Martin Millar is getting through some emails on a computer which sits on top of his busy counter neighbouring a large collection of poppers and dildos. I awkwardly wonder what to talk about first before plumping for the poppers. He leans over the counter and chuckles, recalling a time when they’d be placed in the air vents of Cardiff ’s gay bars, and gives me a crash course in weakest to strongest.
More of an expert in sex aids you’ll struggle to find. His 27-year stint at his sex shop named Lovecraft has been so full of surprises he’s learned to expect the unexpected and still he finds himself occasionally speechless. When Mr Millar opened his store at the corner of Wyndham Crescent in Cardiff in 1997 he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
Inquisitive folk poured through the mysterious dark doors in their droves to see what all the fuss was about. That morning Mr Millar said his Canton store found itself in the South Wales Echo with the headline: “Outcry over sex shop.” “I actually had contacted the Echo saying I’d pay them for advertising and the person on the phone said: ‘No, we wouldn’t advertise with shops like that.
’ And he put the phone down on me,” Mr Millar, who had worked at various retailers before he opened the shop, recalls. “Then the day we opened I saw this headline and couldn’t believe it. It turned out it was great marketing for us and we didn’t even have to pay.
We were so busy after that for a good while. “We did get prote.