LIBIDEX INTERVIEW: MAY COVER STORY

Observing that not many straight latex companies cater much to this market, Rose adds that when the third H&H collection is added in the near future, Libidex will have more than 350 items in this range alone.

The signs are that going into this new market has already been successful for the label, and I suggest to the Libidex chief that one of the reasons might be that Hard & Heavy items are not just functional but also stylish.

“Yeah, I think that’s what we think Libidex is,” he responds. “We think of ourselves as stylish. But we try not to be over-stylish; if you try to over-style something it’ll appeal to two or three people in the world but you do narrow your market down.

“So it’s making it stylish and not just ‘a bit of old rubber that’s glued together and that’s a bag and you get on with it’ sort of thing. We try to give it a twist and even if it’s just a standard item, we try to do it well.”

The launch of Hard & Heavy was, he adds, born of the label’s determination to “address the balance between male and female” in the massive Libidex catalogue.

“We’ve got nearly a thousand products on our website, and before Hard & Heavy it was 60-70 percent female. Even though we had quite a nice male collection, we realised it was quite a few years ago that we’d done it.”

‘We’ve got nearly 1,000 products on our website, and before Hard & Heavy it was 60-70% female. Even though we had quite a nice male collection, it was done quite a few years ago’

Consequently, the label has just followed up Hard & Heavy II with another major male collection called Men’s Fashion.

Launched at the end of March, its initial 130 styles include men’s catsuits and other bodysuits, underwear, jackets, coats, waistcoats, jeans, trousers, leggings, chaps, shirts, t-shirts, long- and short-sleeved tops, shorts and kilts.

We’ve focused on this new men’s range in our six galleries below, which showcase 72 representative styles from the collection. You can, of course, see the whole lot on the Libidex website, where, at the time of writing, the entire collection is available with a launch offer of 25 percent off.

To choose some random examples, that means you could currently pick up the new two-colour Magnus Catsuit for £224.96, heavy-gauge Slim Fit Jeans for £119.96, padded-shoulder Mozart Bolero Jacket for £112.46, two-tone Billy Button Shirt for £127.46, or heart-decorated Cupid Shorts for £44.96.

And, promises Simon, this collection will soon be joined by Men’s Fashion II, which will open up even more options to those who complain there isn’t enough stylish men’s latex on the market!

“With all our collections,” says Simon, “the moment we put them on Facebook, people are going ‘Can we buy them, when can we buy them?’ Bedding is a good example — we do bedding now, and it just flies off the shelves!

“There are also plenty of things that don’t,” he admits, “but what we find in our market is that you have to wait. There are some things that take a little while to warm up, then they become popular.

“There’s some stuff that’s more esoteric, but we want to cover that. So some things don’t sell that often, but the people who do buy them have been looking for them and are glad to come across them.

“What we’ve always wanted to do is cater for everyone, as much as possible.”

This is interesting to hear Simon say, as a few months ago Libidex caused something of a stir in the latex forums by its decision to discontinue its made-to-measure service — a move that would seem to fly in the face of the above aim.

Anyone who has ever browsed the posts in FetLife’s Latex Lovers Group will have noticed how frequently its members recommend ‘always going down the M2M route’ if you are worried that your size or body shape might not work with a standard off-the-peg garment (especially, obviously, a catsuit).

So by dropping M2M, is Libidex not abandoning a significant (and often quite vocal) sector of the market?

“We stopped doing made-to-measure for a few reasons,” Rose responds. “Mainly it was because we started doing a lot of larger sizes. A lot of our M2M was larger sizes. That’s all they were really — not shorter arms and longer legs.

“And we thought it would be much fairer just to make things in larger sizes.

“As with all bespoke clothing, not just rubber, people get penalised for being larger. So we’ve gone up to XXXXL in 60 or 70 percent of our styles and in 100 percent of our popular styles — with no price difference.

“And we also now do an XXS. So we now do nine sizes from XXS to XXXXL in a good number of styles and all the popular ones for sure. Everything produced in the last two to three years will be in these extra large and extra small sizes.