To be or not to be licensed - Act 2
In the second part of this feature, Paul Smith flips the coin to see the up-side of Sex Establishment Licensing and finds out why so many adult retailers are choosing to remain licensed...
Friends, retailers, countrymen, lend me your eyes. I come to praise licensing, not to bury it... Last month’s downbeat article needed balancing and for this summer’s ETO Show edition that balance arrives in the shape of this sunnier look at the state of the nation’s adult shops.
One man with a foot in both camps is Tim Richardson, boss of licensed Taboo stores in Brighton and Hove, plus Brighton’s unlicensed Lust shop. He told me: “We chose to go unlicensed for Lust, initially because some people are still shy of going into a blatantly licensed shop. Because of Brighton Council’s regulations, with the frosted windows and so on, I understood from friends of mine that they’d not walk into a sex shop. I felt that we were losing business to the likes of Ann Summers because of that, with their open shop fronts. So it was that, plus we could get into a more central location with an unlicensed shop. The local council here would only licence shops in secondary positions, not main shopping streets so that was a factor. You can get away with so much more as far as window displays are concerned with an unlicensed shop. For retail, the shop front is really important and when you’re restricted to blank windows, two doors to get inside - it’s all really limiting. By going unlicensed you take that out of the equation, gain a lot of flexibility and only have the percentage of ‘sex stock’ to worry about. Here in Brighton that’s 25-30%; the council’s quite generous although they do include the likes of bondage cuffs as a sex article. It’s so grey as to what’s an acceptable percentage, and what constitutes a sex product. Lust does get checked by the local council, to see what our display areas are.” Focusing his
attention on
but thanks to lower prices to the consumer, as well to the retailer, it’s stayed... palatable to purchase a movie on DVD. Some DVD disties have gone to the wall in the last few years and at the end of the day that’s the main reason to have a licence - to sell R18. As that business has shrunk
considerably, is the market more in sex
toys and clothing?”
Asked if he were to open up another shop, would he go licensed or unlicensed, Tim replied: “It’s a difficult question to answer. Probably unlicensed, now, I think, but it all comes down to what the licence fee is. If it was
three grand, I’d go
licensed. £8,000? Probably. It’d still be financially viable
films, Richardson explained:
“The slow decline of the R18 market has also been a factor. When I opened Lust - it’ll be five years this year - the tube sites had already started up and everyone was saying ‘well, that’s it. The DVD market will be gone in five years’ - which it hasn’t. It’s contracted but that’s now levelled off. For a while it did look like the market might implode altogether - anything could happen -
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Erotic Trade Only June 2012
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