When you first start talking to Sliquid founder Dean Elliott, organic, water-based lube isn’t the first thing you think of. The loud voice. The gravelly New York accent. The stories about growing up with jazz legends, a rough-and-tumble stint as Manhattan nightclub bouncer — even being pummeled by a hurricane on location with a reality show. None of them point to a career as an CEO of an organic lubricant brand.
But when Elliott weaves the stories together, it makes a skewed kind of sense. This is a man who goes after it. And when he walked into a drug store in 2001 and couldn’t figure out what the ingredients were on a bottle of lube, he saw an opportunity and immediately went after it.
I had to reinvent myself And I was like, ‘You know, let’s come up with a cleaner and greener way of doing these lubricants.’
At the time, Elliott’s main gig was as a location manager for some of the big reality shows of the day. He worked on “Joe Millionaire,” “Amazing Race” and “Temptation Island.” He would be on shoots all over the globe. But after 9/11, it had become a much harder job for him to keep up with.
“After 9/11, no one wanted to leave the country anymore,” Elliott says. “I mean, worldwide terrorism, we thought people were going to adapt that Israeli concept of having to look over your shoulder all the time.”
So Elliott was in the middle of this transitional period — still doing the work, but seeing it dwindling — when he walked into that pharmacy and he picked up that bottle of lube.
“I had to reinvent myself,” he says. “So I'm walking down to my house, thinking ‘I gotta figure out something.’ And I was like, ‘You know, let's come up with a cleaner and greener way of doing these lubricants.’”
He figured it out. But it took one hell of a journey.
Elliott grew up in the music industry. His father, Don Elliott, was a multi-instrument-playing jazz musician, composer and producer who ran the first multitrack recording studio in New York.
“My godfather is ‘Uncle Q’ — Quincy Jones,” Elliott says. “I grew up with Dave Brubeck, Gerry Mulligan, Stan Getz and Grady Tate. The list went on and on. They'd come for Sunday brunch and they'd throw on impromptu jam sessions. It was pretty cool.”
A brief, youthful foray into drumming didn’t last beyond his realization that he had different priorities as a teenager.
“I got my driver's license and really realized how much I love women,” he recalls. “So I could practice three hours a day like I'd done previously, or I could spend that time with some girl and try to get over.”
By the 1980s, Elliott was getting a liberal arts degree at NYU and working at some of Manhattan’s most famous nightspots.
“My friend was a bartender at Studio 54 back in the early ‘80s,” Elliott remembers. “I was a bouncer at another club, making $11, $11.50 an hour. So I went to work at 54, where I was maybe making $12.”
Eventually Elliott wound up working as a cooler at the Roxy nightclub in Manhattan. A roller rink four days a week, and a predominantly hip-hop club the rest of the time, Elliott had a crew of 30 bouncers working with him on Friday and Saturday nights.
It was here that Elliott made his first — and final — attempt at a feature film career. He was running security at the Roxy when they started casting the legendary Harry Belafonte-produced hip-hop movie “Beat Street.” The producers would spend time at the club; Roxy mainstay Afrika Bambaataa and several other early hip-hop icons that spent time at the club had roles in the film. Elliott managed to wrangle himself an audition.
“I remember beating out 60 or 70 guys and it was pretty cool,” recalls Elliott. “We shot for three months, which is again an ego boost and it was so much fun. When the movie finally came out it was hyped up by Belafonte to be bigger than ‘Jaws’ and bigger than ‘E.T.,’ and we were told ‘You guys are really gonna make it, this is a career launcher.’ On the day that it came out the Daily News, which was the big paper in New York at the time, wrote ‘Belafonte's Beat Street: The Hip-Hop Flop.’"
Elliott was a little bummed that the movie didn’t launch his film career.
“The original script, I was in 70-80 percent of it,” he says. “By the end, I was in about 20 percent of it. That was the beginning and the ending of my movie career. And I went back to the nightclubs, which was lucrative for me anyway and was fun, but it certainly wasn't being a movie star.”
Today, these are the stories that his employees love to hear.
“A lot of my favorites of Dean's stories come from pre-Sliquid,” says Marketing Director Erik Vasquez. “I think of the stories of him growing up with his famous father, and working the door at these really amazing nightclubs in New York, I just find that to be so indicative of his character today.”
Vasquez isn’t alone.
“Personally, my favorite story or stories are from his days working the nightclubs in New York, just because of the people that he was around,” says Senior VP Colin Roy, who’s been with Sliquid nearly from the start. “Dean is larger than life, for sure. He's been everywhere and done everything. He's had his hands in more things than you could ever imagine and he's got a story for every situation.”
“Larger-than-life” is a common descriptor for the CEO and entrepreneur.
“Dean constantly has really great ideas and a personality that I think helps him bring those ideas to life,” says Vasquez. “He's also the guy that you wanna go have drinks and dinner with because he's got stories and he's fun and he's a New York guy, in your face and loud.”
It was this larger-than-life personality that started Dean in his next career as a voiceover artist in the ‘90s for some of the most bombastic entities around.
“I was the voice of World Wrestling Federation for a few years,” he says. “This was the greatest gig of all time. I recorded Tuesdays from 10-11 a.m., in Stamford, Connecticut at their headquarters, for $5,000 a month. And I'd walk in on Tuesday morning at 10, bullshit about the weekend until it was about 10:20, record for about 30 minutes — ‘This Thursday, Stone Cold Steve Austin takes on the ultimate ladder match. Then we invade the Toronto Skydome.’ They'd play it back, make sure everything was okay, and I'd leave, see them again in a week.”
Elliott also did voiceover work for Atlantic Records, promoting Led Zeppelin box sets; for Volvo, doing the legal tags for Donald Sutherland; and for Chuck Norris’s World Combat League.
By the late ‘90s, Elliott had moved into yet another career, doing cargo and transportation for reality TV. Once again, it was his tendency to take the big risk that led to his promotion to location manager on some of the biggest reality productions in the world.
In late September 2000, Elliott was working on “Temptation Island” in Belize, on Ambergris Caye, when the crew got the news that Tropical Storm Keith was likely to make landfall right on top of them. The storm eventually turned into Hurricane Keith, peaking as a Category 4 storm.
“We were just getting pummelled,” Elliott recalls. “We actually lost two of our crew, dead, trying to move a sailboat. I was helping out as a medic, everything I'd learned being a bouncer at the clubs, and they saw me basically take charge, so now we had to go out and get diesel fuel for the generators, and I was bartering our water for diesel fuel.”
Elliott was sure his time was up.
“Listen, I was a New York, nightclub guy. But nothing was scarier than thinking I was gonna die in a hurricane,” he says. “If you had a bowling ball and you threw it in the wind, it would take that bowling ball like it was a pea shooter.”
The producers took note of his work under pressure and made him location supervisor.
“So I went from not only just doing the cargo and transportation and getting them in and getting them out,” he says, “but now they wanted me to stay on location and it kind of just built a whole new career for me.”
The thing about these careers of Elliott is that none of them happen in a bubble. They all overlapped, a testament to the work ethic he brings to the table. For example, there was the time when voiceover, reality television and Sliquid all collided.
“There's only one place in the world where all three careers met up in like a three-day chunk, and that was in Seattle, Washington,” Elliott says. “I was doing ‘Amazing Race,’ I was there to see Drugstore.com who at that point was still a new client for Sliquid, and I was doing Volvo tag and legal at a studio in Puget Sound. So it was really wild — I did all three careers in one spot and to me it's still the highlight trip of all time.”
Elliott brings that work ethic to bear every day at Sliquid.
“You have Dean in the office and he's giving you constant feedback and direction, which is something that I think is really important,” says Vasquez. “He's always there to tell us when we're doing wonderful and he's always there to give us feedback when he has ideas that he thinks that we should flesh out. He's really good at making us feel successful and making us feel like what we're doing is the right direction.”
He also expects his employees to have that kind of ethic, not just in their set jobs but in developing new aspects to what they can do.
“He is 100 percent behind us learning new skills on the job,” says Roy. “He's 100 percent behind us challenging ourselves to learn new skills here in the office.”
Vasquez agrees.
“Dean challenges me to develop myself so much more than any other boss has,” he says. “He told me when he hired me, ‘You'll find a place for yourself that works here at Sliquid.’ And I did. He wants to cultivate our talent and make us better than we were the day before, the year before, and so on and so forth.”
Elliott had a learning curve of his own when he started up Sliquid in 2001. He didn’t know the first thing about lubricant chemistry.
“I hired an amazing chemist, the guy who was doing all the cleaning products that are sold by Whole Foods,” he says. “I figured, if he can mix clean products that Whole Foods signs off on, he's pretty good. And to this day he's still my chemist.”
They embarked on a research project to determine the best way to manufacture a safe, organic lube. It was important to Elliott, as his wife was sensitive to the chemicals in the lubricants available at the time.
“We found out that glycerine and glycol and any sugar-derived product is bad for women,” he says. “Shortly thereafter we found out that parabens were being banned in the European Union because they were connected to cervical cancer and some other nasty shit. So we said, ‘All right, we're gonna have a whole line of glycerin- and paraben-free lubes on the market.”
This speaks to his commitment to safety beyond what might be commercially necessary. Parabens are a common preservative in many products. And while there have been correlations between cancers and paraben levels, there’s no conclusive link. But Elliott decided to err on the side of caution and develop a completely organic, paraben-free product.
“A lot of these big [lube] companies were all basically trying to fight the information we were finding out by saying ‘Ah, there's nothing wrong with glycerin, there's nothing wrong with parabens,’” Elliott says. “Meanwhile, a year later [those same lube companies] came out with a formulation that was glycerin-free, even though they were telling us all the time that ‘Ah there's no problem.’ Really? Then why'd you do it?"
In 2004, Elliott and his wife moved to Dallas to be close to her ailing parents. Until that point Sliquid as a company had been mainly Elliott himself selling it where he could. In Dallas, he began bringing in more employees to help him grow the business. The first was Colin Roy.
“I started out doing a little bit of everything,” recalls Roy. “I started doing audio work for his voiceover stuff but the first real job I had with him was freelance-designing the Sliquid website. The work just kind of grew from there. Did a website, did some labels, did a couple of graphics and just kept going.”
Vasquez has been with the company for nearly three years. But he, too, developed his position over time.
“In the past, I'd be with a large corporation, I was just a number, it was just 'Get your work done, submit it, and boom, you're done,’” he says. “With Dean, he takes an interest in each one of us. And besides it just being fun, I get to travel, and all that good stuff, having someone truly invested in my development that would keep me long-term with Sliquid is something special that I would never give up.”
Elliott engenders a ton of loyalty from his employees.
“We're like family, I've known him for over 20 years,” says Michelle “Glitter” Marcus, VP of Sales and Merchandising. “He's someone that will always go the extra mile for those that are around him, in business and in friendship. He is a guy of great enthusiasm, knowledge and comfort.”
Elliott has also pushed Sliquid further into progressive causes that he’s passionate about. For instance, he’s been fighting for years against having to test his lube on animals.
“We've been fighting the animal-testing law for probably a decade now,” he says. “When the FDA decided that lubricants needed to be a medical device, we wanted to become compliant but we also were dead-set against animal testing.”
Another area he’s passionate about is promoting transgender acceptance through his products. This grew as much out of his New York, speak-his-mind-and-do-it-loudly attitude as it did from his open-mindedness.
It developed from the first time he met trans icon Buck Angel, with whom Sliquid has developed an Angel-branded collection of products specifically for the FTM trans community, the Buck Angel T-Collection.
He first met Angel 12 years ago at the Erotica Show in the Olympic Gardens of London, England. Elliott, a big dude with a loud voice and imposing demeanor — had been looking around for someone he could hang out with at the show.
That’s when he spotted the bald, bearded, tattooed, black-leather-clad, shirtless and jacked Angel smoking a cigar and thought “who is this badass?”
“I was heavier at the time,” says Elliott. “And I just walked up to him and I said, ‘Who the fuck are you, man? You look like the kind of cat that if I owed money to, I would hide out on, like, an island somewhere.’”
The two of them struck up a conversation about working out and staying in shape until Angel excused himself.
“Ten minutes go by,” recalls Elliott. “The place is huge, the ceilings are like 200 feet high, just a gigantic building. The lights go down, the spotlight goes up, and we’re looking at this cat coming down from the rafters, who’s wrapped in a giant ribbon, doing this aerial show.”
It was Angel himself, making his grand entrance to the show.
“I'm watching this thing go on and the muscles are popping and glistening, and he's holding on to this ribbon as he's coming down, and he gets to about 30 feet above our heads, and the rest of the ribbon unravels, and he’s naked,” says Elliott. “And I remember looking up and thinking ‘Wait a minute, where is this dude's cock and balls?’ You gotta remember, I'm a New York bouncer. This was a world I don't know.”
Nevertheless, a deep friendship was born that blossomed into more than just a lucrative business arrangement, but a true brotherhood.
“Buck Angel is my older brother, first and foremost,” says Elliott. “And because I wasn't some fanboy, because I didn't know who he was, because I wasn't there to kiss his ass, he really loved me as just a fellow dude for respecting him as a dude. And I guess a lot of people don't do that.”
For his part, Angel feels the same sibling connection with Elliott.
“I just became his brother,” says Angel. “We're really just like bros. I’ll tell you a lot of it has to do with him just treating me like a dude. That's really important to me because I did transition to become a man.”
The two bonded over their shared sensitivity as much as masculinity.
Elliott is “a sensitive, powerful, vulnerable, badass motherfucker,” says Angel.
“He comes off like a tough guy but he's also really sensitive, which is awesome. I love that about him. Men don't always get to show that side. Men aren’t always allowed to be sensitive, but he celebrates that,” notes Angel.
“When I was going through stuff in my life, if I needed a shoulder to cry on, it was Buck,” says Elliott. “He was so sensitive to my sensitivity, to my feelings, to my hurt and heartache, he was just a great sounding board and a great shoulder for me to cry on. The business thing is secondary.”
The T-Collection has grown from a single lubricant specially designed for trans men with vaginal discomfort to an entire line of trans-friendly products. Angel attributes it to Elliott’s total acceptance of Angel and his community.
“He was always very respectful of my situation of being trans, he was always super-cool about it,” Angel recalls. “I said, ‘Dude, I need a product for my community that doesn't exist, I need a product that will bring knowledge to men with vaginas’ and he said, ‘Oh my god, brilliant idea!’ That's what I love about Dean — he's a man who has a lot of power on some level, he's a man who's cisgender and he can really help to bring knowledge to the rest of the world and especially gynecologically.”
And Elliott isn’t done expanding into new industries.
For example, he’s started Mad Toto, a company that creates protective cases for glass pipes.
“[I was] born on 4/20, so it's my birthright,” he says, laughing. “Mad Toto started because I wanted to get into the [pot] sector. I bought a place in Crested Butte, Colorado because that's where I love to ski, and this guy that I was with had this little Burton 420 case, and we're on the lift and he opens it up. He pulls out this little kit, and I'm like, ‘Hey that's a cool little thing’ and he tells me they don't make them anymore. So I was like, fuck, they don't make them anymore? Lightbulb!”
Once again, Elliott went to work building a company from the ground-up.
“I saw a thing, I saw a need. I said, ‘Hey, I can make this,’ and then boom, there’s a company,” he says. “It doesn't make a ton of money. I throw some money at it, but as long as it's not losing money, I'm happy. We're just having fun with it. It's kind of an excuse for me to just travel to, like, hippie ski spots and all that.”
This is the life Elliott has always led, jumping on opportunities when they present themselves and running with the ball as far as he can. His employees love that he brings them along for the ride.
“Ever since I started with Dean, it's always been exciting,” says Roy. “There's always new things. When we started and we were doing a little bit of everything — doing voiceovers, starting a new company — audio work is what I had come from, mostly. So there was always something new, and really that hasn't stopped. It's been something new the whole time.”
“Dean is a great mentor, he's played a lot of different roles in his lifetime,” says Marcus. He has “a lot of greatness to offer to not only those that work for him but those that in his life generally speaking,”
“He's really, really good about selecting the talent that he keeps around him, because I think we work really well together as a team that supports his ideas and his vision,” says Vasquez. “One thing Dean does is he treats all of us like family. He truly cares about our development as far as not just professionally but personally.”
This closeness has allowed Sliquid to grow into the vanguard of the boutique lubricant industry. The company has won many XBIZ Awards over the years, as Sex Lubricant Company of the Year, Sexual Health and Wellness Company of the Year, and several others. Sliquid’s Spark lubricant won this year’s Sex Lubricant of the Year. For his part, Elliott won the XBIZ Retail Exec Award for Businessman of the Year in 2016.
“We are extremely proud,” he says. “We're passionate, we're proud. Believe me, I'm neurotic, I don't sleep much as it is. If I thought there was someone doing it cleaner and greener than we are, I would never sleep. That's just who I am. We make sure that we're at the forefront, we're using the best quality ingredients that we can possibly find that we can put inside our bottles. We don't have the fanciest packaging, we don't have the glitz and glamour, but our bottles are filled with the best stuff we can possibly find.”
