We have returned from our trip out west to the Adult Novelty Expo and it was certainly an exciting trip, both in the good and the bad. We got to meet some really cool people, see a LOT of new products and learn some interesting things in the process. Overall, the good far outweighed the bad.

First off, on the flight going out there, the only thing that could’ve been worse was if the plane fell out of the sky and exploded. It was chaos checking in, then they canceled our flight, it took them 2 hours to get us re-booked on another flight, which didn’t leave for about 3 hours after that, they ran out of food on the plane, so we had nothing to eat and then to top it all off…. they lost our luggage. For those who are interested, I would caution you to stay away from US Airways.

But we soldiered on, not letting this dampen our spirits to see the latest and greatest that our beloved sex toy purveyors had to offer. And it turned out to be a great thing too. Because we had a really great time.

As I mentioned before, we met so many cool folks. First off, we finally got to meet our wonderful sales rep, Joy, who has been with us from the very beginning, offering guidance and insight into a market we were very new to. There may not be a Silver Stars without Joy. Here’s a pic of Ash & Joy from the conference:

Joy also introduced us to Michelle, who runs Naughty Cupids out on the west coast. It’s a small scrappy startup just like us. She shares a lot of our same philosophies regarding sex education and positivity. She’s doing the home party thing and website sales and she’s hoping to open a store soon. Michelle is just a fantastic person and we spent a good portion of our trip hanging out with her. Unfortunately we ended up with no pics. But we’re hopefully going to meet her again at another conference soon, so we’ll make sure to snap some then.

Next up, we met one of our favorite bloggers, authors and all-around sexperts, Jamye Waxman. This was definitely one of the highlights of the trip as she turned out to be such an extremely cool person. We talked sex and sex toys a bit, she offered up all sorts of tips on our store situation and we just had a really nice chat. She’s now on our ‘Awesome’ list. So if you get a chance to meet her, make it a priority. We can’t say enough good things about her. Here’s Ash & Jayme at Aneros’ booth.

We also met several people from Babeland, who we modeled our own store after in many ways. They were all very friendly and an all around pleasure to converse with as well.

Last… we joked about it before we left, but it actually happened. We ran into the porn king himself… Ron Freakin’ Jeremy! The Hedgehog, baby! He also was extremely friendly and likable as well. Ash grabbed this shot below with him:

Just so you know, you can click any of the images above to get a full-size pic as well.

So all in all, it really was a great trip. I’ll follow this up soon with details about what toys that we saw, but for now, we’re all energized about the business. It was great to talk with so many people who are familiar with the sex toy industry and what the joys, trials and tribulations are. So we’re really getting cracking on getting the lingerie store open and getting the changes that we’ve been putting off to the website in place. Expect big things here soon.

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