Brian Sloan (entrepreneur)

Early life & education

Sloan grew up in Skokie, Illinois. He graduated from the University of Missouri in 2002 where he double majored in philosophy and political science. He went on to attend Penn State Dickinson School of Law where he graduated in 2005.

Career

Sloan graduated from law school but never worked as a lawyer. He started his first business purchasing items from bankruptcy auctions and then reselling them online. He would also make purchases from garage sales and antique shows, buying anything that he could resell for more money on eBay.

One item that Sloan began selling was human skulls. He would purchase them from China and would boil, clean, reassemble, and them sell them to medical students. In 2007, Chicago artist Jojo Baby visited Sloan's apartment to purchase vintage mannequins when he saw human skulls in boiling in a pot of water in Sloan's kitchen. Jojo Baby subsequently called the police and Sloan was questioned on suspicion of being a serial killer. Sloan was never charged with a crime, but the skulls were confiscated and the incident was profiled on the front page of the Chicago Tribune.

Sloan decided to relocate to Beijing, China in 2007. It was in China that Sloan began to develop and manufacture an automatic male sex toy and by 2009 was generating over $1 million in annual sales. Sloan's best selling product has been the Autoblow 2, which generated media coverage internationally. It was the first of its type on a crowdfuning platform and raised $275,000. Since its launch, the product has appeared on Comedy Central’s Not Safe With Nikki Glaser Season 1 Episode 4 and HBO series Silicon Valley, Season 2, episode 7. Additional products Sloan has crowdfuned include a flexible vibrator known as Slaphappy and a male masturbator known as 3Fap.

In June 2015, Sloan launched a worldwide vaginal beauty contest in order to find vulvas to replicate onto the top of the Autoblow 2. Three million votes were cast from 191 countries across 110 vulva photo submissions. After winners were announced, Sloan hired a data scientist to classify the vulva photos and analyze the IP data to publish a paper, which examined vulva style preferences across various cities and countries. Elite Daily produced an 8-minute documentary featuring Sloan 3d scanning the winners of the contest. Sloan was criticized by several female journalists about his Vaginal Beauty Contest. One publication cited the contest’s risk of adding to “pervasive judgment of women’s bodies by men”, while a feminist writer called the contest “A veritable manwich of misogynist manure".

In November 2015, Sloan launched a male genital beauty contest, focusing on the scrotum. The stated purpose of the contest was to find the 3 most beautiful scrotums in the world and 3d scan them to turn them into objects of home décor. He awarded $10,000 of prize money to the 3 winners of each of the contests. Sloan also hired the same data scientist who wrote the Vulva Paper to write the Scrotum Paper, analyzing the data from the Scrotal Beauty Contest.

Personal life

In 2014 and 2016, Sloan received media coverage for visiting North Korea and running in the Pyongyang marathon, in Pyongyang, North Korea. He was one of 300 foreigners in 2014 and one of 1,000 foreigners to compete in 2016 in the marathon. He documented his time in Pyongyang in media interviews, stating that his group was taken to 2 giant statues of Kim Jong-il and his father Kim Il-Sung, where they were advised to lay flowers as a mark of respect.

Sloan was profiled in the June 2016 print edition of Playboy magazine in an article entitled “The Man Who Wants To Change The Way Men Get Off.” The article discusses Sloan's inventions, contests, entrepreneurship, and lifestyle.