Now, he said, there is an openness in talking about sex, “right up to the CEO”. At Johnson & Johnson, he recalled standing up in front of an all-male sales force and being met by nervous laughter. Over his career, he’s noticed how the conversation around sex has changed.
He started out at Johnson & Johnson in the 90s, working on K-Y, then moved to Reckitt in 2007, headed up Durex in China for eight years, became the brand’s head of innovation and now finds himself perched at the top of the intimate wellness ladder. He’s spent most of his professional life talking about sex. In conversation, Wilson doesn’t even slightly adjust his upbeat tone when discussing the problems of anal lubrication. He would die happy, he told me, if he could play a set at the EDM festival Tomorrowland.) (Wilson’s retirement plan is fully formed: a second home in Ibiza, already bought. To prepare for his fortnightly DJ lessons, he is at his decks for up to 12 hours a week in a specially designated room in his house on the south coast of England, where he lives with his wife and two children. He spikes his hair, never wears a suit and zones out to DJs Paul van Dyk and David Guetta while travelling. Sandy-haired, rosy-cheeked, nearing 50, Wilson has a kind of renegade energy, consciously uncorporate. “I said: ‘If you want to work on condoms you need to put a condom on that banana and taste it.’”įreshly promoted, Wilson is Reckitt’s global category director for intimate wellness, overseeing all the company’s sex-related products, including Durex condoms, lubes and toys. In a car on the way to the Durex condom factory on the outskirts of Bangkok, as traffic vibrated in the heat along the highway, he told me with pride about the time he had laid out rows of bananas and condoms for a gathering of senior executives at Reckitt, Durex’s parent company. He likes to consider their flavour, to know the sensory experience of a customer engaged in oral sex, and to think about how it could be bettered. It is important to Ben Wilson, the man in charge of the condom brand Durex, that he chews the condoms he sells.
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