Porn to sell

Product placement comes to adult videos...hey, watch where you put that thing!

A A A Comments By Robert Wilonsky Thursday, Jul 27 2000

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Come and get it: As this scene clearly demonstrates, women love a man in Eckõ gear.

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But Coltrane Curtis knows his alliance with Vivid is a risky one; he has heard complaints even from within his own company. But business is business, and it's a tricky thing marketing a lifestyle--you're likely to please as many as you piss off.

"Not too many brands can take the risks, but we've done $220 million in revenue this year, and the porn stuff doesn't show up on the radar," Curtis says. "This is all about staying in consumers' minds. The whole Vivid relationship is not about driving sales. It's about establishing Eckõ into anther industry, another lifestyle. I will not ever, not in a billion years, sell our clothes where porn is sold, but our demographic is 15- to- 30-year-old men, so you will have a high-school kid and a 30-year-old man with a house and two Porsches in the garage. We have to market to those people and have respect for everyone who buys our clothes. So, yeah, it's a fine line, and we're always on it."

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