Bringing Sexy Back (to the baby bottle industry?)

As a Silicon Valley engineering/marketing geek I attended numerous high tech, male dominated trade shows in the 1990’s; male dominated, that is, but for a few of us female product managers and the scores of hired “booth babes” spilling out of cheerleading outfits who hovered between products, drawing in men who were typically more intimately familiar with their keyboards than they were with women. Ah, Vegas. Put a bunch of tech geeks, scantily clad women and the ever present access to alcohol and gambling all in one large complex and you’ve got potential trouble. However, the most forward thing any attendee ever did to me while I was working one of these things was ask me out for a drink.

So, imagine my surprise when just yesterday, at a baby products show in Disney’s sunshiny world of Orlando, Florida, a (hot and French) booth boy leaned over into my company’s booth and felt my breast.

Okay, he felt my breast-shaped bottle, and I blatantly invited him to (and of course got permission to use his photo). Still, here he is, touching the soft breast-like material on our new Natural Nurser™ (the product all three of us SV moms who run the company are depending on to succeed to keep us out of the corporate tech world forever). As you can see, he is fondling the bottle whilst on a cell phone. This is not an insignificant detail. He is listening to the message one gets when calling the phone number we handed out to countless potential customers and partners; a message that turns out to be (due to a very unfortunate typo on the letterhead we’ve been using for nearly a year but only discovered yesterday, mid-show) an invitation to join a sex chat line.

That’s right. It appears that folks who would otherwise have been placing an order for our baby bottle after hearing “Welcome. If you are a retailer, press one,” have been met with the unfortunate greeting: “Hey sexy guy. Ready for some excitement?”

Classy, no?

The error was small, which as all moms know, does not mean the potential repercussions weren’t huge. (I don’t know about you but all I need to do is simply forget to bring a tiny piece of plastic known as a pacifier on a trip and all hell breaks loose in my world). Our company’s Toll Free line is a 1-888 number. Our letterhead has been promoting a 1-800 number. Thus, the resulting sex chat experience.

But, as we geeks have always known, it seems that even here in the baby products world, sex sells—or at least doesn’t deter. The very same two southern, cute-as-a-button baby boutique owners from Georgia who informed us of the typo’s existence placed our first order for the bottle yesterday at the show. Polite as could be, they didn’t even mention the sex line fiasco until after we’d written up their order. As we stared at them with absolute horror (and frankly, an oncoming case of the giggles), they simply took their receipt, waved, and walked away with a smile.

After recovering from the shock, my partners and I are smiling too. We seem to have skated through without any or many others (at least that we know about) making a foray into phone porn by our unfortunate invitation. Instead of the somewhat expected attack from show officiates claiming we had somehow purposefully turned a wholesome exhibition into a Smut Fest, we had a fantastic show. (Thank G-d our business cards had the correct number, and that most of these folks are huge distributors who will work personally through us to craft a bigger deal. No need for a Toll Free number).

As a new kid on the block with a product no one had ever seen before, we got an exceptionally positive reaction. We’re happy to say that our hip new design was wowing babyworld celebrities left and right. It seems that the baby industry was looking for someone to bring sexy back in the bottle world. We’re up to the challenge, but we hope to stick to more conservative ordering processes in the future.