Viv Conway and Jo Cummins founded their female-focused sex toy brand to empower women to embrace sexual wellbeing. Conway joined Business is Boring to talk about growing the business and overcoming social stigmas.

Growing a business is difficult in the first place – but when it’s one that falls under strict advertising rules, funding pressures and social stigmas, it’s sure to be even harder. Girls Get Off is a sex toy brand founded by Viv Conway and Jo Cummins in 2020. They wanted to empower other wāhine in their sexual health and realised there was a real lack of sex-toy marketing towards women, in ways that women engage with – so decided to change that.

Their goal was to be fun, relatable, safe, and to normalise buying sex toys. So they designed one, ordered in 1,000 samples and then got to work marketing them. Since then, Girls Get Off has taken off, growing a huge online presence with their social content, including “Sunday confessions”, where they share anonymous sex confessions from their more than 70,000 Instagram followers. 

Conway joined Business is Boring last week to talk about sexual wellbeing, advertising and what’s next for Girls Get Off.

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Simon Pound: Once you noticed that there was a gap for a brand that actually talked about this taboo topic, was it hard to decide that you would fill that gap? Because we’re all brought up pretty repressed.

Viv Conway: Yeah, and I think particularly in New Zealand that’s true. You have European friends that just don’t care as much – they get naked at the beach. But in New Zealand, we’re all a bit prudish. 

We initially set out to say we’re going to be a wellness brand – this is sexual wellness. And then we realised that actually our mission is more around normalising female pleasure. When you start any business you can do as much research as you like, and you can plan it to a stage, but you’re never going to know until people actually pull out the money and pay for it. 

So we ordered 1,000 of these vibrators. And thought, you know what, we might just end up with 1,000 vibrators in the garage, but we’re gonna give it a go, we’ll just test the market and see what happens. I’m glad we took the chance, because you can plan and be as confident as you like, but there’s always an era of uncertainty.

This is an industry that’s super hard to advertise and super hard to get talked about and picked up in the media, so how did you begin to get the word out about Girls Get Off?

From the very beginning, we wanted to be really strong on our branding. We’re not going to cut corners with how we want it to look and feel, and then knowing that we couldn’t use any paid advertising, we had to then bring this back to something that’s fun. What we were seeing in the market is a lot of brands going down the “woo-woo” route, like selling glass yoni eggs or whatever, and that’s all cool, they’ve definitely got their audience for it, but we realised that wasn’t always relatable to the masses. 

What is relatable is making it fun and humorous. Not a joke brand, but making it so that people can have a little laugh. For example, our Sunday confessions – people write in with what they’ve been up to on the weekend. And that’s an opportunity for people to share that content with others without having to talk about what vibrator they’re using or anything that makes them feel uncomfortable.

What are the kinds of barriers that are against you that aren’t against a business selling any other product?

Well, we can’t use any paid advertising. I think our ad account got blocked pretty much straight away, as soon as we started to even try those things. Stuff gets declined all the time, so that can be pretty challenging. I work with billboards and that’s been quite a funny experience finding agencies who are open-minded about working with us, because when you’re reaching out cold to people, particularly over email, and asking if you can talk about your vibrator business, the response isn’t always fantastic.

We had a billboard down in Tauranga that we put up when Aucklanders were coming out of the lockdown. And it just so happened that we met someone who does billboards and they said “look, the landowner for this site actually used to sell sex toys, so he says do whatever you want”. So we can get there, but it’s just about figuring it out and it just takes a little bit longer and we’ve got to be really creative. But all our competitors are in the same boat anyway.

What are your plans from this point? Are you going to expand the range?

We might discontinue things and add others, depending on what the market wants. But at the moment we will only ever have a small range, because that’s the thing that we identified as being a huge problem – you don’t necessarily know what you want, particularly if you’ve only ever tried one or two toys before. You don’t want to go on and find 500 different toys, it’s too hard. It’s not like looking for a movie.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Chart-topping podcast host Simran Kaur tells Business is Boring why she’s passionate about getting more wāhine into investing.

Two years ago, Simran Kaur and Sonya Gupthan had an idea for a platform that would open up the conversation about money, savings and investing for other women. Now, Girls That Invest is one of the top investment podcasts in the world, with social followings above 150,000 and over a million podcast downloads.

Kaur and Gupthan have spoken around the world, delivered a TEDx talk, and now have even signed a book deal with US publisher Wiley. From the conversation that sparked the idea in 2020 to now, Girls That Invest has been on a quick journey of growth, and they have big plans for the future too. This week, Kaur joined Simon Pound on Business is Boring to talk about the journey so far, and where Girls That Invest is heading next.

Business is Boring, the award-winning weekly podcast series is back refreshed, rejuvenated and with a brand new partner in Spark Lab. Join Simon Pound as he talks to everyone from accidental entrepreneurs to industry leaders about their business journeys and what propelled them to where they are today. 

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Simon Pound: It can seem a bit crass to talk about money – but actually money equals freedom and choice and independence, right?

Simran Kaur: Yeah, absolutely. And that’s kind of what we speak on – it’s not about trying to get people to buy fancy cars or live in expensive homes. I mean, if that’s what you want to do, power to you, but it’s more about “how do you get enough money to have those choices, those freedoms in your life?”

To get there, we need to start talking about it. Because if you don’t talk about it, you don’t learn how other people do it. We definitely have a culture in New Zealand where we tend to be more humble, we tend to not talk about [money], but that also means that other people can’t learn from you.

There’s always been a class divide – wealthy families can pass that wealth on to their children, but on top of that there’s a massive gender divide because even in these wealthy families it’s historically been passed down through the males. How are you helping turn that ship around?

Only 16% of women in New Zealand are investing, which is very, very small. In comparison, around 30 to 40% of men invest. Why aren’t [women] investing? Research has found there’s just this knowledge gap. People want to learn – it’s not that they’re not interested, it’s not that they don’t care, it’s just that they don’t know how to get started.

Tell us about how you’ve grown the following and the platform, because lots of people can start a podcast, but how do you become one of the top investment podcasts in the world?

I always started with the idea that it would grow. With Girls That Invest, even though we were starting off very small, we knew that as it grew, it needed to cater for everyone. I was very specific with the kind of content we would speak about, for example we wouldn’t just give New Zealand examples, we would give American examples and UK examples. We wanted people to feel like this was a kind of global brand, as opposed to being New Zealand-based.

Who is your audience, and what are you trying to help them with?

Our audience is mainly young women and men, particularly people from minority backgrounds, people that have never felt like they could walk up to a financial advisor and go “hey, can you tell me more?” It’s about us breaking down the stigma and the jargon so that they feel confident they’re turning up with a little toolkit of information so if someone throws a word at them it makes sense. 

The equivalent for me would be when I go to a mechanic – it doesn’t make sense to me, I’m very confused and anxious, and you either take on what they say, or you’re completely against it because you don’t trust what’s been told to you. I want people to feel comfortable going into their finances, in a way that they feel like they understand the basics. We never really tell people what to invest in. It’s more “what’s a fund? What’s a stock? How would you get started?”

You recently talked on Voices on RNZ about this idea of everyone having a money history. Can you talk us through that?

A money history is basically the way that you’ve grown up with money. Some people are more on the side of being a spender. Some people are more savers, some are very extravagant – I’m very frugal. It’s not necessarily a choice that we make, but it’s the ways that people around us have perhaps shaped our views on money.

It’s important to know your money history and your money story, because that way you can kind of unravel those thoughts, how you heard about money growing up. For example, I grew up thinking money was very evil and that if you were to be wealthy, you were probably a terrible person, or you were very busy, you didn’t have time for your friends and family and I didn’t want any part of that. I think it’s important to be able to break that down and ask: why do I think that way? 

What advice would you have to someone who wants to solve a problem they see, like you have done with Girls That Invest?

When I was younger and I was investing I wanted to find a community of like-minded people, and it was very “finance bro-y”, and I never really felt like I belonged in that space. I wished there was a space for people like me that just wanted a fun investing community. No one else was doing it, so why not make it myself? 

So if someone’s thinking “I really wish there was an XYZ in the space that I’m interested in, but no one else is doing it or no one else is doing it the way I’d like to see it done,” you’re probably not the only person that feels that way. A lot of my business decisions are based on the fact that if this is something that I would like, other people are probably going to like it too. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.