The heart of O.school is education, but with so many people asking us which pleasure products to buy, we knew we had to expand. In September 2022, we launched the official O shop to help guide people’s purchasing experiences. Through that process, we’ve come to the conclusion that choosing a pleasure product shouldn’t feel any more taboo or salacious than choosing a hair dryer, yoga mat, or any other household item.
Our experts curate, rate, and review pleasure products against a stringent set of criteria, making the process of learning about, and purchasing, them as everyday, normal, and pleasurable as the products themselves. Here’s how we do it.
We are a team of millennial and Gen Z’ers, led by a queer woman of color. Our executive team includes a data analyst, management consultant, a FinTech expert and founder, and a personal finance content strategist and editor.
Seems counterintuitive, right? But our broad range of experiences and perspectives makes us uniquely qualified to do what we do. We analyze data and conduct intensive research to curate pleasure products that pass the muster of our O shop certification process. In other words, we apply our distinctly unsexy skills to bring you sexy things. And while we love and respect sexologists, and lean on their expertise, we believe our data-driven approach sets us apart, helping us to deliver the most objective take on products that offer subjective experiences. Think of us as the NerdWallet of sex.
Since our founding in 2017, we’ve educated over 25 million people across 100 countries. We mean it — education really is in our DNA. As such, pushing products for the sake of selling them is not our prerogative. Instead, we aim to empower you with the information you need to make choices that feel right for you, your body, pleasure, and lifestyle. With an education-first mission, we leave opinions out of the equation, and rely on data and research instead.
Our experts have spent 1000+ hours collecting data on 100+ brands, retailers, and 1000+ products to analyze, compare, and review. This process informs how we curate the O shop catalog.
We don’t just analyze existing data, we make our own, too. We’ve conducted a U.S. census verified State of Sex survey, collecting data from over 1,000 participants on their sexual behaviors and expression. We’ve polled 40,000 readers via our O.school newsletter, and learned from 30,000 thousand respondents to our Orgasm Order Form.
Thanks to all the original data we’ve collected, and our careful analysis of people’s sexual behaviors and consumer needs, we’ve put together a curated list of pleasure products, and a highly structured way of educating people as they buy. We want the shopping process to be an educational process.
To help us be as fair and honest as possible, O shop remains completely independent from all manufacturers and retailers. O shop does not make its own products, and we provide unbiased reviews, guides, and best lists. We will promote any pleasure product we’ve deemed “best” in a category, whether or not it’s sold on O shop. That’s because our mission is to help you choose what’s best for you. When we have sponsorships or branded content, we pledge full transparency to our readers with well-placed, clear disclaimer text.
When you peruse the O shop catalog, you will never see a sale or deal. That’s because we offer the lowest price online already. We do this by collecting data across the Web from a variety of retailers and manufacturers, tracking their product prices, sales, and deals daily. Based on that information, every product listed on O shop dynamically adjusts to reflect the most up-to-date, lowest price available online — including any sales or deals out there. You don’t have to scour the Web to find the lowest price or sale, because we’ve already done that for you.
When it comes to pleasure products, we found huge price disparities from one retailer to the next. For example, as of this writing in August 2022, the Lelo Gigi 2 is sold at multiple retailers, with prices ranging from $104 to $169. See for yourself:
Given that multiple retailers sell the exact same product at vastly different prices, consumers are not only being underserved, but taken advantage of — a problem we aim to solve. We increase transparency and reduce fragmentation by doing the work of price comparison for you.
We don’t have thousands of products on purpose. Scrolling through a huge catalog is confusing and overwhelming, especially if you’re unsure of what you want. We’ve made it easy for you by carefully selecting only the most popular products per category, giving you a variety of options for different needs — but without the fluff. Here’s how we select products for our catalog.
O shop does not manufacture its own pleasure products. Instead, we cull together a highly curated catalog, aggregated from reputable brands that manufacture quality products to last. We’ve run 1,000+ products from 100+ brands and retailers through a rigorous filtering system, known as O shop Certification. We check for such factors as, but not limited to:
Products that have been O shop Certified have passed this filtering process, resulting in a catalog that features only the best of the best. We’ve narrowed it down so you can make the choice from there.
We review products featured in our catalog against a stringent set of criteria. Here’s a look at we do it.
O shop reviews: Read our review methodology to learn more about how we rate and review O shop Certified products on O shop.
Why? Because, frankly, we don’t believe relaying our own experiences would serve you. Every body is different, with different needs, desires, pleasure centers, and sensitivities. Our experience may not be your experience, which is why we do not use personal anecdotes related to experimenting with pleasure products, unless inclusion is absolutely justified. Instead, we rely on our expert knowledge of the industry as a whole and how a product fits in and compares to similar products.
While we don’t insert our own opinions, we showcase community reviews from people who have bought products through O shop. We let the reviews speak for themselves to illustrate the general sentiment around product functionality and more.
You’ll notice each product featured on O shop has a star rating. This rating is aggregated from retailers selling this product around the Web. We look at an average of 10 retailers per product, and tally up their star ratings and reviews to come up with an average. Our featured star rating is based on that average score. Using an aggregated, average star rating system versus our own is yet another measure we take to remain unbiased.
We regularly audit reviews, best lists, and articles presenting product comparisons to ensure we are offering the most up-to-date information. We watch for new products and tech on the market that may earn a new “best” spot in a category, for example, and update articles accordingly. This is to ensure we are always offering you the latest, most accurate information.
Subscribe to our newsletter for exclusive content and to join a community of 10,000+ people anonymously sharing their sexual experiences, answering polls, surveys and more.
.png)
.png)
.png)
.webp)
.webp)
.webp)
.webp)
.webp)