As a brand, Tantus may not scream “kinky” in quite the same way many other strictly-fetish brands do, but when prompted, CEO Mike Blacksmith affirms, “We’ve been a kink company pretty much from day one.” As he and Tantus founder and owner Metis Black chat over the phone with XBIZ from their Nevada home base, the story of the highly lauded company begins to unfold.
Perhaps best summarized by its tagline, “Good Clean Fun,” Tantus is best known for revolutionizing the industry over two decades ago when Black introduced a proprietary silicone formula to the market. At the time, creating a product specifically designed with better sexual health and wellness in mind seemed novel, but throughout the years Tantus has kept its momentum, paving the way and championing better products and better community-wide education in unwavering fashion.
All the genres we’re in, we’ve played in heavily first and then made toys that work in that market — we really design and build these toys from our heart and from experience.
Aside from its role as arguably the original sexual health and wellness toy company, much of Tantus’ ethos runs parallel to and at times intersects with the kink community. The company takes inspiration from kink's many values and players, and this in turn has inexorably shaped the face of the brand.
The kink community has long been a silent driver of culture in many ways, from normalizing discussions of safety and consent to broadening understandings of gender and sexuality, growing its visibility in the public sphere and now even holding space as tastemakers in popular fashion. For Tantus, those values, whether deliberately or subconsciously, have been infused from the top down via Black and Blacksmith, since the very beginning.
“One of our first successes at Tantus was butt plugs,” related Black. “We were doing that well before most people were thinking about it as a ‘normal’ fetish, other than maybe a dominatrix. It was well before pegging was a word!”
Designing from personal experience, however, placed Tantus in a uniquely capable position.
“The way I was playing, I was definitely using toys,” said Black, noting the company’s debut product: silicone butt plugs. “I didn’t approach it as like, ‘I want to make a kink company’ but I did think, ‘I want to make a toy company because there’s nothing out there that I want to play with.’” With regards to the body-safe aspect of silicone, Black adds, “That’s where we really differentiated and that was our goal going in — to make safe products for people and make them mainstream.”
“We’ve never designed a toy and then started [using] it,” added Blacksmith. “We’ve always played and then designed toys, so all the genres we’re in, we’ve played in heavily first and then made toys that work in that market — we really design and build these toys from our heart and from experience.”
Harkening back to the late ’90s when Tantus first burst onto the scene, Black painted a picture of a market very different from the one we’ve now all come to know and love. Back then, the vast majority of toys were made of PVC with added phthalates.
The pitfalls of phthalates have been well-documented, which is why silicone now dominates the market. But in 1998 when Tantus first debuted, the industry was still very much stuck in dark corners of seedy adult video stores.
“Back in those days, all the adult companies ... were owned by men,” said Blacksmith, crediting Black as one of the first women who started from the ground up.
“She didn’t buy into a product line or do things like other companies,” Blacksmith said. “So when you do that and you’re a female, you think a bit differently than a man. You’re paying attention to a lot of things: sizes that are realistic and don’t hurt, material that doesn’t give you UTIs or other infections — that’s where we really started. The downfall was that our toys were probably 700 percent more expensive to make than anyone else’s on the market.
“It took us years to educate the marketplace and we had to educate on multiple layers,” said Blacksmith. “You used to have to sell through all the Jersey, Denver, Middle America and East Coast old boys club distributors, and they don’t want to hear that ‘Oh, this is healthy and you can sterilize it — and by the way if you want your wife to fuck you in the ass, it’s perfect for that!’”
Coming from the men’s kink community in the ’80s in San Francisco, a community decimated by the HIV/AIDS epidemic, Blacksmith spoke of a sense of camaraderie and shared lived experience that he associates with the gay men’s scene specifically.
Both he and Black, now married, have continued to participate in the kink community, at an individual and company-wide level, whether it be attending play parties or conventions, teaching classes or donating product to various organizations; Blacksmith himself is the titleholder for two regional leather titles, with Tantus having received the International President’s Award in 2018.
“We get recognized by the kink community and we donate all over the place,” said Blacksmith. “We donate hundreds and hundreds of units a year to title-holders and contestants in the bootblack and leather communities. We donate to the women’s community, the trans community, men’s community and pan community, we donate to colleges for sex-positive events — behind the scenes we’re probably talking thousands of units a year that go out to these individuals from our company.”
Additionally, the Tantus website also features a section dedicated to sex ed and conversations on kink, with contributions from both Black and Blacksmith as well as a variety of other educators.
Through and through, Black and Blacksmith make it a point to remain part of the community they serve.
“There are not a lot of people in our industry who are real — that actually fuck,” mused Blacksmith. “Among the management of top-tier companies, they don’t play with toys, they’ve never had a fist inside them, they’ve never been tied up or spanked, I’ve never seen them on Fetlife, never seen them in a play scene or teaching, giving back to the community.
“People get into this industry for a number of reasons. For us it’s sex positivity and sexual health. Metis and I, and sometimes our employees, get kink-shamed but we just don’t hide it. We’re real.”
He added, “The store clerks and the people on the forefront of this industry, they are the warriors and the true heroes. The people that are writing copy or selling in these stores — they’re the ones that I see at conventions and play parties. They walk the walk and talk the talk.”
Meanwhile, Black is content to pepper the conversation with anecdotes of happy memories from the past 20-odd years, outlining Tantus’ legacy within the community and highlighting its various achievements.
She revels in telling the story of Tantus’ first ANME, where folks were fascinated by the silicone butt plugs. “Everyone would lift a butt plug and put it to their nose just to check [that it didn’t smell].” She lets out a laugh. “I was entertained by that.”
Prior to that, Tantus gained its footing via Stockroom, which Black credits as one of her best business decisions. “When we were first getting started, I had a list of target people and Stockroom was right at the top because it was so progressive. They became our first distributor, sending stuff to England and then all over Europe. It really made a huge impact on both of our knowledge bases.
“We got [the anal plugs] into Adam & Eve catalogs back when you used to send catalogs out across the country, and that was the first silicone toy that they picked up.”
After the plugs came a range of strap-ons and since that point, Tantus has yet to slow down.
“When Mike was going for the titles and we were involving ourselves more into kink, our client list did grow a bit more,” noted Black. “Mike came up with this whole line of XL toys that have been amazing.”
“They’re fun,” Blacksmith chimed in.
In developing the XL line, Black says, the company finally managed to perfect the material for a long-time project: packers. The new line, which only just debuted a few months ago, has been in the making for over a decade. “We’ve had the mold since 2006/2007,” said Black, noting that they designed and hand-crafted the original for one of their employees who was transitioning at the time and experiencing irritation with other models.
“We just didn’t have the chemistry at the time to come out with a packer for the mass market yet.” However, both rave that the new material is “unlike anything else.”
“That’s the difference with us, I would say,” added Blacksmith. “We’re highly involved in the chemistry of our material. We know all the stuff — down to vinyl bonding — and how to manipulate the chemistry to make our material perfect for the human body.”
“It is so soft and pliable but it’s not sticky,” said Mike. “It’s insane what we can do with this material, and that involvement relates to our ability to walk the walk.”
Tantus has come a long way and, with the support of its community and uncompromising standards, has built itself into the rock-solid brand that it is today. As founders, creators and executives, both Black and Blacksmith have remained authentically true to themselves and their values, building a company that is equally dedicated and thus beloved for its commitment to the kink community, the sexual health and wellness community and the adult industry.
“We’ve been around for so long and have such brand recognition that people think we’re a huge company,” Blacksmith shared. “We’re little; there’s only 13 of us. All the market penetration we get is because we pour our souls into this. We’re 13 people that are completely, 100-percent passionate about what we make.”
