Good Vibrations Magazine

If you’ve visited us before, you may have noticed that goodvibes.com has revamped our web site and re-launched Good Vibes Magazine in a new format. While we have made many changes that will bring us gracefully into the 21st century, most of Good Vibrations remains the same. I thought I would take this chance to share a little bit about us: our philosophy, our history, our purpose and who we are now. It’s a very exciting time for Good Vibrations — in 2002 we will be celebrating our 25th Anniversary. It’s amazing to see how far we’ve come since we opened the first store in 1977.

Good Vibrations was begun that year by sex therapist and sex educator Joani Blank. That first retail store was opened in San Francisco’s Mission District. It was on 23rd and Guerrero and about as big as a large closet. We even kept our dildos in the top drawer of a filing cabinet! The first store was a friendly, “clean, well-lighted” place for women to receive accurate sex information and quality toys. Not surprisingly, the response was amazing and the store flourished.

Resident staff writer, educator and sexologist Dr. Carol Queen recalls the beginning of Good Vibes: “Good Vibrations was definitely started with the needs of women shoppers in mind. It was a bit of a surprise to the early staffers that men wanted to shop here too — after all, men had their own stores! The earliest male customers had to explain that not all men liked those places. They wanted access to good quality merchandise and information in a comfortable atmosphere, just as women did. Gradually, founder Joani Blank began to shift the business’ focus from just women to ‘people interested in sex.’”

Even before she opened the first store, Joani had founded Down There Press in 1975. She wanted to provide books on sexuality that were not available through mainstream bookstores and publishers. Her first books were The Playbook for Women about Sex and The Playbook for Men about Sex. Down There Press has since grown to include 15 additional titles, with 12 currently in print. These include the Herotica series and groundbreaking works such as Femalia, Anal Pleasure and Health and A Kid’s First Book About Sex.

Deborah Mayer, our Staff Relations Coordinator, has been working at Good Vibrations for 14 years. “I started in the second Good Vibes store, at 22nd and Guerrero [just around the corner from the first store] in San Francisco. We were open very few hours a day and I spent most of the day sitting in a massage chair reading erotica. This was back in 1987. I’m a hedonist and I’m delighted to share the message of pleasure. At this point, I have a hard time thinking of working anywhere else. One thing I love about Good Vibrations is that we’ve managed to keep our personal way of dealing with customers. We take the time to not only sell but to educate. We listen carefully to our customers. We really care.”

Good Vibrations’ first mail order catalog, offering books and toys, was sent out in 1985. In 1988, The Sexuality Library catalog of books and videos was launched to separate the toys from the other products. We have since combined everything again into a larger catalog.

“Before we were a co-op, we were a democratically managed business — in regularly scheduled staff meetings, employees made decisions together with owner Joani Blank. The group’s experiences with democratic management laid the groundwork for Good Vibrations’ transition into a co-op and Joani’s decision to sell her business to the workers. Even before that transition, the staff had changed a long-time policy not to carry adult videos. Led by porn connoisseur Susie Bright, the staff convinced Joani to give it a try — and now Good Vibes has begun making movies of its own!” says Carol Queen.

In 1992 Joani sold the business to the staff. We were restructured as a worker-owned cooperative, which is the model of business we still operate under. Being a cooperative is an important part of Good Vibrations. Each owner has a voice and we all get an equal say in the governance of the business. I believe I can speak for everyone when I say that being part of a cooperative is our preferred way of doing business. Being a coop is a good reflection of the type of business we are. The business of sex, or the type of sex business we work in, is a very personal business. Owning our own company reflects that personal nature.

One thing I can say about Good Vibrations and how different it is from all other places I have ever worked is how much the workers really care. I have never met a group of people who honestly care so much about what they do and how they do it.

This caring is reflected in our mission statement: “Open Enterprises is a worker-owned, women-owned cooperative providing access to accurate sex information and sex toys, books and videos through its retail, mail order and publishing companies, to promote healthy attitudes about sex.”

Good Vibrations currently employs 130 workers with about 60 worker-owners (the rest are on worker-owner track and will be owners after approximately nine months of Good Vibrations employment). Working at Good Vibrations is akin to having a relationship with 130 people. With any relationship, open, honest communication is essential. We teach the importance of communication in our sexual education and we try to live it as coop workers/ worker-owners. The principles we strive to follow are openness, honesty, communication, community service, sharing resources and diversity. This may sound like a bunch of San Francisco new-age abstractions but it’s not. When I first started work at Good Vibes I heard all of this and didn’t believe it was possible in a business. Boy, was I wrong.

As part of our honesty we test and review each and every product. We do not sell you anything we wouldn’t use, read or watch ourselves. We strive to promote a sex-positive attitude and sexual health and pleasure. We throw the words “sex-positive” around a lot, but basically all that means is accepting people and what they want to do — or wherever else they want to do it! Any form of consensual sex between adults is okay by us. We believe that pleasure is a birthright. We want you to be happy.

We recently had our Spring Annual Planning Meeting. In this meeting all owners and many trackers come together to discuss the future of Good Vibrations. We vote on new board members and talk about our strategic plans for the next few years. This year was very interesting. Our board President, Ziadee Whiptail, led us through a creative visualization exercise. The entire staff sat together in a circle, closed our eyes and envisioned Good Vibrations in 10 years. It was incredibly enlightening and interesting to see what various people thought was most important about Good Vibrations. Many people felt that retaining the coop was most important, others focused on education, while others pinpointed diversity and better serving communities that currently are underserved in the area of sex education. The most overwhelming thing was how committed to Good Vibes everyone is and how positive everyone is about our future. The all-staff meetings are wonderful. After the meeting Ziadee told me that what “jazzed me up the most was hearing how far everyone wanted to take our mission in terms of changing culture, changing the way mainstream people view sex, our government views sex, and how public schools view sex.” For me, it’s inspiring to see all of these creative people working hard to create, manage and maintain a very successful business that has sexual health, pleasure and education as its focus. I work with 130 lesbians, dykes, queers, bisexuals, transgenders, transvestites and straight men and women. Many of us have tattoos, piercings, dyed hair — we would be considered “unemployable” by much of corporate America. But here at Good Vibes we are accepted for who we are and what we are — our beliefs, standards and ability to work are the only things that are important.

Our growth has been exponential. According to Priscilla Castillo, our Human Resources Manager, we employ about 20 to 30 new workers a year. Even though we are no longer a “small business” we have many goals that are unique to a company our size, actually, goals that are unique to almost any company. “Diversity has changed tremendously in the last three years. In training, in our staff and in our company strategic goals. We are one of the few companies that has diversity as a company goal.” If you walk into a Good Vibrations store you will not see a group of middle-class Caucasian women and men. You will see representatives from the Latino, Asian and African-American communities, every age, every gender and every economic class.

The best way for us to get our “mission” across is by doing it through great customer service. Thus, the new web site. According to Krissy, our Web Manager, “We hope that people will find the site much easier to navigate. The shopping is much more user-friendly so people will hopefully find it easier to shop. We also hope that people will enjoy new features, such as gift certificates that you can redeem online, over the phone or in our stores. People will be able to tell what’s in stock and search the site.”

“We were definitely overdue for the change,” says Krissy. “Customers have been asking for a web site that is easier to shop with. We will be able to provide better customer service with our new site, and that’s our goal.”

Good Vibrations is the best place I’ve ever worked. I’m not exaggerating when I tell you it’s amazing. If you are ever in San Francisco or Berkeley, please come visit us at one of our two retail locations — and enjoy the new web site!