Camouflage, out of hiding
‘We’re a classy joint’: Erotica store reopens in time for Valentine’s Day.
By David L. Beck Mercury News. February, 11 2001.

After a Halloween trick closed downtown Santa Cruz’s most distinctive shops for three months, Camouflage is back- just in time for all your, um, Valentine’s Days needs.
Camouflage sells erotica, clothing, sex toys, games, massage stuff and gag gifts such as “dirty dice” and really tiny condoms.
“I think it serves people,” said owner Joan Levine. “Trying to end the war between the sexes is party of our mission,” and if it take bright plastic vibrators in astrological shapes to bring peace, so be it.
Camouflage and its next-door neighbor Bead It were closed for the night on Oct. 31 when something – civic infrastructure, perhaps- played a trick on them. A 6-inch, high-pressure water line burst beneath the sidewalk. What followed was what property owner David Wilson calls “two or three hours of hydro-mining.”
The water went under the building at 1325-1329 Pacific Ave. and, blocked and churning, came back out through the sidewalk. Both stores were flooded, while underground the water blasted out a cavern 40 feet long, 12 feet wide and 3 or 4 feet deep. It deposited about half the mud and silt it had churned up inside the building and the rest went in the gutters, where the city later vacuumed it up.
The building, one story tall but built in the early 1970s to hold a second story sometime, according to Wilson, straddled the whole but didn’t fall in. It was red-tagged while some 39 cubic yards of concrete were poured into the cavern and secured onto the slab. Bead It, a string-it-yourself costume jewelry store, found a temporary home two blocks north and reopened in time for the Christmas season. (It moves back to 1325 pacific next month.) After “the best Halloween we’ve ever had” in terms of sales volume, Levine stayed put, waiting for repairs.
The store goes back 21 years, beginning in the old Cooper House. Levine was a young New Yorker who was living in the Santa Cruz Mountains “raising goats and chickens and things” with a guy who made T-shirts. He suggested a retail operation, and Camouflage was born.
“Originally,” Wilson said, “they weren’t quite as, mmmmm, graphic? Quite so erotic? What has happened over the years – because they’ve been there over 10 years – they’ve just kind of gone with what the public accepts.”
Levine remembers how it all began.
“My accountant gave me a pair of edible underwear for my birthday,” she said. “A gag gift,” but one that launched Camouflage in a whole new direction. Today, what she calls “pleasure products,” including books, account for half her sales, and lingerie the other half. “Most of our customers are young women, say, between the ages of 18 and 25. But many, many, many are males over 60.”
“Everyone enjoys pleasure… We just think the better people feel with each other – the more fun and pleasure they’re having, the more love they’re having.”
In the shop’s window is an allegedly aphrodisiac cookbook called “Inter Courses,” alongside a slinky red slip. “For Valentines Day, there are all the little foofy stuff- I don’t know what you call it- the baby-dolls, corsets” and other lacy, frilly things, saleswoman Rachael Seeger said, while for men there are roves, loungewear and “the heart-print thong- what everyman needs.”
There are games such as “Pin the Macho on the Man” and body adornments such as liquid latex. (You loved it on Mystique in “X-men.”) There’s a lavender-scented body wrap that you heat in the microwave before applying.
Less overtly erotic but certainly pleasurable is Nukkles (pronounced knuckles). You slip them over your hands and work on your partner’s back, or wherever. “These with a little massage oil is a great gift,” Seeger said.
She points to a new line of wigs, less over-the-top and more early Hollywood than the ones Camouflage carries at Halloween. “Glamorous,” she said.
“I like that we’re a classy joint. We can get away with being a sex shop on the main drag because we’re stylish.”