Kiwi sex toy company Girls Get Off’s battle to find insurer

Girls Get Off co-founders Jo Cummins and Viv Conway say they have struggled to find an insurer willing to cover their company. Photo / Jason Malouin

• Girls Get Off has been rejected by more than 20 insurers across New Zealand and Australia.
• The company has been looking for an insurer for a month.
• Last year, Girls Get Off was also denied a banking account with a major Kiwi bank.

The co-founder of Kiwi sex toy company Girls Get Off (GGO) says more than 20 insurance companies have refused to cover the company over the nature of its business.

It comes months after GGO was initially refused a bank account with BNZ for similar reasons.

Viv Conway told the Herald that GGO had been looking for a new insurer in New Zealand and Australia for the past month.

“[We’ve] had like 23 insurers in Australia come back saying that the nature of the business activities was outside their appetite,” Conway said.

“The New Zealand insurers had also said it was to do with, like, they weren’t super happy that we were shipping lots overseas.

“That seems strange to me that in a world with so much e-commerce they would be uncomfortable insuring businesses that have overseas exports.”

Conway said the company had been forced to look to Australia because of limited options in New Zealand.

Girls Get Off's Jo Cummins and Viv Conway have been hunting for a new insurer in New Zealand and Australia. Photo / Jason Malouin

“We’ve previously only had one insurer in New Zealand who was happy to insure us,” Conway said.

“Because we don’t have any other people who are keen, that doesn’t leave us with a lot of choice.”

GGO, which also has a branch in Australia, sells its products online.

“In this business we get a lot of knock-backs, we had, obviously, the banking incident last year… we’ve had FedEx refuse to ship our goods from Australia to New Zealand because they classified it as obscene materials,” Conway said.

“It’s still very apparent that there’s still a lot of stigma and that comes through in a lot of different ways… there is just a lot of hoops that we’ve got to jump through, there’s a lot of things we’ve got to be mindful of in this industry.”

‘Outside of policy’

GGO made headlines last December when it was refused a business account by BNZ because the nature of its operations was “outside of BNZ policy”.

BNZ’s chief executive Dan Huggins later admitted the decision was wrong.

“I have seen the articles recently on Girls Get Off and that particular customer: we didn’t get it right with that customer. We certainly don’t see ourselves as the moral police,” Huggins said at the time.

“We are talking with that customer to try and bring them over to the BNZ… we didn’t get it right and we need to fix it.”

According to BNZ, businesses that offered “adult services” were typically required to complete “additional checks”.

Cameron Smith is an Auckland-based journalist with the Herald business team. He joined the Herald in 2015 and has covered business and sports. He reports on topics such as retail, small business, the workplace and macroeconomics.