[Inside Look] The API Adult Expo: Shanghai's 'Sexpo' Has a Glow-Up

The Floor Has Changed

This year's Adult Products International (API) Expo sold out well ahead of its April 17-19 run, and the floor showed it. Over 60,000 visitors from 100 countries and regions passed through the Shanghai Convention & Exhibition Center of International Sourcing, where more than 400 exhibitors filled 26,700 square meters of booth space.

China is the world's largest producer of sex toys, and the API Expo functions like the industry's annual show-and-tell. What's on the floor reflects not just what manufacturers are making, but where consumer tastes and confidence are heading. This year, that direction is emphatically upmarket, increasingly tech-forward, and notably more female.

What was once a slightly furtive, overwhelmingly male-dominated trade event has repositioned itself, booth by booth, into something closer to a lifestyle industry showcase. Women are now a visible and vocal presence at this expo, having been conspicuously rare at similar shows a decade ago. Now, shirtless male models work booths alongside their female counterparts.

Nick Pan, the API International Marketing Manager, put it plainly: "Tickets sell faster every year, which shows that pleasure products are becoming more accepted among everyday Shanghai residents. Plus, a big proportion of visitors are Gen Z – a lot of the traders and shop owners are post-2000s, too."

Hello Kitty's Hornier Cousin

The products on the floor seem to reflect this shift, with many products and brands leaning into a kawaii-cute aesthetic. Pastel-colored vibrators shaped like cartoon unicorns, seahorses, sheep, and mushrooms look like distant cousins of Hello Kitty and Labubu. Dildos come in forms ranging from the whimsical – dragons, octopi, a full produce aisle's worth of vegetables, including corn, cucumber, and eggplant – to the more, shall we say, anatomically committed.

BDSM gear covers similar ground: shibari ropes, whips, chains, harnesses, bondage-ready teddy bears, dominatrix staples in leather and lace. Somewhere in the middle distance, a Swarovski crystal-encrusted vibrator catches the light.

Sexual Health Gets High-Tech

The other major theme: high-tech toys. Many exhibitors featured app-connected devices that use machine learning to sync with adult video content in real time, taking what's on screen and converting it into corresponding physical sensations – a stronger squeeze here, a quickened rhythm there. Apparently, this feature is now fast becoming a category standard.

Teledildonics – the somewhat unwieldy term for internet- and Bluetooth-enabled devices that let users control sensations from a distance – had a substantial presence, with brands pitching to long-distance couples and the more experimentally inclined.

Keeping with the futuristic theme, Cydoll featured hyper-realistic, life-size silicone dolls with articulated metal joints, while booth after booth offered erotic chatbots and voice-activated devices. Rows of what appeared to be sleek, Muji-esque thermos flasks turned out, on closer inspection, to be high-tech vacuum stimulators for men.

Not everything had been through a rebrand. A less ambiguous version of similar stimulators appeared a few booths down: Silicone molds cast from the faces of Japanese adult film stars, mouths agape. Nearby, another booth advertised their "automatic vagina-thrusting sex butt" featuring "pioneer vagina-thrusting technology" and "superskin 2.0."

Up on the third floor, a lone booth displayed the blow-up dolls of generations past, drawing giggles from passersby – a curio, the adult industry's equivalent of encountering a VHS tape at a consumer electronics show. Even the silicone raw material suppliers had staked out space up here, running live molding demonstrations while small crowds watched material being pressed into forms in real time.

Gloves Required

Marinella Rossi, Sales Manager for Zalo in the European and US markets, said: "The Chinese market appears to be adapting and embracing new trends even faster than Western markets. Consumer expectations are rising." She observed that visitors were arriving more informed and selective than in previous years – scrutinizing materials for skin safety, comparing functionality, and gravitating toward products that combine digital innovation with aesthetic appeal more commonly associated with beauty packaging.

That trajectory is visible beyond the expo's visual vocabulary. Across the exhibition, language has taken on the cadence of wellness and lifestyle brands. Among the performance-enhancing products like delay sprays, supplements, and pills was a Japanese lubricant brand whose promotional materials promise "a miracle of viscosity, born from absolute purity" and bill it as "the pinnacle of lubricity."

That shift is also reflected in how the event is positioned at an institutional level. The expo's partnership with public health-linked organizations such as the China Reproductive Health Industry Association and the Shanghai Family Planning Services Association hints at a more deliberate framing. Beyond product showcases, the event is being positioned – at least in part – as a platform for sexual health awareness, reflecting a broader move toward more open conversations around intimacy and bodily autonomy in China.

I thought back to an adult expo I attended in this same city more than a decade ago. By the final day, the once flesh-toned silicone surfaces of the most popular products had been handled by so many different hands that they'd turned a grayish, crusty hue. Not a pleasant memory.

Things have changed: booths for full-body companions – the kind where the toes come complete with French manicures – now require visitors to put on gloves before touching. A pink lube fountain burbles somewhere nearby. A traditional Chinese medicine brand passes out delay spray samples made from natural ingredients, a pitch that somehow feels both ancient and very of the moment.

The show, like the industry it represents, has come a long way.

Some more pics to see what you missed:

Credit: Brandon McGhee

Testing the product quality...

We weren't exagerrating about the octopus theme...