“Hang on, let me move out of the warehouse and go somewhere quieter — someone is running a table saw.”
Kenton, the founder, lead designer and, well, entirety of indie sex toy company Funkit Toys maneuvers away from the rumbling buzz.
That’s the goal — make more ways to have fun.
“May take a moment,” he interjects, “this place is very large.”
In a long-distance chat from Washington D.C., Kenton explains that he only just recently moved from his work-home studio to a shared facility.
“My lease ran out and the place I moved into had cats, which is not ideal for working with silicone,” Kenton says.
It’s a deadpan yet completely relatable answer, laced with a touch of comedic irony when one imagines the nightmare of a pair of cats loose in a dildo factory.
Having begun his venture into the world of pleasure products approximately five years ago, Kenton relates the story he’s told many times before: Funkit Toys was founded in April 2016 — he’d been working with silicone since approximately six months prior and had been making wooden paddles for a year before that.
Synthesizing pretty much the entirety of Kenton’s resume-worthy skills, his now job as lead designer of Funkit Toys utilizes expertise in graphic design, sculpting, color theory, anatomy and materials safety, to name a few.
“I’d been doing 3D printing and digital design for a long time and eventually I just sort of realized that I could quit my day job, so I did," he said. “I like to joke that none of my marketable skills went to waste when I transitioned into this. It all goes somewhere.”
However straightforward or serendipitous that might seem, Kenton doesn’t hesitate to dispel the rosy picture.
“I can’t remember ever making a conscious choice that I was going to make sex toys for a living,” he relates. “I would describe it as less of a business decision and more like falling down a flight of stairs.”
No master plan, no family business, no long-held dream; rather, Kenton explains, “I thought I was going to go into sex education and on my way to becoming a sex educator, I sort of face-planted into sex toys,” adding, “which was better cut out for me anyways. I’m not much of a teacher.”
Modular Sexperiments for a Design-Savvy Soul
Elaborating on Funkit Toy’s origin story, Kenton explains an impatient moment that led to a spark of ingenuity. “I didn’t want to wait for a paddle to come in the mail, so I just made one,” he said. “Then I had an idea for a better one, and then one that wasted less wood,” and so on and so forth.
Monetization came easily enough after an acquaintance approached him wanting to purchase one of the paddles, of which he had several at this point.
With generous disbelief, he explains, “This guy came up to me and asked me how much I sold them for — I just looked at this guy and go, ‘sell?’ That’s when I started the Etsy store.”
Graduating from wood to silicone in November of 2015, it wasn’t long before Kenton debuted his first products under the Funkit Toys label: Swell and Cashew, the brand’s one and only “dick-shaped toy,” he explained politely enough but nevertheless with a touch of disdain, and its first of several plugs, respectively.
Regarding the distaste for dick-shaped toys: “It’s just not my jam,” Kenton offers. “It was a fun thing to practice in the modeling program I was messing with because a penis is a very intricate shape. I’ve seen a lot of amateur modelers try and make one, but they just never quite come out [right]. It’s very easy to make a kind of uncanny penis shape and get something wrong enough that it just looks weird.
“It feels a lot harder sculpturally to make it look natural, which is why I wanted to try it.”
The more he chats, the more Funkit Toys takes shape as one big, grand experiment: a mad-scientist’s lab of materials, 3D printing, design renderings — all helmed by this one “Fucksmith,” as his business cards denote.
He clarifies, “I didn’t come up with Fucksmith, it was sort of just lying around and didn’t look like it belonged to anyone.
“It’s from a [web]comic called ‘Oglaf;’ there’s a character that basically has a costume shop and you bring your sexual fantasy to him and he’ll dress people up and make props and bring it into reality.”
The dots are all starting to connect, further amplified by the admission that at an early convention, he had had lab coats embroidered specifically for the occasion.
“I had an idea in my head that every time I went to a conference I’d do a different shtick but costumes are expensive,” he concedes.
The Ramen Cup of Dildos
A standout feature amidst the Funkit range is the modular design that’s incorporated into the bulk of the brand’s premium models, meaning that most Funkit toys can be combined together to fashion an entirely new, unique toy. Elaborating on one of his favorite “modular sexperiments,” Kenton describes the result when Slot, a silicone paddle, and Pommel, a bullet sleeve, combine.
“[Pommel] was designed to rest under the vulva for strap-on play, but you can attach a bullet vibe and stick it to any other toy and it transmits the vibration really well. I love attaching it to the Slot because you can wrap that around the penis or rest it against the vulva — you essentially have a vibrating sheet of textured silicone to play with.”
Beautifully, Kenton’s one-man Funkit show is beholden to no mandates, rules or objectives, evolving and expanding in step with his trial-by-fire, on-the-job experience and with a self-aware image of what he has to offer.
“I still tend to design things because that’s what I want to be making, but I also have specific goals in mind for where I want to fill a gap in my product line,” he noted, teasing pending development of longer, thinner and smaller toys, as requested by popular demand.
However much can be said about Kenton, Funkit Toys, and all its wonderful modular creations, it’s impossible to talk about Funkit Toys without mentioning the NoFrillDo. This dildo is exactly what it sounds like — no frills, no features, no bells and whistles, just a good ‘ole basic dildo that’s body-safe and won’t break the bank. What more could you really need.
Ironically, affectionately referred to as the “ramen cup of dildos,” the NoFrillDo line is by far Funkit’s bread and butter, designed with safety and frugality in mind.
“One of the main points of the NoFrillDo is because if someone’s looking at an $8 jelly rubber toy and someone tries to upsell them to an $80 silicone one, that’s a hard upsell. But when you’re going to something that’s $24 and guaranteed to be safe, that’s a bit less of a jump,” he explained.
Following a successful crowdfunding campaign, NoFrillDos launched to a hungry public. Now, with over 2,000 units sold, it continues to top Funkit’s charts and, as the product description cheekily notes, come in a variety of shapes and colors, several of which are “not pink.”
Talk the Talk, Walk the Walk & Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is
As far as branding goes, it’s become relatively in vogue to position oneself as an activist company, one which is committed to some cause or another, appealing to an ethical consumerism mentality that is more prevalent than ever, particularly amongst younger generations.
For as much clout as brands receive when they sign their name onto a large donation or particularly buzzworthy promo, it’s often the ongoing work, carried out quietly and diligently, that resonates the most.
Leveraging NoFrillDos’ popularity and affordability, Kenton has launched a series of fundraising initiatives that have come to be known as NoFrillDo “Bake Sales,” in which a portion of profits are donated to a varying list of charities.
Explaining his commitment to supporting the sex worker community in particular, he offers, “There’re all sorts of causes that I believe in but [sex work] is the place where I can do the most good without bringing ammunition to some political opponent. Sex worker advocacy organizations aren’t going to look worse by their association with a dildo company.”
“Another thing that helping sex workers does is that it lifts a lot of the most marginalized people up,” he adds. “Making sex work legal and making it safer are both causes I believe in.”
To date, Kenton has managed to raise thousands for sex workers’ right associations, ranging from SWOP Behind Bars to Red Light Legal, through Funkit Toys, and recently expanding to include Scarletteen, a sex education platform geared toward adolescence, in the slate of beneficiaries.
Toys for Parts
Funkit Toys presents itself as a unique company and brand in many senses of the word. As Kenton expounds on the benefits of “shit posting” as a marketing strategy on Twitter [see his various sex toy musical parodies], this vibrant sense of individuality and resistance to conform to a pre-ordained “this is how we do things” has yielded both an incredibly creative and inclusive product that champions its own universality.
Speaking on the push for gender inclusive products that’s been seen in recent years, Kenton offers a simple hard line.
“That’s the main thing with sex toy marketing that I’ve had a beef with,” he said. “Very often there’s exclusion where there doesn’t need to be.”
Elaborating, he explains, “I think all sex toys are gender neutral; you just have to market them that way, as opposed to saying ‘this is a man’s manly toy for men’ and ‘if you’re a man, you should use it and if you’re not a man, don’t.’ It’s not just being kind, it’s good business strategy to not tell people your toy isn’t for them when it might work for them very well."
Relating the story of a blogger who announced the launch of a “gender-neutral nail polish,” Kenton’s point — that in fact, many toys are inherently gender-neutral insofar as they can be used on any body to achieve the same end result — couldn’t be clearer.
“We all kind of looked at that like, ‘Oh finally — a nail polish that fits on my nails! At least now I won’t have to put on all this lady nail polish.’”
“It’s not that hard to avoid all of these pitfalls,” he concluded, “you just have to have some room for understanding to not exclude people.”
Making More Ways
Looking forward, Funkit Toys is moving full-steam ahead. With regards to Kenton specifically, he says he’s looking at creating more toys, with a specific attention to filling gaps in his current product line and items that embody the novelty concept, such as the Halloween candy corn butt plug.
Previously, “I sort of locked myself into the modular category and tried to make everything fit that for a long time,” he confided. “I got into a rut but at some point it clicked for me that I don’t have to wait for special occasions to do silly things that I want to do. I run my own company and can do that kind of thing whenever I want.”
Between the talk of forthcoming sexperiments, explanations of different types of molds and extraction processes, Kenton took a moment to ruminate on the totality of Funkit Toys. “That’s the goal,” he reveals, “make more ways to have fun.”
