Sex Sale Appeal

The mass marketing of porn

“I’m just a good businesswoman. Selling sex isn ‘t really much different from selling shoes.”

That unabashed declaration comes from Beate Uhse, 61, whose famed shops have become West Germany’s Sears, Roebuck of sex, offering more than 3,500 varieties of love aids, ranging from bawdy books to inflatable mates. Now Europe’s leading erotic entrepreneur has her sights set on the estimated $5 billion U.S. pornography market. Uhse’s new American subsidiary, Reel Pleasure Unlimited, is distributing a portfolio of hard-core movies to 46 theaters across the U.S. In keeping with her reputation for peddling only top-of-the-line pornography, the initial release, Extremes, is the first X-rated film to feature four-channel Dolby stereo.

If the film venture succeeds, Uhse may start U.S. mail-order outlets in sun-and-fun states like California and Florida and market her products nationally. She has no plans at present, though, to open any sex boutiques in the U.S. Reason: zoning laws or public pressure have usually relegated porn palaces to disreputable districts like New York City’s Times Square and Boston’s Combat Zone.

West Germany’s most famous businesswoman is a self-made tycoon. During World War II, she piloted Luftwaffe planes from factories to the front lines. The end of the war found her a penniless widow picking potatoes to support herself and a young son. After hearing complaints from other women about unwanted pregnancies, she consulted a medical book and began selling a four-page birth-control pamphlet. Uhse paid the printer for the first publication by giving him 5 Ibs. of scarce butter.

Today, the Beate Uhse Co. dominates West Germany’s lively sex industry; in the past decade, annual sales have more than quadrupled, to $57.5 million. Her empire includes a computerized mail-order business that processes up to 4,000 orders a day for items like condoms and vibrators, 15 adult theaters, 31 retail sex shops, a publishing house and a pharmaceutical laboratory that develops new love potions.

Uhse’s success is founded upon two of the most venerable marketing strategies:

attention to quality and name-brand identification. Says she: “We took sex out of the closet, put my name on it, and sold it openly and without apology. We take pride in what we’re doing.” Beate Uhse has become to German pornography what Colonel Sanders was to American fried chicken.

In all Uhse’s operations, she has tried to take the sleaze out of sex. Her Blue Movie Cinemas, which attract married couples as well as the raincoat set, are clean, well lighted and have potted plants in the screening rooms. In her sex supermarkets, shoppers stroll through spacious, attractive displays with grocery-style wire baskets as they select their dildos and see-through lingerie. Uhse, twice married and now divorced, says that she personally tests many of her wares before putting them on the market.