IT IS IMPORTANT TO BEN WILSON, themaninchargeofthe condom brand Durex, that he chews the condoms he sells. 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. He makes other people sample them, too. In a car on the way to the Durex condom factory on the outskirts of Bangkok, he told me about the time he had laid out rows of bananas and condoms for a gathering of senior executives at Reckitt, Durex’s parent company. “I said: ‘If you want to work on condoms you need to put a condom on that banana and taste it.’”
Freshly 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. Sandy-haired, rosycheeked, nearing 50, he has a kind of renegade energy, consciously uncorporate. He spikes his hair, never wears a suit and zones out to DJs Paul van Dyk and David Guetta while travelling. He practises for his fortnightly DJ lessons 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. (Wilson’s retirement plan is fully formed: a second home in Ibiza, already bought. He would die happy, he told me, if he could play a set at the EDM festival Tomorrowland.)
In conversation, Wilson doesn’t even slightly adjust his upbeat tone when discussing the problems of anal lubrication. He’s spent most of his professional life talking about sex. 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. Over his career, he’s noticed how the conversation around sex has changed. At Johnson & Johnson, he recalled standing up in front of an all-male sales force and being met by nervous laughter. Now, he said, there is an openness in talking about sex, “right up to the CEO”. Early in our visit to the Durex factory, he warned me that we would be discussing sex often and candidly: “I hope you don’t mind.”
Wilson’s immersion in Durex is total. He’s been offered other jobs at Reckitt, which also owns Strepsils, Gaviscon, Nurofen and Dettol, but always turned them down. Condoms mean more to him than Strepsils ever could. In his spare time, he scours eBay for vintage condoms. He recently paid £2 ($2.50) for a specimen from the 1970s that had been discovered in a binoculars case in a charity shop. (He would not recommend using it: “ It would be like putting on a 50-year-old sock.”) With the heroic participation of his wife, he tries out all
