Southie condom company has gays covered

It's no secret that gay and bisexual men make up a sizable segment of the condom-buying population; since the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, condoms have been the premiere tool, so to speak, in the gay and bi male's safer sex arsenal. But for gay and bi men browsing the condom rack at the local pharmacy, the packaging on some of the most popular condom brands sends a strong "heteros only" vibe. Most boxes of Trojans have a silhouette of a man and woman locked in an embrace. LifeStyles's "His n' Her Pleasure" condoms are marketed with the tagline, "Shaped for him ... Ribbed for her!" It's not the type of packaging likely to appeal to most gay men.

A gay-owned condom company based out of South Boston, Global Protection, hopes to change all of that with their One brand condoms. The One condoms, which began selling in national pharmacy chains like CVS and RiteAid this summer, come in round foil wrappers with eye-catching photos and drawings and innuendo-laced slogans (a wrapper with a photo of a skydiver bears the tagline "One extreme sensation"). For the present, the boxes sold in retail stores only have artwork with gender-neutral or heterosexual pictures, but Global Protection has a special assortment of One condoms, called the Pride Mix and featuring gay male-themed art, available for purchase on their website. Most of the orders for the Pride Mix come from non-profits doing safer sex outreach to gay and bi men, but marketing manager Jared Fennelly said the company is working to get the gay-themed condoms into drug store chains and mass market retail stores in select urban areas, including Boston. He said Global Protection has been in talks with some chains, which he declined to name, and said that while they tend to be conservative, some have expressed strong interest in marketing condoms to their gay male customers. Global Protection plans to roll out an assortment of gay-targeted safer sex supplies, including the One condoms, to sell to those stores within the next seven to eight months.

"That's quite a shift for retail. ... They recognize in certain metropolitan areas such as Boston it would be a benefit to them to appeal to a gay audience," said Fennelly.

Global Protection, founded in the late 80s by Tufts undergrads Davin Wedel and Adam Glickman, has a long history of trying to make their condoms more enticing to their target audience. Wedel, who serves as the president of Global Protection (Glickman left the company and now serves as CEO of Condomania, another company they co-founded) said that he and Glickman cut their teeth as condom entrepreneurs at Tufts in 1987 by buying bulk condoms from a manufacturer and packaging them in matchbooks with the Tufts mascot, Jumbo the elephant. On one side of the package was a drawing of Jumbo giving the thumbs-up with a condom wrapped over his thumb, and on the other side was the motto, "A safe Jumbo is a happy Jumbo." They sold a couple hundred condoms at that year's homecoming, and by the end of the year they had sold about 1000 Jumbo condoms.

Wedel said he was inspired to start the company after hearing former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop publicly endorse condom use to stop the spread of AIDS. He said students on campus seemed uninformed about the epidemic, and few people he knew used condoms. Wedel and Glickman hoped that by giving the packaging a fun design they could change students' attitudes about condom use.

"Students just loved it. It just immediately changed their perceptions from freaked out about it to got to have it," said Wedel.

While Boston's gay community was one of many in urban areas across the country hit hard by the AIDS epidemic in the early days, Wedel said at the time his efforts were focused more on the student population at Tufts, in large part because he was still struggling with his own sexuality and had not yet come out.

"It was really about something that was just, this is something that affects everyone. So it wasn't because I knew what was going on in the gay community in Boston," said Wedel. "It was very much about my realization in my community what was going on."

After the success with the Jumbo condoms Global Protection began expanding, creating and selling custom condoms to other colleges around the country and to radio stations, bars and other businesses to use as giveaways. The guerrilla condom marketing operation became a full-fledged company by Wedel's junior year.

Wedel said the goal of the company was to find ways to market condoms in a way that got people excited about them and changed their view of condoms from an inconvenience to something fun. Global Protection created novelties like condom lollypops, condom key chains, and they created the only FDA-approved glow-in-the-dark condom. Wedel took time off from school to oversee production of the glow-in-the-dark condoms in Asia.

"If you made them interesting people wanted them. So we saw that as, we could use the regular market place to promote condoms and change people's perceptions about condoms and start conversations about safer sex. That's been the crux of the company all along," said Wedel.

After graduation Wedel and Glickman went into the condom business fulltime. Over the years the company has sold mostly to non-profits doing HIV/AIDS outreach (Fenway Community Health and AIDS Action Committee are two regular customers) rather than to individual consumers. In total the company sells to about 3500 non-profits nationally. The One condoms went on-sale to non-profits a couple of years ago, before they were released to retail stores, and the company's Pleasure Plus condoms, which have a special ribbed pouch, have been another top seller.

The company moved around Massachusetts for years before settling down in Southie about 10 years ago. Global Protection's condoms are manufactured overseas, but the packaging and some of the testing is done in Southie. On a recent visit to Global Protection's headquarters Bay Windows watched the packaging of a custom order of condoms for Washington, D.C.'s public health department (Some non-profits distributing the condoms made for D.C. have complained about the design and integrity of the packaging, although both the city's health department and Global Protection maintain that the condoms meet all federal quality standards.). Unwrapped condoms rode up a conveyer belt, two by two, before being squirted with lube from a 110-gallon drum that was about the size of a one-person hot tub. The condoms were inserted into packaging, which was separated and sealed by a machine and checked by hand. Random condoms were tested for leaks by filling them with water. In a separate room workers filled and sealed boxes of One condom.

Wedel said he believes the One Pride Mix is the first commercially available condom targeting gay and bi men, although the company has done gay-themed custom packaged condoms for clients in the past. Asked why condom companies, including his own, have not created gay-themed packaging in the past, Wedel said that up through the 90s most of their marketing efforts were focused on convincing people about condoms' safety rather than marketing to specific populations.

"Through the 90s it was really about safety. It was really about, is this condom strong enough? It was about just protection, it was about that," said Wedel. "And people have moved away from that as they become less afraid of AIDS. Now it's about trying to make condoms pleasurable and make people interested in the condom in a different way. ... From our perspective we believe the consumers are ready for something like this where five, 10 years ago they weren't ready for something like this."

Despite Wedel's explanation, marketing to specific populations has been one of the hallmarks of Global Protection's work since its founding. In addition to designing condoms to appeal to students on college campuses, Global Protection also created Homeboy condoms marketed towards African Americans and Samurai condoms marketed towards Asian Americans, according to a 1990 profile in the Boston Business Journal.

Wedel said the Pride Mix condoms have been one of the most successful products within the One line. The company offers special assortments targeted at other populations, including an Urban Mix targeting African Americans and Latinos, but the Pride Mix is the second best-selling product in the One line, behind the standard assortment.

"If you've got an organization that's doing outreach to gay men, MSMs [men who have sex with men], and if you have a product that's going to appeal to MSMs more or any particular group of people, [the organization is] going to want it," said Wedel.

One of the largest challenges facing both condom makers and non-profits, Wedel said, is the sense that condom use is dropping. Among gay and bi men Wedel said some stop using condoms because they feel that HIV is a manageable disease, and others who have been practicing safer sex since the early days of the epidemic are experiencing condom fatigue. Wedel said disinformation campaigns by the religious right in favor of abstinence-only education have also raised doubt in the minds of many young people about the effectiveness of condoms. This summer Global Protection launched a non-profit called the One Voice Foundation to train students on college campuses to educate their peers about condom use and safer sex.

"The issues surrounding condom use and education about HIV and STDs have gotten very muddled in the last years," said Wedel. "Politics have really interrupted some of the education. All of that stuff has made a new generation of kids coming out of high school very confused about condoms. And all the stars that are out there doing something that relates to HIV, it's all about Africa. So this is about trying to get the conversation back here."

Officials say condoms safe
A pair of Washington Post articles last week raised questions about the safety of Global Protection condoms that were custom-packaged for the Washington, D.C. Department of Health (DOH), but both DOH and Global Protection refuted those claims and pointed out at least one major inaccuracy in the articles. Additionally, one of the Post's interview subjects, a non-profit head involved in distributing the condoms who the article claimed had concerns about the integrity of the condom wrappers, told Bay Windows he was misquoted and that his only concern about the condom was the artwork on the wrapper, not the safety of the condom.

The first Post article, published Sept. 5 and picked up by the Associated Press, claimed that "officials at nearly a half dozen" organizations involved in distributing DOH's condoms told the paper they had received negative feedback from clients about the condoms and that most of the officials said the complaints focused on the condoms' allegedly shoddy packaging. Among the claims allegedly made by the officials was that the packaging tore open inside people's pockets and purses and that the expiration dates on some condoms were unreadable. The article claimed that the condoms were wrapped in paper, rather than plastic or foil.
Global Protection founder and president Davin Wedel pointed out that the Post's claim that the condoms were wrapped in paper was inaccurate. The outside of the packaging is paper, but inside the condom is encased in a layer of cellophane underneath a layer of foil. Wedel said that type of packaging is the standard design used by the industry, and it meets all the federal safety standards.

"Clearly it's not in a paper bag, which is also what it says in the article. ... It's the exact same packaging that Trojan uses," said Wedel. He said Global Protection is sending the D.C. condoms for independent testing to insure that they meet federal safety guidelines.

DOH also disputed claims that the packaging on the condoms was unsafe.

"The condoms the DOH received from the manufacturer were safe and met U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) standards for packaging and manufacturing of latex condoms," wrote the DOH in a statement. The statement said that 650,000 condoms have been distributed to 50 community organizations and that D.C.'s condom distribution program is one of the first city-sponsored programs in the country to use a condom with "a targeted public health message."

Officials from DOH declined to comment for this story.

Wedel claims that in his conversations with DOH he has been told that there is widespread dissatisfaction among the organizations distributing the condoms with the design and slogan on the label, which reads, "Coming Together to Stop HIV in D.C." He said the label was designed by DOH, not by Global Protection. Wedel said DOH told him only one organization, a non-profit called the Condom Project whose executive director, Franck DeRose, is prominently quoted in the Post, has raised complaints about the safety of the packaging.

"So far [officials in] Washington, D.C. [have] said he's the only one who's said anything negative, or all of this is based on his comments," said Wedel.
DeRose did not respond to a request to comment.

One of the other officials quoted in the Post story, Adam Tenner, executive director of Metro Teen AIDS, said that the Post inaccurately characterized his complaints about the D.C. condoms. The Post story says Tenner told the paper that youth working with Metro Teen AIDS were concerned with the quality of the packaging because it did not seem to be made from plastic or foil.

Tenner told Bay Windows that youth were hesitant to use the condoms not because of the quality of the packaging but because the condoms did not have a familiar brand name on the packaging that they felt they could trust. He said he has no concerns about the integrity of the packaging.

"Youth have not told us they've had any problem with the safety of the packaging. From our perspective this is a design issue, not a safety issue," Tenner said.

Tenner also said that in conversations with officials from other organizations involved in distributing the condoms the primary concern has been the design of the packaging rather than safety. He declined to say whether any official had questioned the condoms' safety.

"In the discussions that I've been involved in, the issue has been more around the design of the packaging," said Tenner.

By the numbers
Global Protection distributes more than 25 million condoms per year to more than 3500 health and outreach organizations.

Global Protection products are available in more than 13,000 retail stores, with an additional 3500 expected by the end of 2007.

In the last 12 months Global Protection has sold more than 2 million Night Light glow-in the dark condoms, 3 million Pleasure Plus condoms, and 7.5 million One condoms.

The Pleasure Plus condom can be inflated to hold 45 liters of air, which is 300 percent more air than required by the FDA.

One Pride Mix is the first commercially available condom marketed towards a gay audience and is the second highest selling One condom product, behind the general assortment.