Keep It Clean
Illustration by Claudia Chanhoi.
This is an unusual product launch for a design object. Held in a five-star hotel suite overlooking the Thames, there are manicures on tap, free-flowing prosecco, and sexual health educator Sarah Mulindwa, host of Channel 4’s The Sex Clinic, is giving us a PowerPoint presentation on the finer points of masturbating in the shower. A hand-picked crowd of sex-positive influencers are filming content, taking turns in the bathroom to pose with the product in question: the Womanizer X Hansgrohe Wave Clitoral Stimulation Shower Head. Featuring “unique PleasureJet technology”, the ergonomic shower head includes three different jet settings, an intensity slider, and Hansgrohe’s signature EcoSmart setting that claims to use 60 per cent less water than your average shower. You can hog the bathroom without wasting the Earth’s precious resources, but the influencers are far more interested in sharing rave reviews with their fans. “Imagine turning on the Weather Channel and it’s saying light showers with a one hundred per cent chance of orgasm,” former The X Factor contestant Ash Holme tells her front-facing camera. There’s a discount code in her TikTok caption for 20 per cent off the retail price of £99.99.
For a design journalist more used to bathroom launches involving a panel discussion about taps, it’s all a bit overwhelming. There’s a certain cognitive dissonance in seeing Hansgrohe, a German bathroom engineering company with a pedigree stretching back to 1901, team up with sexual wellbeing retailer Lovehoney to bring something so gung-ho about sex to market. Much of the mainstream design industry generally adheres to a strict omertà around all things sexual, but now Hansgrohe has nailed its colours to the horny mast. This, however, could prove to be a canny financial decision. The sexual wellness device market is big business these days. Management consulting company PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) estimates that the global industry was worth $19bn in 2021, with the market “supported by positive long-term growth dynamics, which Covid-19 has structurally accelerated”. That’s management consultant speak for “everyone was stuck at home with nothing better to do”.[1] According to the Financial Times, that market could be worth $62.32bn by 2030. Even the phrase “sex toy” is passé these days. Now, design that’s designed to get you off goes by the moniker of sexual wellness device (for the self-care devotees) or sex-tech (for the self-optimisers). The Womanizer Wave markets itself for both the routine shower masturbators and those looking for some me-time in the bath.
The shower head was designed to be unobtrusive and not immediately communicate its purpose (all photographs: courtesy of Hansgrohe and Lovehoney).
But household sanitation has always been thoroughly sanitised; scrubbing the body clean goes hand in well-washed hand with a pristine soul. Bodily cleanliness and moral purity are intertwined in most major religions via water-based purification rituals, while sexual gratification in general, and masturbation in particular (not to mention female masturbation), have widely been regarded as sinful across different cultures. Sanitation reformers in the 19th century began as moral crusaders, and even as scientific knowledge grew around health and disease, a connection between physical and spiritual cleanliness remained. Even cinematic depictions of bathroom business were verboten by Hollywood’s Hays Code until Alfred Hitchcock shocked audiences with a flushing toilet in Psycho (1960). Today, bathroom manufacturers still trade on this squeaky clean imagery. Looking at their glossy images of impossibly gleaming tiled rooms, the idea that anyone would take care of a bodily function in one of these spaces seems absurd. Outside of the showroom setup, bathrooms are a hive of sexual activity – the prepping for, the act itself, and the cleanup afterwards. But for bathroom design brands, the topic has remained taboo. A shower head engineered for masturbation blows that pact of un-acknowledgement out of the water.
It’s not just design for the bathroom that gets shy when it comes to sex. While established engineering brands have turned their knowledge and resources to the design of sex toys before, they have often become prudish when their runaway success sees the company name associated with – gasp – female pleasure. Such is the case of Hitachi and its no-longer eponymous Hitachi Magic Wand Household Electric Massager, which first vibrated its way into bedside drawers in 1968. “It was a massive hit: a very obvious sexual one,” writes Kate Devlin in her illuminating book Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots. “Even though it had gained a reputation as a sex toy, in 1999 Hitachi was still maintaining its popular product wasn’t for masturbatory purposes. Then, in 2013, they decided to stop manufacturing it owing to concerns about the company name being linked to sex,” Devlin explains. “Quite why it had taken them so long to notice this is unclear, especially given it had featured in pornographic videos for quite some time.”
The shower head’s shape was developed to ergonomically suit the contours of a human body.
Like Hansgrohe, Hitachi has been around for over a century. Founded in 1910, the Japanese company made its name engineering induction engines for copper mining. It rapidly expanded into everything electrical: industrial equipment, telecoms technology, stereo parts, TVs, systems for high-speed trains, and even bits of nuclear reactor. But it was the brand’s Magic Wand massage tool that saw it become a household name; when the product featured on an episode of Sex and the City in 2002, it sold out. Stopping production of a cult product because its wildly popular off-label usage could be bringing your brand name into disrepute would surely be a hit to a company’s bottom line, but it was a risk Hitachi was willing to take to appear sexless. The company’s California-based distributor, Vibratex, managed to talk Hitachi into producing the device again in 2014, but under the name Original Magic Wand. Only a sex toy could lead to such corporate consternation. It was a Hitachi-designed boiling water reactor, that had been one of the six impacted in the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, but a vibrating clitoral massager is apparently more toxic to a brand than a level 7 accident on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale.
So how and why did a squeaky clean bathroom brand such as Hansgrohe risk getting into the business of water-powered sex toys?
One of the three different jet settings of the Womanizer Wave.
Hansgrohe has always prided itself on coming first in the race for the new. On its website, the company proudly counts among its innovations: “the first hand shower with different spray modes”, “the first pull-out kitchen faucet”, and “even the first shower rod”. Innovation is baked into company lore; founder Hans Grohe’s metal business in Germany’s Black Forest catered to those who wished to adopt the indoor bathrooms that had become fashionable at the start of the 20th century, with showers offering a more affordable and space-saving alternative to bathtubs. A century later, with regular home-bathing a standard cultural expectation, the company has had to go in search of new regions of the bathroom to innovate around.
Founded in 2017, Hansgrohe’s InnoLab – short for Innovation Laboratory – houses a 15-strong team of interdisciplinary designers, engineers and product managers “who are looking for new adventures outside of the obvious”, explains Steffan Erath, Hansgrohe’s head of innovation and sustainability. Sequestered in the Black Forest, away from the company’s modern-day HQ in Schiltach, the InnoLab is where the wackier ideas about bathrooms can be bounced around. It’s not just a pursuit of the new that drives the InnoLab – addressing social and environmental issues is also a core part of the lab’s stated goals. “Wherever the biggest issues with the planet and society are, we try to solve them,” says Erath. Can you save the world through showering? It’s the kind of lofty mission statement that seems better suited to a startup than a 122-year-old heritage brand. But the need for constant movement forward, for endless new products brought to market, for relevance, are challenges every company faces under consumer capitalism. The market for bathroom hardware is currently strong – worth $125bn worldwide in 2023 – and renewing one’s product lines is key to keeping pace. “We’re always starting new projects,” explains Erath. This rapid pace is necessary because the InnoLab expects a success rate of just one in ten projects actually reaching market. “Failure is part of the game,” he adds.
“All the testers were voting for the sexy time scenario. But no one really wanted to admit voting for it.”
Hansgrohe’s successes so far have been interesting and varied. There’s the Jocolino showerhead for children, available in crocodile, zebra and lion designs with big googly eyes, a handle ergonomically shaped for small hands, and gentle spray settings to avoid any soap-in-eye traumas. The Croma E shower system was created with safety for the elderly in mind, pumping cold water through the thermostatic mixer case to prevent the metal surface from becoming scalding to the touch. Even companion animals are catered to thanks to the DogShower, a hand shower with soft, brush-like fronds on the nozzle that allow the user to gently stroke their pet as they wash them, to keep the bathing experience as calming and stress-free as possible for all parties. It was the DogShower that was one of innovation designer Michelle Uhl’s first projects while interning at the InnoLab, and the process got her thinking. After tackling the pet care market, sex-tech may not have been the most logical step, but her interest had been piqued by conversations with women in the InnoLab about another project that had happened before she arrived: the RainTune.
Like something out of a spa-centric sci-fi movie, the RainTune is a multisensory shower “experience” that frankly sounds like the height of luxury. Users select from seven different pre-programmed “scenarios” on a linked smartphone app to induce a carefully choreographed set of light, water, sound and scent via a built-in system of video screens, LED lights and aromatic shower tabs. Scenarios include an invigorating wakeup, a recuperating post-exercise setting, and a lavender-forward nighttime programme. The InnoLab tested out a wide variety of scenarios during the R&D stage before landing on the final seven, and one in particular ended up on the cutting-room floor. “During testing, my colleagues told me that there was a scenario called the sexy time, and I found that really interesting,” says Uhl. “All the testers were voting for the scenario. But no one really wanted to admit voting for it. I was like, ‘Whoa, that’s so cool. Why don’t we look into it?’” Uhl was aware that people with clitorises were appropriating shower heads for pleasure, and with Hansgrohe priding itself on its water-saving jet technology, applying it to orgasm-seeking seemed like a no-brainer.
The Womanizer Wave is available in black, white and chrome.
Pitching this project to the innovation board, which is made up of senior Hansgrohe staff and independent specialists, was understandably nerve-racking for Uhl. “I was extremely nervous,” she remembers. “Before the call with the panel my knees were shaking. I was like, ‘Oh my god, what if I lose my job? What if everyone thinks I’m crazy?’” This was in 2020, during the height of the pandemic, so the presentation was done online. Uhl leaned in to the shift in consumer behaviour motivated by the lockdowns, pulling up facts about how Pornhub was getting more clicks than Netflix. The angle worked, and the board loved it. “Everyone was excited,” says Uhl. “They said: ‘Why not try something new? This is a super-valid use case, everyone is doing it already in the shower.’”
She was thrilled, especially given that she was not exactly expecting
a receptive audience. “I hadn’t thought that it would be such positive feedback, especially from men. At that time, we didn’t even have one woman sitting on the panel.”[2] All-male boards are a well-known bottleneck when it comes to innovations that intersect with sex. “The ‘sex tech’ sector may in fact hold enormous untapped potential, but investors – mostly white, straight, male investors – appear to be keeping their distance,” Alice Bonasio wrote in 2016 for a piece published by Fast Company, catchily titled, ‘When Prude Investors Cockblock Sex Tech, No One Gets Off’. A combination of clauses against promoting anything considered adult content, discriminatory banking systems,[3] and general squeamishness around female sexual pleasure means that investment money, which is overwhelmingly controlled by men,[4] rarely gets thrown at women’s masturbation aids. But money is a powerful persuader, and getting into the sexual wellness device market could make companies oodles of it.
With the board’s blessing, Uhl made the project part of her university thesis for her degree in product design at HfG Schwäbisch Gmünd, handing out Hansgrohe shower heads to friends with instructions to report back on which jet settings they enjoyed the most. “It was quite a journey,” says Uhl. “The result was super cool, because afterwards we knew that we had the technology and spray types in our portfolio already. We just needed to optimise and modify to get to the result where it really feels pleasurable.” Looking for a more ergonomic shape that would suit the contours of the human body, the InnoLab also had an existing product in their recent archive. “Fun fact, it was DogShower,” laughs Uhl. “We modified the spray type so we could test out pulsation and a spray slider.” When it came to the tech part of sex tech, the InnoLab team was all set – but working out how to test, market and distribute a sex toy was a whole different game. “The easiest part for us was the technology,” explains Uhl. “You could say it’s a regular shower head at the end of the day, just with this very specific use case. For us, the hurdle was getting into the sexual wellness market, because we have no experience at all there.”
Development sketches of the proudct from Hansgrohe’s InnoLab.
It was a problem the InnoLab team knew they had to solve. When giving its approval, the innovation board had given Uhl a single condition: “Find a strong partner”. As luck would have it, Erath had previously met the head of innovation at Wow Tech Group, a Berlin-based sex toy manufacturer that merged with Lovehoney in 2021. The idea for a masturbatory shower head got pitched to Lovehoney CEO Johannes Plettenberg, who met with Hansgrohe’s innovation board to give the collaboration the green light. “It was a match made in heaven, because Lovehoney had also been thinking of solutions like this,” says Uhl. In particular, the sex toy brand had been looking for ways to adapt its Womanizer, a sex toy that Plettenberg had acquired the rights to distribute in 2017. Created by German inventor Michael Lenke with input from his wife Brigitte in 2014, the Womanizer has gone from a madcap basement invention to one of Lovehoney’s bestselling toys, thanks to Lenke’s pioneering idea to use clitoral suction instead of mere vibrations. The first prototype involved an aquarium pump and a piece of plastic hosing – an inauspicious design for the intrepid Brigitte to test out. “Technically, the modified aquarium pump worked,” Lenke told Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin. “But it didn’t work for my wife. She still holds it against me.”
Despite the early fish-tank accessory disaster, the Womanizer and its trademarked Pleasure Air Technology was a hit. Now Lovehoney was on the hunt for ways to commandeer water to expand its orgasmic potential, but lacked the technical expertise. “We’d been aware that water, and especially the shower head, is quite a common masturbation method,” says Elisabeth Neumann, head of user research and in-house sexologist at Lovehoney. “We do a lot of research on sexual behaviour, and we knew that it’s a very early memory for people: how they discovered self love and masturbation. But we hadn’t been building our own product.” Both parties agreed it was an ideal business collaboration. Hansgrohe could offer its engineering services and extensive knowledge of bathroom products, and Lovehoney could bring its expansive testing and research department into play, along with its established platform for selling and shipping sex toys.
“The easiest part was the technology. The hurdle was getting into the sexual wellness market.”
Hansgrohe sent over its shower heads, then Lovehoney handed them out to testers and interviewed them about their experiences. Key feedback, such as the importance of an ergonomic design suited to placing between the user’s leg, was delivered back to the InnoLab. Uhl and her counterpart at Lovehoney would trade sketches and 3D models of potential forms, which the InnoLab printed and sent to Lovehoney to pass on to their testing pool for more reviews. “One of the most important things was the testing,” says Erath. “For us, it was weird to be asking these kinds of questions, so it was a big benefit to have Lovehoney’s sexologist and testing pool.”
The biggest debate was how obviously sex toy-ish the shower head should present as. Should it blend into the bathroom decor, or be loud and proud about its pleasure purpose? Although most respondents agreed that they were happy to leave their sex toys lying around when friends came to visit, the general preference was for the shower head to appear unassuming, lest family members pay a visit. Alongside a more gadget-like matte white or black, the teams opted for the bathroom perennial of a chrome finish. Lovehoney also lent its knowledge of sex toy packaging norms, as the experience needed to be more sensual than that of a standard shower device. “I’ve been working in product management for a long time,” explains Erath. “But I really learned a lot about the unboxing experience. It feels like an Apple product; you can feel the love in the packaging.”
Another of the three different jet settings of the Womanizer Wave.
The mind-expanding benefits of the partnership were mutual. Although Neumann has dedicated her life to qualitative research on sexual behaviour, even she found the user testing process illuminating, particularly when it came to discerning whether there was a market for such a novel product. “We were especially nervous about this, because they could easily say, ‘I have a shower head already. Why should I buy this?’ Or, ‘I’ve masturbated with the shower head in the past, but now I have toys it’s not my thing anymore,’” says Neumann. “To be honest, we were surprised by the huge amount of euphoria and positive feedback we got. So many people said, ‘It’s so obvious – why has no one ever thought about it doing this before?’”
The reason no one had married sex toy technology with bathroom engineering is twofold: the aforementioned sanitising of the sanitation industry, combined with a seemingly insurmountable level of regulation around bathroom products that forms a barrier to entry for sex toy manufacturers. “Their industry isn’t one to focus on sexuality or intimate topics,” says Neumann. “On the other side, our industry doesn’t really have the knowledge to build products like this.” It seems almost topsy- turvy, given that showers go on the human body and sex toys often go, well, inside them, but aside from regulations around electricity there’s little oversight on sexual wellness device products. This lack of regulation has, unfortunately, allowed all sorts of sexual wellness hucksters to flourish without oversight – looking at you, Gwyneth Paltrow.[5] Bathrooms, on the other hand, are seriously highly regulated environments. For shower heads, products need to be signed off by the Food and Drink Association if you’re planning to market a product in the United States, and every material used needs to be drinking-water approved. “Drinking water standards are the highest I can imagine,” says Erath. “Every country has different rules, it’s a nightmare for global companies.” It would take your average sex toy manufacturer a decade to navigate this labyrinthine system, he estimates, whereas for Hansgrohe it was “business as usual”.
The intensity slider on the head varies the pressure of the water stream.
The kind of inter-industry collaboration pioneered by the Womanizer Wave could, then, be the way forward for a new typology of well-designed sexual wellness devices. Knowledge-sharing between experts from different sectors and the sex toy industry could allow for safe and well-tested products to be brought to a market that has been opened up by the normalisation of products designed for self pleasure – and the discretion afforded by e-commerce and home delivery.
Back at the hotel room launch party, the sex-positive influencers certainly have no qualms about grilling Mulindwa on the finer points of the Womanizer Wave’s usage. Is it safe to use? Yes, but only externally. Can you use it with lube? Just go with the flow of water from the shower and you’ll be fine. What about a version in gold? Maybe in the future, if there’s a consumer demand for it.
[1] Let’s all take a moment to appreciate the PwC clean shirt who managed to sneak the line “online penetration has accelerated due to Covid-19 and is forecast to remain high” into their very professional report on sex toy economics.
[2] Hansgrohe has also made changes to its innovation board following the success of a project focused outside of the cis male experience. “It opened up this topic,” says Erath. “You see that society is different. Now we have a more diverse board with more diverse backgrounds.”
[3] For a full account of how banks often refuse to serve sex workers and adult entertainers, along with censorship from social media platforms, see ‘The Online Ass Wars’ by Carolina Are in Disegno #31.
[4] Only 8.6 per cent of all venture capitalists in the US are women, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
[5] In 2018, Paltrow’s lifestyle brand Goop reached a settlement of a $145,000 fine for making misleading claims about, among other things, the “benefits” of its vaginal jade eggs, which it claimed could cure incontinence and increase sexual pleasure. Gynaecologists warn that putting these rocks in your vagina come with all kinds of health risks, from putting strain on your pelvic floor muscles, to introducing bacteria hitching a ride on the microscopic cracks in the porous surface of jade. Please, do not do this at home.
Words India Block
This article was originally published in Disegno #36. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.