What do you get when you combine hard work, tremendous interpersonal skills and remarkable, recurring happenstance? You get the incredible career arc of Susan Montani, the National Sales Director, Mass Market for California Exotic Novelties – a company probably better known by its abridged brand name, CalExotics.

At CalExotics, Montani works for another Susan, company founder Susan Colvin, a storied innovator and trailblazer in her own right. Long before meeting and coming to work for Colvin though, Montani’s path had already taken a series of unlikely, unexpected turns of the sort which have shaped her entire career.

In a sense, Montani’s career in the adult industry has roots which extend back to her college days in North Carolina – even though at the time, she had no real awareness of the industry, let alone interest in working within it.

“During that time period, in schools in the south, especially with art, there was a lot of censorship,” Montani told YNOT. “There were some pictures of famous art that the college professors had been threatened about and were afraid to show. I was so floored by it – especially being a northerner – it was just a more prevalent topic in the south.”

As chance would have it, Montani’s brush with the forces of censorship would introduce her to a company she would later work for in her first adult industry job.

“At the same time, Adam & Eve was big into anti-censorship, so I became aware of Phil Harvey and Adam & Eve when I was a teenager, because he was on the forefront of anti-censorship and a huge First Amendment supporter,” Montani said. “It was really during that time period I began to understand the First Amendment in a completely different way. And it wasn’t just about ‘porn or no porn?’ it was ‘I’m not going to be able to look at famous statues in Italy in an art history class.’”

Working for Adam & Eve was something which lay years ahead in Montani’s future – and at the time, she had zero inkling this was the direction her career would take.

“I became very aware of the First Amendment and Adam & Eve during my time in college, but having a job or career doing something in the industry was never even on my radar,” she said. “So how it all came back around in a circle is just a complete fluke.”

Montani’s first big gig was a job working for Ralph Lauren – a job that included occasionally sitting in meetings with Lauren himself.

“It was like being in an alternate universe,” Montani said of that time. “My life had been so much simpler in North Carolina, and then to be thrown back into the north and New York City weaving my way around Manhattan and the new launch of all these different product lines. I was in rooms with Ralph, while he wore his Levi’s and ate M&Ms, which was pretty awesome and kind of awe-inspiring.”

The “fluke” mentioned above which later led Montani to work for Adam & Eve was neither the first nor the last of her career. In fact, one could accurately say one of her early big breaks literally came from sitting on a park bench.

As fate would have it, the person who sat down next to Montani on the park bench on that day – a man she describes as “disheveled and rugged” – happened to be Burt Shavitz, better known as the “Burt” in Burt’s Bees.

“He looked over and we started talking and I thought ‘Boy, he really looks familiar,’” Montani said, adding with a laugh that Burt was “also very well-spoken for being so down-and-out looking.”

Another chance encounter would later take Montani from Burt’s Bees to Adam & Eve.

“I ran into the president of Sinclair Institute (a sister company of Adam & Eve) who was at a Chamber of Commerce meeting in Raleigh and I was so intrigued,” Montani said. “I was attending with the founder of Burt’s Bees, and the Adam & Eve/Sinclair folks were asking if we might want to make a natural lubricant. So, I was part of the idea of formulating one – which at the time was fairly unique. I was blown away that here I was having this conversation with these people who were executives with PHE, because I had admired the gumption this company had when I was in college.”

Montani was immediately struck by the professionalism and authenticity of the people she met from Adam & Eve/Sinclair, as well as the strange coincidence to find herself in substantive conversation with representatives of a brand already etched into her mind from her college days.

“(They were) so professional, so interesting and so down to earth and I thought ‘Wow, isn’t this something?’ I’m here with these people who I had heard about only an arm’s length away,’” Montani said. “And then they ended up offering me a position (to take over and run Wholesale Operations).”

After working with Adam & Eve for 13 years, Montani moved along again to CalExotics, after meeting and being impressed with Susan Colvin. Montani immediately recognized Colvin as another person of great cachet, one who Montani describes as “really on the forefront” of bringing adult novelties and pleasure products into the mainstream consciousness.

“She’s the person who first launched toys in purple and pink and one of the first people who really did beautiful packaging,” Montani noted. “I decided, if I’m going to stay in this industry and make a change after 13 years (going to work for Susan) made a lot of sense to me. She has been such an instrumental factor in this business, in the same way Ralph was in clothing, in the way that Burt and Roxanne were in natural products, in the way that Phil Harvey has been in adult. I’ve been so lucky to work with such really unique thinkers.”

Along the way in working for iconic brands and innovative thinkers, Montani has established herself as someone who understands both the adult and mainstream spaces well enough to serve as a bridge between them. In her current role at CalExotics, much of Montani’s work can be described as maintaining current relationships and growing new ones.

“It juggles between customers I’ve worked with for many years, many print catalogs, and companies who are deciding about this category – they know there’s money to be made and they’re trying to figure out if they can do it,” Montani said. “How can they get approval? So, it’s a cross between managing all these companies who I’ve known and helped develop and grow their sexual health and wellness (product offerings). They now feel really comfortable with me, they’ve known me for a long time and realize I understand what stuff does well for them, but they also know I understand what’s pushing the line.”

Asked if the amount of pushback she gets from mainstream companies on the idea of distributing adult product has lessened over time, Montani said “it cycles.”

“It is an amazing, very surprising cycle,” she said, observing that things opened-up in the years following the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal, then tightened up again. She has watched the mainstream acceptance of adult product vacillate in the years since then, as well.

“It opened up again with 50 Shades of Grey – we all saw that – and then it tightened up again,” Montani observed. “It is a swinging pendulum – and I think that’s surprising to everyone who doesn’t work the mainstream.”

When she reflects on her career, one thing you do not hear from Montani is any sense of regret or second thoughts. She attributes much of her satisfaction in working in the adult industry to the nature of her peers within the industry, noting they share an authenticity and realness she first felt while working for Burt’s Bees.

“Working with Burt’s Bees, everything was about being natural and being real and that’s what strongly attracted me,” Montani said. “When you look at the people in the adult industry, there’s also a complete realness and honesty. There’s just a level you can connect on in conversations with people in our industry and it’s as if there’s a layer which has already been peeled away.”

If there’s another common thread to her career which accompanies the recurring role of happenstance in its progress, Montani said it’s the quality of the people with whom she’s had the pleasure of working – something which most definitely carries on to this day in her role at CalExotics.

“Here I worked with Burt and Roxanne and I worked with Phil Harvey – these are really notable people in the decisions they’ve made and what they do,” she said. “Phil is no question one of the most generous, moral, ethical people you’d ever meet. And I’d tell you the very same thing about Susan Colvin.”

Reflecting on her 20 years in adult, Montani summed it up in one efficient phrase: “This industry has been such an interesting ride.”