For decades, the Chinese adult products and sexual wellness sector remained one of the most underregulated and misunderstood industries across the domestic consumer market. Before 2018, the entire ecosystem covering offline brick-and-mortar adult novelty stores, third-party online adult toy retail shops, wholesale intimate wellness accessories and cross-border adult supplies trading businesses operated in a vague regulatory gray zone. The lack of unified official production guidelines, market access thresholds and complete after-sales service policies caused a host of chronic problems for both merchants and end consumers. Low-quality uncertified silicone adult toys, inferior water-based lubricants and untested intimate care devices flooded the low-end market, which not only disrupted the market order of formal adult supplies brands but also brought potential health risks to a large number of intimate product users.

In May 2018, a transformative change swept across the whole industry as the Sexual Wellness Products Branch, affiliated with China Daily Use Sundry Goods Association, was officially established as the first national-level specialized organization for the adult sexual wellness industry in China. This authoritative industry association united dozens of top-tier participants throughout the supply chain, including well-known international and domestic intimate wellness brands, professional adult toy raw material manufacturers, finished product processing factories, cross-border adult product distributors and sexual health research institutions. Different from loose civilian industry groups, this official branch was tasked with multiple core missions to reshape the development pattern of the adult supplies industry.

The core work of the association included drafting unified national production standards for smart adult toys and simulation intimate products, formulating clear market access rules for new entrants, auditing product safety qualifications for all types of adult intimate supplies, and standardizing the online and offline sales and promotion methods of adult novelty goods. In addition, the organization also focused on solving industry pain points such as chaotic pricing of couple wellness products and imperfect consumer after-sales rights protection mechanisms. Industry analysts pointed out that the founding of this adult products industry association marked the end of the disorderly development era of China’s intimate wellness market. It laid a crucial institutional foundation for high-quality domestic adult toy brands to expand the domestic consumer market and explore overseas export business, and also greatly enhanced the overall credibility and social acceptance of the formal adult sexual wellness products industry.