Brian Sloan (entrepreneur)
Brian Sloan | |
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Alma mater |
Penn State Dickinson School of Law University of Missouri |
Occupation | Entrepreneur |
Known for | Creator of sex toys & adult-themed beauty contests |
Brian Sloan is an American entrepreneur known for creating a number of sex toys and adult-themed beauty contests. He is one of the few few entrepreneurs in the adult industry to successfully use crowd funding, raising over $375,000 across three Indiegogo campaigns.[1][2][3] He is the host of a vaginal beauty contest and a scrotum beauty contest[4][5][6][7] and appears as a pitchman in infomercial style videos for most of his products and contests.[8]
Early life & education
Sloan grew up in Skokie, Illinois. He graduated from the University of Missouri in 2002 where he double majored in philosophy and political science.[9] He went on to attend Penn State Dickinson School of Law where he graduated in 2005.[10]
Career
Sloan graduated from law school but never worked as a lawyer. He started his first business purchasing items from bankruptcy auctions and then reselling them online.[11] He would also make purchases from garage sales and antique shows, buying anything that he could resell for more money on eBay.[12]
One item that Sloan began selling was human skulls. He would purchase them from China and would boil, clean, reassemble, and them sell them to medical students.[12] In 2007, Chicago artist Jojo Baby visited Sloan's apartment to purchase vintage mannequins when he saw human skulls in boiling in a pot of water in Sloan's kitchen. Jojo Baby subsequently called the police and Sloan was questioned on suspicion of being a serial killer.[13] Sloan was never charged with a crime, but the skulls were confiscated[12] and the incident was profiled on the front page of the Chicago Tribune.[14]
Sloan decided to relocate to Beijing, China in 2007. It was in China that Sloan began to develop and manufacture an automatic male sex toy[9] and by 2009 was generating over $1 million in annual sales.[12] Sloan's best selling product has been the Autoblow 2, which generated media coverage internationally.[15] It was the first of its type on a crowdfuning platform and raised $275,000.[16][17] Since its launch, the product has appeared on Comedy Central’s Not Safe With Nikki Glaser Season 1 Episode 4 and HBO series Silicon Valley, Season 2, episode 7.[18] Additional products Sloan has crowdfuned include a flexible vibrator known as Slaphappy[19][20] and a male masturbator known as 3Fap.[21][22]
In June 2015, Sloan launched a worldwide vaginal beauty contest in order to find vulvas to replicate onto the top of the Autoblow 2.[23] Three million votes were cast from 191 countries across 110 vulva photo submissions.[24] After winners were announced, Sloan hired a data scientist to classify the vulva photos and analyze the IP data to publish a paper, which examined vulva style preferences across various cities and countries.[24] Elite Daily produced an 8-minute documentary featuring Sloan 3d scanning the winners of the contest.[25] Sloan was criticized by several female journalists about his Vaginal Beauty Contest. One publication cited the contest’s risk of adding to “pervasive judgment of women’s bodies by men”, while a feminist writer called the contest “A veritable manwich of misogynist manure".[26]
In November 2015, Sloan launched a male genital beauty contest, focusing on the scrotum.[27] The stated purpose of the contest was to find the 3 most beautiful scrotums in the world and 3d scan them to turn them into objects of home décor.[28] He awarded $10,000 of prize money to the 3 winners of each of the contests.[4] Sloan also hired the same data scientist who wrote the Vulva Paper to write the Scrotum Paper, analyzing the data from the Scrotal Beauty Contest.
Personal life
In 2014 and 2016, Sloan received media coverage for visiting North Korea and running in the Pyongyang marathon, in Pyongyang, North Korea. He was one of 300 foreigners in 2014 and one of 1,000 foreigners to compete in 2016 in the marathon.[29][30] He documented his time in Pyongyang in media interviews, stating that his group was taken to 2 giant statues of Kim Jong-il and his father Kim Il-Sung, where they were advised to lay flowers as a mark of respect.[31]
Sloan was profiled in the June 2016 print edition of Playboy magazine in an article entitled “The Man Who Wants To Change The Way Men Get Off.” The article discusses Sloan's inventions, contests, entrepreneurship, and lifestyle.[18]
References
- ↑ "3FAP: 3 Textured Orifices With Suction For Men". Indiegogo.
- ↑ "Autoblow 2: A Robotic Oral Sex Simulator For Men". Indiegogo.
- ↑ "Slaphappy: The Flat Flexible Vibrator With A Twist". Indiegogo.
- 1 2 Roberts, Jamie (August 12, 2015). "Welcome To The World's First Vagina Beauty Contest". UniLad.
- ↑ "Sex Organ Beauty Pageants Bulging Out All Over (NSFW)". Huffington Post. June 17, 2015.
- ↑ Cohen, Trace William (November 18, 2015). "Your Balls or the Balls of Someone You Know Could Be Worth as Much as $5,000". Complex.
- ↑ Kleeman, Sophie (November 18, 2015). "This Scrotum Beauty Pageant Is Trying To Prove That Balls Are Beautiful". Mic.com.
- ↑ Hodgson, Nichi (August 7, 2015). "The Entrepreneur of the Autoerotic". Ozy.
- 1 2 Love, Dylan (June 15, 2014). "This Lawyer Quit His Job, Moved To China, And Started A Wildly Successful Sex Toy Business". Business Insider.
- ↑ "Meet Brian Sloan: the king of sex toys". Loaded. April 4, 2016.
- ↑ Biggs, John (April 25, 2014). "A Word With The Creator Of The Autoblow 2". Tech Crunch.
- 1 2 3 4 Lacy, Sarah (November 1, 2009). "Think the Term "Supply Chain" Is Unsexy? Meet the Kinky King of Beijing". Tech Crunch.
- ↑ "Skulls found in Chicago apartment". NBC and Fox.
- ↑ Ahmed, Azam (May 3, 2007). "4 skulls plus 1 pot add up to hot water". Chicago Tribune.
- ↑ Taylor, Jordyn (July 14, 2014). "This Blow Job Machine Went Viral, But Will We Let Men Enjoy it Without Shame?". Observer.
- ↑ Sowunmi, Jordan. "Building a Better Blowjob Machine". Vice (magazine).
- ↑ "I Got A Blowjob From A Robot, And Here's How It Went Down". Elite Daily. February 23, 2016.
- 1 2 Moxley, Mitch (May 30, 2016). "The Man Who Wants to Change the Way Men Get Off". Playboy.
- ↑ White, Alan (December 2, 2014). "The "Slaphappy" Is A Bendy Vibrator And Its Inventor Thinks It's Changed The Game". BuzzFeed.
- ↑ "Slaphappy the Flat Flexible Vibrator with a Twist". Indiegogo.
- ↑ Drucker, Ali (October 14, 2015). "We Talked to the Man Engineering the World's Craziest Sex Toys". Maxim.
- ↑ Kelly, Diane. "Autoblow2 Creator Brian Sloan Is Now Crowdfunding an Awkward 4-Pound Masturbation Sleeve". Gizmodo.
- ↑ Hodgson, Nichi (January 13, 2016). "Vagina Beauty Contests are a Thing". GQ (magazine).
- 1 2 Crocker, Lizzie. "This V Is for Victory". The Daily Beast.
- ↑ "The World's First Vaginal Beauty Pageant". Elite Daily.
- ↑ "Here's What "Vagina Beauty Pageant" Is Really All About". Mic.com. June 19, 2015.
- ↑ Kivanç, Jake (November 23, 2015). "There's Now a Beauty Pageant for Your Balls, Because This Is What the World Needs". Vice.
- ↑ Scott, Ellen. "You can now enter your balls in a beauty contest". Metro (newspaper).
- ↑ "Americans Run Pyonyang Marathon". TMZ. April 14, 2016.
- ↑ Plautz, Jessica (April 18, 2016). "North Korea's Marathon: A Rare Chance to Tour Pyonyang on Foot".
- ↑ Specia, Megan (April 12, 2016). "An American in North Korea: What it's like to run the Pyongyang marathon". Mashable.