WELCOME TO THE PLEASURE ZONE

When Ky Hoyle set up her women-friendly sex shop in London's East End 30 years ago, she wanted to break some taboos. She's still making waves, writes Tanya Pearey

- Tanya Pearey

It was a brief, handwritten thank-you note from a customer, but it meant the world to Ky Hoyle. It read, 'Thank you. After three children and 20 years of marriage, I've finally had an orgasm!' The letter came at the beginning of Ky's business venture, but she's kept it safe over the past three decades so she stays focused on exactly why she set up her sex shop: 'To help women understand that they have the right to sexual pleasure and showing them how to achieve it.'

'The toys are secondary, explains Ky, who is in her 50s. 'Without sounding too saintly, we're not really about flogging sex toys, we're more about trying to give people permission to explore their sexuality. And women particularly have needed that, especially when we first opened.'

The idea for Sh!, the UK's first women-friendly sex shop, was sparked after Ky's failed trip to buy sex toys in the 1980s. 'It was the most horrible experience,' she recalls. 'Everything was very male-focused, the male fantasy of what women wanted, not what we actually wanted.

Spurred on by the memory of dark and dingy Soho sex shops, with intimidatingly large and graphic toys, and shady men in dirty raincoats, Ky raided her £700 savings to open altogether different premises in London's Hoxton. The emphasis was on women's pleasure, but it was difficult to source stock to reflect this ethos, so the company started making its own - not so successfully at first. 'We made an awful lot of dildos that were little better than dog toys in the early days,' laughs Ky.