On Thursday, August 27, 2026, the Adult Novelty Manufacturers Expo — known industry-wide as the ANME Founders Show — announced via its official Instagram account that its 30-year run has ended. The announcement, reported the same day by JRL Charts and AVN, closes the book on what was for three decades the pleasure products industry's longest-running and most influential business-to-business trade event, the room where American manufacturers met distributors, retailers and buyers face to face.

Why It Matters

Trade shows are the industry's price-discovery and distribution layer. For a category that Meta, Google and TikTok will not let advertise, and that Amazon gates aggressively, the show floor has historically been where a small manufacturer got in front of a buyer without paying a platform toll. ANME's exit removes the oldest of those rooms. It also caps a strange year for the sextech trade calendar. Nashville's STIMULATE+ launched its first awards in August 2026 and is positioning as a Southeastern B2B hub; Sex Expo announced a January 2027 return to L.A. LIVE aimed at consumers; SZI Expo just postponed to March 2027; and brands like Our Erotic Journey are increasingly skipping adult-specific shows entirely to exhibit at general-merchandise events like ASD Market Week. Read together, the pattern suggests the category's B2B center of gravity is shifting — away from a single legacy manufacturers' show in Los Angeles and toward a fragmented mix of regional trade events, mainstream retail shows and direct wholesale channels. Whether that is healthy diversification or just dispersal is the question buyers will be asking in Amsterdam and Nashville this fall.

The timing is what makes it land hard. ANME had only just celebrated its 30th anniversary, holding the 2026 Founders Show in July at the Los Angeles Marriott Burbank and promoting it as a celebration of three decades of innovation and wholesale relationship-building. Weeks later, the farewell.

ANME was founded in 1996 as a dedicated marketplace where manufacturers could present new product directly to retail and distribution buyers. Its founding roster reads like a who's-who of the American pleasure products business: Susan Colvin of CalExotics, Elliot Schwartz of Nasstoys, and Ron and Chad Braverman of Doc Johnson, with Pipedream Products and Topco joining the Founders group over the following decades. Federal trademark records for "Adult Novelty Manufacturers Expo" list first use in commerce as July 12, 1996. Per ANME's own anniversary materials, the show tallied 40,000+ attendees, 6,000+ vendor booths, exhibitors and buyers from more than 25 countries, and over $300 million in business transacted across its history.

The farewell statement leaned on relationships rather than commerce: "ANME became a place where an industry came together—not simply to buy and sell products, but to build relationships, exchange ideas, celebrate successes, and create friendships that extended far beyond the show floor." It went on to thank customers who "traveled year after year," the vendors who "trusted ANME as a place to showcase your companies, launch your products, and grow your businesses," and "the industry at large: thank you for allowing ANME to be part of your story." Neither report attributes the decision to a specific cause, and no successor event was named.

Sources

Update — 2026-08-29

Initial entry — story first created.