I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God, what this child is going through.’ I knew right then and there, this is needed.”

ON A COLD morning in early spring, in a lecture hall on the University of Kentucky campus, 300 bright young things are watching as Patty Brisben rubs a student’s arm with a pink massage glove. “Imagine it on other parts of your body,” she says. “Now, you’re going to get your partner buck naked...”

Brisben frequently talks to college classes like this one, and what she talks about is what she talks about everywhere: sex, intimacy, and the products she sells. Her style is, as always, friendly, funny, matter-of-fact. “I speak in heterosexual terms because that’s my lifestyle,” she says in the middle of spreading some tasty goo on a purple silicone penis. “If you have another lifestyle, just place your partner where I place the male.” The high-minded academic purpose—if you were to ask one of the sociology or psychology professors who routinely invite her to speak—is to educate students about the Human Condition. But no one here is ruminating about how this class will look on a transcript; they want samples.

The first volunteer takes the massage glove back to her seat, along with a tube of Romantica lotion. “Pink sweater, come on down,” Brisben points to her next volunteer, then anoints the girl with candy-flavored dusting powder. As she demonstrates, Brisben offers relationship wisdom for the young and—presumably—less-than-skilled. “Men are microwaves, women are Crock-Pots,” she quips, explaining why a girl might need a vibrator even if her guy’s, like, a total stud.

There are men in this room; campus programs are co-ed. Nowhere else does Brisben face a crowd that includes males when she talks about Ben Wa balls or Good Head lotion or the Pleasure Pillow. But her transition to a mixed house is seamless. A cluster of guys high in the back of the hall makes a rowdy display of volunteering each time she brings out a new product, so she calls one of them down.

As his buddies cheer, he swaggers into place, towering over Brisben. “I do have something for you guys,” she chirps. She asks him to put out two fingers, dabs some lubricant on them, and picks up Super Stretch.

Super Stretch is an item that could most tactfully be described as a “life-like massaging sleeve.” It’s not clear whether the young man is familiar with the purpose of this particular item; he’s too busy making the most of his moment in the spotlight, puffing his chest and playing it up for his buddies in the upper row.

Brisben slips the squishy device on his fingers and gives a tug.

“Whoa!” He gasps involuntarily and stands wide-eyed. You can almost see the wheels turning underneath his thatch of sleep-rumpled hair. If it felt like that on his fingers, then...? Oh.

When he walks back to his seat, he’s sheepish but smiling. Apparently Patty Brisben knows what men want, too.

Originally published in the June 2007 issue.