This Condom Brand Wants Women to Like It Too. How Does Design Get It There?

The question about condoms has shifted from "How do you get men to like condoms?" to "How do you get women to love them too?"

"I've come to think condoms may be one of the hardest design problems in the world," says Lin Jianda, an associate creative director at frog.

frog (frog design) is a multinational design consultancy. It grew out of Esslinger Design, founded in 1969 by the German designer Hartmut Esslinger. Since then it has done design work for Disney, Logitech, NEC, Lufthansa, Olympus and Sony, among many others.

Lin Jianda had joined frog only in August 2017. Not long after, a condom brand called FAMA came knocking. Not yet four years old, it was looking for a new direction.

"When we started FAMA, we were really carving out a niche, built around personalized customization. But honestly, we still had no systematic brand positioning," says Pan Chen (born Pan Guoqing), FAMA's co-founder and brand director.

Before it approached frog, FAMA had no complete product line. Its products were built around letting customers customize a condom to their own needs — the artwork on the box, or the size, thickness and lubrication of the condom itself — so there was no unified look. Illustrations in any style at all could end up on a FAMA box.

Recalling his first impression of the brand's condoms, Lin describes them as "the kind of condom they hand out at a music festival — fun, but not something you'd trust."

Customization does give buyers a sense of novelty. But more often, a product that leans too hard on being distinctive struggles to build trust and loyalty across a wide customer base.

Figures Alibaba released after Singles' Day in November 2017 showed condom sales reaching 50 million units within the first 12 hours of November 11. The three best-selling brands, in order, were Durex, Jissbon and Okamoto.

On Tmall, Durex's official flagship store alone had one product with total sales of about 1.54 million units, pushed with a "20 yuan off when you buy two" deal. At Okamoto's flagship store, the top seller had total sales of about 930,000 units, also promoted with assorted discounts.

In the interview, Pan Chen stressed that as a new brand they were not trying to take on the big three; they wanted to expand beyond their original customer base. He has also watched e-commerce change the condom market: the discount-driven promotions the platforms run, plus brand competition offline, keep pushing prices down. Pan thinks broad-exposure advertising may not work as well from here, and he hopes his brand can spread through the pull of small circles.

Founded in 2014, FAMA presents itself on its website as a Spanish brand, but the shareholders and capital behind it come from Mingliu, a Chinese condom brand. Mingliu was founded in 2002 and belongs to Shanghai Mingbang Rubber Products Co., Ltd. It runs its own condom factory in Shanghai, in the Qingpu Park of the Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Zone.

Mingliu's chairman, Cai Qijie, is also FAMA's founder. He brought in two younger co-founders, Pan Chen among them, and handed them the running of FAMA.

Yet in its official materials and in interviews, FAMA draws a careful line between the two brands, insisting again and again that they have separate production lines and that everything they do is run separately. In practice, an old brand setting up a new one to reposition itself, or to reach people who never bought its original products, is neither unusual nor hard to understand.

Lin Jianda, who has worked on commercial design projects for years, says the pattern is common: "You get a founder who built the company from nothing and knows the product inside out, but he's focused on product research and doesn't know much about design, so he lets the young people drive that side."

This time FAMA came to frog looking for a tone for its products — something customers would remember beyond "fun and novel." The work covered two things: the packaging, and the condom itself. A condom's design takes in material, smell, size, thickness, even shape.

How to make a condom fit what people want, or simply make it more appealing, is the core question for every condom brand.

There is no denying that condoms sit in an awkward place. Beyond the functional case for them — contraception, protection against STDs — they have long had a bad name. A recent study found that only a third of American men use condoms, and the reasons for not wanting to are much the same across the board: uncomfortable, less pleasure, poor fit. Left to themselves, men rarely reach for one.

A 2012 report on how Chinese people use condoms, and the problems around that, surveyed 1,850 students and found that only 14.6% of the men and 17.2% of the women knew how to use one properly. A rate that low reflects the absence of proper sex education, and a blank spot in what people know about condoms and other protection.

For people who do understand condoms, though, there is another hurdle: choosing to use one in the first place. In 2013 the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation sponsored a competition to develop a more comfortable condom. In 2014 it gave the University of Wollongong in Australia $100,000 to encourage condom research.

As of last year, none of these products had reached the market. Some winners are still building prototypes; others gave up. Which points to a plain fact: designing a condom that satisfies everyone looks impossible.

In 2017, Global Protection Corp., based in Boston, began selling custom condoms in 60 sizes, built from 10 lengths and 9 circumferences. It, too, hoped this would find the condom people were most likely to accept — an approach not far from FAMA's bet on customization.

Davin Wedel, Global Protection's CEO, told The New York Times bluntly: "Condoms have a huge image problem, and going without one is still very common." Among women who do use condoms, nearly 7% said they had had one "break or come off completely."

So how do you get people to like condoms?

"The best condom, obviously, is one you can't feel," says Lin Jianda, who sees the condom as a transitional product in human history. "The thing itself goes against human nature — what animal puts on a piece of plastic to have sex?" To him it is a stopgap, born of our fear of reproduction and of death.

Functionally, though, condoms are necessary. To find what would make people genuinely accept one, frog started with a focus group of 12 women, looking for the core problems and for the needs today's products still fail to meet — a method frog often uses before designing anything. Choosing women rather than men was a way to surface problems nobody had noticed before.

Lin told QDaily that to avoid designing something too mass-market and mediocre, they deliberately sought out a few "extreme consumers": people who have sex every single day without fail, or who like sex toys and adult products.

Out of that research frog published a report called Be Your Own Sex Director (《做自己的性导演》), laying out the myths and blind spots in how people buy and use condoms. Lin says a good number of the women told them condoms gave them a "sense of a foreign object." That sensation comes from the condom not conforming fully to the penis, so the friction of sex bunches it into creases, which makes it less comfortable still.

frog also found that very small things — a condom's transparency, its smell, how moist it is — can all change how a woman feels during sex.

Few people stop to think that choosing an ill-fitting condom affects more than themselves; it can make their partner uncomfortable too. More often than not, some men care mainly about whether their partner reaches orgasm, without grasping how many details both people may need to understand before that happens.

In Be Your Own Sex Director, frog's researchers asked a couple, "What would make you feel this was perfect sex?" The woman answered, "It makes me feel how much I love him." The man answered, "Coming at the same time."

Pan Chen thinks the difference comes from men and women understanding intimacy differently.

Set gender aside, though, and in any sexual encounter some people do care about the result, while others care more about the whole process — foreplay, and how the two treat each other once it is over.

There is nothing wrong with the difference itself. But misreading what your partner wants is a problem of knowledge. It is sharper in Asia, where people are not good at talking about sex openly, and where having views about sex, or raising the subject yourself, often gets stigmatized.

One woman interviewed said: "If I go and buy condoms, people will think I'm a loose girl." A man interviewed said: "Why would a good girl carry condoms around?"

This myth is hard to get around, and, more to the point, it has kept the choosing of condoms — and the person condoms are made to serve — fixed on men rather than women.

Look at condom products and the shared marketing traits appear fast: nearly every brand pushes ultra-thin, long-lasting, textured, as if meeting those specs alone guaranteed perfect sex with your partner.

Pan Chen sees the claim that ultra-thin equals perfect sex as the myth being built. "Below 0.03 millimeters you honestly can't tell the difference any more, but a lot of people don't know that — especially the 0.01 and 0.02 kind, which use polyurethane. That material doesn't conform well, and it comes off very easily, so an extremely thin condom isn't actually all that good. But the ads have already set the standard people choose by," he says. "Thinness isn't a demand that comes from men. It's what happens when people have no shared basis for choosing a condom."

Finding the people who care about what their partner actually needs and feels became the difference FAMA wanted to build on.

"The user we want is someone who cares about women — that person could be a man or a woman. Say I'm a user who cares about women: I wouldn't pick Durex, I'd pick FAMA, because every Durex ad puts the emphasis on maximum pleasure and ultra-thin, all these very male things," says Lin Jianda.

To cut down the creasing during sex, frog found that the area most prone to it lies between the glans and the shaft, and proposed that the front section of the condom use a different material to create a cinching effect, so it hugs the penis more closely. "The concept we put forward was invisible," Lin explains — a design with no presence, one you cannot even see, which is what he thinks a good condom should be.

The cinching idea ran into manufacturing limits. To balance thinness and fit, condoms today are mostly shaped by dipping a mold straight into a pre-mixed liquid. That method makes it very hard to combine two materials on one condom so that only part of it cinches.

Pan Chen says they are working through the materials and the production technology step by step, hoping to refine the design of the condom itself. But for the new product launching in May, he says, the idea is not yet possible.

For this round, FAMA has concentrated instead on the condom's transparency and smell. "We looked at a lot of materials and can already get to almost no smell at all, with no added fragrance," Pan says. "Pacifiers are made of latex too, and those can be made odorless. The cost of that odorlessness is a bit higher."

frog's design went through several rounds. On the packaging, Lin Jianda admits FAMA is not a leading brand and has to make people feel a difference. "We wanted the look to be cute. I've found that if a product can get a woman to say 'that's so cute,' that's already a success." The cuteness, he stresses, has to be pitched just right.

Lin had originally wanted a semi-transparent box. He believes that seeing certain details with your own eyes, or getting to know condoms more openly, builds goodwill on its own. Pan says they dropped the acrylic idea mainly because they wanted their choice of materials to take the environment into account, with the least pollution possible.

Between frog's recommendations and what FAMA could actually build, plenty of technical difficulties and gaps appeared. That also throws a fact into relief: after all these years of condom technology, breakthroughs have been genuinely hard to come by. Which is, in Lin Jianda's view, the hardest part of designing a good condom.

Big brands have all but eaten the condom market, but Pan Chen is optimistic about repositioning a four-year-old brand. "Everyone has reached what you'd call openness, but there's still a distance between open and enlightened — how you look at sex, or at your own body, how you properly face your own desires and manage them. As our basic education keeps getting better, I believe this market has exponential, explosive growth ahead of it."

Cover image courtesy of frog