New chamber of commerce for Xecutives

LAS VEGAS — It is an alternative chamber of commerce, one for a group of merchants who say they've been ostracized, denigrated and disrespected by the larger business community.

The annual barbecue is held at the Chicken Ranch, a brothel in Pahrump, Nev.

Other mixers include outings to strip clubs. Brunch speakers are expected to "motivate, inform and educate without being dry, dull or boring," as chamber literature puts it.

"We actually have a voice now," said Peppy Huffman, marketing director for Paradise Electric Stimulations, a Las Vegas-based manufacturer of erotic-aid products. "The way I see it, somebody's sticking up for the little guy here."

Bill Krane, who operates both a holistic-wellness center and the adjoining Night Moves, where people come to see racy lingerie modeled, said he "would have joined the regular chamber if I had been made to feel welcome, but quite frankly I wasn't."

So Krane, Huffman and 260 other merchants joined the Sin City Chamber of Commerce, a sort of renegade chamber run from a cramped room in a nondescript office complex it shares with mortgage brokers and a branch of the Dairy Council of Utah/Nevada.

The year-old chamber is run by two former employees of the much larger and mainstream Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce, which calls itself the "Voice of Business."

The idea sprang up last year when one of the former employees, Loretta Holt, was surprised to hear that a local company was being struck from the Las Vegas Chamber's roster. The enterprise, she was told, operated a site offering sexually explicit photographs for downloading.

"I remember thinking, 'Now wait just a minute,' " said Holt, a membership-retention specialist for the chamber at the time. "Adult entertainment is the lifeblood of our community. It's a multibillion-dollar business here."

Holt now serves as president of the alternative chamber.

The Sin City chamber represents strip clubs, "adult-toy" manufacturers, pornography publishers, escort services and telephone-sex merchants — and some members who don't have anything to do with adult industries but who joined for the networking and referral opportunities.

"Strip clubs need copying machines, for example," said Sin City's chief executive, Wayne Bridge. "Dancing girls buy cars. Everybody needs their taxes done. There's a lot of business to be done with our people."

Sin City operates largely on the Internet, with links to its member businesses. The idea is finding support in some other cities, including Los Angeles and San Francisco, where similar Web sites have been started.

Renee Rand of Party Gals, a North Las Vegas-based adult-party planner, said referrals from the Sin City Chamber Web site account for 5 percent to 10 percent of her in-home business annually.

Rand described her parties as "a bit like a Tupperware party, although we sell different kinds of rubber, as well as things that go buzz in the night."

It is impossible to find a commonly accepted figure for the economic impact of the adult industry in Las Vegas, mainly because there is no agreement on just how to define the sector.

The mainstream Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce, which dwarfs in size and budget the Sin City spinoff, says it has never discriminated against or denied membership to any "legitimate business" in good legal standing. But officials did not sound eager to incorporate the newer chamber.

"Sin City Chamber of Commerce has really tapped into a niche market, for an industry that feels it's been misrepresented," said Cara Roberts, a spokeswoman for the larger mainstream chamber. "So I'm not sure that we're an organization that a lot of these types of companies are looking to join."

There is some evidence of strain between the two organizations.

The more established chamber reserved rights to the "sincitychamber.com" domain name on the Internet last year, a move that the spinoff chamber countered by simply adding "of commerce" and setting up shop.

Holt and Bridge estimated that less than 5 percent of the adult-entertainment businesses in Las Vegas are members of the renegade chapter. But they said membership has climbed steadily and that they are on the verge of offering benefits such as group rates for health insurance or group discounts on credit-card processing fees.

It also has reached out to the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community by hiring a director of sales to coordinate business relationships in that sector.