Dominic Hawes has stepped down from his role as Managing Director of wholesaler BMC Intimate and been replaced by Gary Mayes, who has joined the company from outside the adult industry.
“BMC has a great portfolio of brands and most of the ingredients for strong growth are in place,” said Mayes. “We now need to open new customer accounts and ensure that we’re as competitive as we can be in the market. I’ll be adding a couple of new team members to bolster our sales and marketing effectiveness and I’ll also be looking at making our offering a lot more compelling to customers in our core markets. The adult toy market is hugely competitive and who retailers work with to source toys can make a huge difference to their profitability.
“We’ve got a few retail partners who truly understand the BMC vision and their sales are growing at an exponential rate because they are taking the right product, retailing at the right prices and their sales team truly understand the features and benefits of our products. If we can do it for them, we can do it for others too. Although we share similar products with other wholesalers in the market, our approach is totally different and it can pay dividends to work with us.”
Mayes added that the first new additions to the BMC team will be a new sales manager and a new marketing manager.
Dominic Hawes will remain on the Board but will not be involved in the day-to-day running of BMC. Instead he will assume product development responsibility for the Mantric brand. He commented: “We’ve faced some criticism from our suppliers in the past that we devote more time to developing the Mantric brand than we do to marketing theirs. By moving the development of Mantric out of the core day-to-day operations of the company, we’re demonstrating that this is simply not the case.
“Mantric has always been a very special brand for me and I’m really pleased to be able to continue my relationship with it. Mantric is a very specialist brand and new products in the line need to offer something truly different. Sysil has taken the market by storm and Siena’s sales have been really encouraging too so the future’s looking bright for Mantric. We’ve now got distribution in place for the brand in China and the USA and we hope to be able to announce new distributors on an almost monthly basis.”
BMC Intimate will continue to be the exclusive UK distributor of the Mantric brand, but Hawes reported that negotiations were also well advanced with distributors in Germany and Sweden.
Hawes concluded: “It’s been a very testing few years for me both personally and professionally and I really felt that BMC needed fresh vision, a fresh approach and a new leader that can build on what we’ve achieved to date. Gary can do all of these things and more. A very wise man once told me only ever to recruit people more able than myself and I think we’ve done that in spades.”
