Thank you for downloading this programme. In this edition of the bottom line, Evan Davis and guests discuss the market for sex toys and legal recreational drugs. What are the risks and rewards of selling products with an image problem?

Hello and welcome to the programme. We are going to spend the next half hour or so in an amoral zone. We're not going to judge,

but we are going to analyse businesses that operate in industries that are frowned upon,

what we might call taboo sectors, sex and drugs in particular. It's all legal, I should

stress, but my three guests run businesses that face unusual constraints and interesting opportunities.

Let's take a few minutes to meet each of my guests.

First, Neil Slateford, co-founder of a company called Love Honey.

It's based in Bath.

Neil, what does the company sell?

Love Honey is the largest online retailer of sex toys and sexy lingerie in the UK. And

is it all online? Yes. A lot of people want the discretion of buying these products online.

How big is your business? 2012 to 2013. We did 25 million turnover. Okay. So it's significant.

It is a significant business. And tell me how you

personally got into it, Neil. Well, I met my business partner, Richard, and we both wanted to

set up an e-commerce business. We knew we wanted to get into selling things online. So we thought,

right, we'll find a market, and we looked at lots of different things, went to lots of different

trade shows. Nearly went for cross-stitching.

But in the end, we thought that this market for sex toys was really, really underserved and done particularly poorly online at the time.

Clearly, a lot of the products were aimed at women, but the websites that were selling them were very,

very pornographic and were not aimed at women at all. So we thought that was a real puzzle that

needed solving. And we thought that if we could bring professional photography, editorial standards

to the adult market, that we would really differentiate ourselves. Class, just something a little bit less tawdry than the other sides. Yeah, I mean, just a bit more matter of fact. And also taking away the slees, explaining how the products work, all the things that a normal retailer would do, but nobody was doing in the adult business at the time. And you were a DJ before that, in fact. I was in the music business, yeah, as a record producer a DJ, yeah. All right. Thank you for that, Neil. Well, my second guest is on the line from Denver, Colorado. He's Andy Williams. He's co-founder of Medicine Man, Denver. It was founded in 2009. And why don't you explain what your business does, Andy? Sure. Medicine Man sells marijuana and marijuana products.

...