I had never been among so many condoms.
Red condoms, blue condoms, flavored condoms, lubed condoms. Christmas-colored condoms, condoms for Halloween, extra-sensitive condoms and those with numbing benzocaine. Extra-thin condoms, condoms in a tin and grab-bag condoms for indecisive women or men.
Boxes and boxes and boxes of condoms — literally millions of individually wrapped jimmy hats, love socks, French letters — stacked 8 feet high on pallets and shelves.
"We have 125 brands," says John Fidi proudly. "We're like Baskin Robbins over here."
Not far from the strip clubs and swinger hangouts off N. Dale Mabry, Condom Depot is tucked inside a Tampa industrial park off Anderson Street. From the outside, the online retailer's headquarters is a decidedly unsexy warehouse, but once inside, I'm greeted by risqué posters, boxes of porn videos and a technicolor assortment of condoms poking out of cardboard boxes. One of the company's 10 employees leads me to owner John Fidi's office, which is bare except for a large cherrywood desk and a cupboard filled with collector beer steins.
Fidi, a husky 34-year-old with a bald head and blond goatee, is hunched over his desk with a phone to his ear. I wait a few minutes before he hangs up.
"People need their rubbers, you know," he says, apologizing. He gives a relaxed smile, like a man who uses his product several times a day. He jokes easily, and his unmistakably Yankee voice bellows as he explains his foray into the condom business 13 years ago.
Fidi and his wife, Kim, started Condomdepot.com out of their basement in the small Connecticut town of Plainville after selling off their first business venture, a candle company.
"I wanted to sell a product, but I didn't know what I wanted to sell," he recalls. "I wanted something people used up quickly and needed more of."
Within a few years, the Fidis went from five orders a day to 500. Tractor-trailers would drop off shipments of condoms on their front porch.
"You try explaining that to your neighbors," Fidi quips.
As the business expanded, the couple sought financing from their local community bank but was turned down.
"The bank came back and literally said, 'We can't do [the financing], because you sell condoms,'" he says. "I basically got fed up and decided we'd move to Tampa."
That was February 2005. Today, Condom Depot moves more than 13 million condoms a year. They're one of the leading online condom distributors in the country and host the most visited condom website, according to the Alexa Web Information Service.
"We're not a middle-man," he says. "We're an actual direct source. Direct from Durex, Trojan, Crown, etc."
Condom Depot's main customers are nonprofit agencies, clinic operators such as Planned Parenthood and "just the average guy or gal who doesn't want to buy rubbers at the store."
Learning the ins-and-outs of the love glove is an evolving process, Fidi explains as he leads me through the warehouse. He's discovered a large portion of his business comes from unfaithful spouses (his No. 1 telephone call is from spouses trying to ascertain their loved ones' fidelity/infidelity by finding out the date of their condom purchases). He's learned to keep extra product on hand for the two busiest seasons, Christmas and back-to-school. He's also had to keep up on the sheer number of brands available.
"It's not the old rubbers papa used to wear," Fidi says. "A lot of them are brands people have never heard of."
In fact, his No. 1 seller is not Trojan, Durex or Lifestyles but Crown's Skinless Skin.
But not everything in the condom business is silky smooth.
In 2004, Condom Depot become one of the first online retailers to pull their entire supply of condoms with the spermicide nonoxynol-9 after several studies, including a 1999 Centers for Disease Control study, found the spermicide ineffective and responsible for inflammation and lesions in some women.
Fidi says the decision was designed to pressure condom companies to stop manufacturing the spermicidal versions.
"We lost a ton of business doing it," he says. "But my wife didn't want to sell it. It's not a woman-friendly product."
Fidi found out there's a lot of friction in the world of rubbers: Christian fundamentalists, liquidators selling expired product and even counterfeiting.
Just like fake Versace handbags or unauthorized reproductions of Transformers, some illegal companies manufacture condoms to look like popular brands.
"To the untrained eye, you wouldn't have a clue," Fidi says, but the counterfeit condoms are unmistakingly inferior.
"I encourage everybody to be really careful about that," he says, cautioning against buying from convenience stores or private sellers on Amazon or eBay. "It's shocking how much is floating around."
Fidi strolls about his warehouse, showing off myriad condoms, lubes and dental dams. He lingers by a box of Vibrating Johnnys — a stimulating silicone ring created by Condom Depot and named after him — and recalls one of his favorite phone calls from a mother who discovered a purchase from condomdepot.com on her credit card.
"She called and told me, 'Oh, no, my daughter doesn't have sex. She's 17."
Fidi lets out a deep guffaw and returns to his office. After all, it's National Condom Week, and he's got a lot of rubbers to sell.
So why are so many local retailers keeping their latex in lockup?
This article appears in Feb 13-19, 2008.