When viral tweets and news articles about the Olympic Village’s “anti-sex beds” began to spread shortly before the start of the Tokyo Games, Airweave CEO Motokuni Takaoka knew that it would do no good to put out a hasty denial.
Instead, the event’s official bedding supplier decided to let the athletes do the talking, leading to a series of viral videos that have made the company’s product an online sensation — even if it wasn’t for quite the reasons it had hoped for.
“We didn’t expect the cardboard beds to go viral like they did,” Takaoka told The Japan Times on Sunday at the company’s showroom in Tokyo’s Otemachi district. “It’s something that we hadn’t given a thought to, hadn’t anticipated at all.”