Iamwire (May 2, 2014)

The Indian culture has always imbibed a shy factor which has pulled the audience away from expressing their sexual desires openly. However, with the emergence of online portals in this space, a wide segment is utilizing this opportunity to satiate their untold needs.

Sexual wellness industry is flourishing in India with the adult sexual products market, expected to grow INR 2450 crores in 2016 and INR 8700 crores in 2020. Also, the surveys have revealed that majority orders are received on online portals by women shoppers and from the Tier1 and Tier2 cities.

“The global solution is eCommerce and this industry has quickly moved to the web from the physical retail model which has been prevalent for several decades in other parts of the developed world. What’s interesting In India, is that we have never had physical retail in the form of adult shops. Therefore, this is one of the only industries where 100% of the market is online with 0% offline,” said Samir Saraiya, founder, Digital E-Life Pvt Ltd, the owner of portal, ThatsPersonal.com.

Also, there are a few challenges. As said by Vinodh Reddy, founder of OhMysecrets.com, the major one is to make consumers aware of the availability of such products online. Legality of selling Adult toys in India is an issue and requires to strictly follow a few guidelines. Apart from these, precautions have to be taken by the companies while delivering these products to avoid losing anonymity of the product ordered.

We interacted with a few players in this space to know more about their success in this space.

IMBesharam: The company portrays itself as ‘Adult Lifestyle Web-Store’, serving 1.3 billion Indians worldwide. As claimed, the products are sourced from popular brands in US and Europe. Till last year, the company was offering around 1000 products and was aimed at increasing this number to 5000 by the end of 2013. During the beta launch phase for 90 days in 2011, it shipped over 3000 orders and the average value of the order is INR 2700.

As of April 2014, the site is getting a monthly traction of 143k unique visitors with a total of 4000 products on site and an average order value of INR 4211. Also, the founders are planning to soon launch a US site in mid May aimed at NRI’s in North America & Europe/Australia/Africa.

Based out of Mumbai and US, the venture is an initiative of Raj Armani. It offers a wide range of products across various categories such as lingerie, costumes, clubwear, sexywear, swimwear, partywear, fantasywear, footwear, shapewear, and undergarments, Energy products & energy drinks, sunglasses, watches, and other lifestyle accessories. Also, it provides stuff catering to the needs of Bachelor & Bachelorette parties.

Most of the visitors are from metros but the visitors from the non-metros incidentally make larger purchases for the site.  It currently has 223,424 Facebook likes and 3,993 Twitter followers.