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Posted
Monday, June 30, 2008 4:28 PM
| By
Rachael Larimore
The Sunday New York Times chronicled the trials and tribulations of women who run businesses and employ their husbands. The piece profiled women who sell backpacks and run temp-services agencies, women who run companies that deliver meals or set up trade-show displays. But somehow they missed my favorite female CEO, Patty Brisben, who runs a sex-toy company in a suburb of Cincinnati.
Brisben's story is your classic Horatio Alger tale. As this Cincinnati Magazine article explains, she married at 17, and her first husband left her because "he wanted to spend his life with someone who was going to be successful." Some years later, having remarried, she started selling sex toys at in-home parties to make some extra cash. Fast forward to the present: Her company, Pure Romance, did $60 million in sales in 2006. Brisben's son is the president, which frees her up to run her foundation focused on women's health, and to do things like sponsor Sex Week at Yale University. The most delicious part, though, is that Brisben allows her first husband—he who thought she wouldn't be successful enough for his liking—to help the company out as an occasional consultant. (Her other ex-husband works for her, too.)
I've never met Brisben, but—confession time—I have been to a Pure Romance party. The sales reps don't speak in clinical terms, but neither do they act like they've just stepped off the set of a porn shoot. The parties are tasteful and discreet, and sex is treated like a normal, important part of a healthy relationship. When Brisben's son sought to buy radio advertising during drive time over the objection of some stations, he explained: "Look, the moms in the minivans are the ones who need the sex toys. They're looking to spice up their relationships."
I love that Brisben has made sex toys safe for the soccer-mom set and that she is down-to-earth and magnanimous enough to make it a family business. But most of all I love it that she's succeeded in the same town that resisted Larry Flynt and Hustler for so long.
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