CAMBRIDGE — Hubba Hubba owner M.J. Pullins never really liked the term “sex store.”
Yes, it was a hub for New England dominatrices stocking their dungeons. Yes, generations of exotic dancers have come here to try on see-through heels. Yes, couples looking to spice things up have found products to do just that, in dizzying variety, on its shelves and in its shimmering display cases.
But the shop specializing in sex, and sexy, has done so much more for the customers who came from all over, Pullins said. It was the kind of place people could walk in the door and find solutions to problems the straight-laced world couldn’t solve, or answer questions they’d be judged elsewhere for even asking.
When it closes next week amid financial troubles, that space is gone for good.
“People put on to us what they want without realizing what we are. It’s not this dirty, sleazy thing,” she said, wearing a hot-pink leather jacket and vintage silver necklace. “It’s actually really, and I’m not going to say wholesome, but it’s kind of wholesome."
Pullins led the shop during just a portion of its history.
The 53-year-old Wellesley alum originally from upstate New York had been a longtime customer and a friend of its manager. After its prior owner Susan “Suzie” Phelps died in 2017, Pullins left behind a career in the biomedical field and bought the store in 2019. By then it was in its fourth Cambridge location, a basement space on a side street midway between Central and Harvard squares.
From the start when it opened in the late ’70s, it was a destination for countercultural fashion as the punk and mod movements were budding here. It was, by Pullins’s telling, the first store in the Boston area to carry Doc Martens, the chunky black shoes that are now a fashion staple.
There have been other adult-oriented stores here before. Up the road in Harvard Square is Good Vibrations, a sex toy-focused store that opened around the same time.
But to its loyalists, Hubba Hubba was one-of-one. The selection inside morphed over time to fit the sensibilities of its eras, providing the looks for fans of industrial music and EDM, and everyone else hoping to show some extra flair, or some extra skin, in a nightclub.
When ManRay, the Cambridge goth and alternative venue, opened in 1983, Hubba was the place to go for the latex, PVC pants, and BDSM gear people were known to wear inside.
“We all loved that shop and loved her. She dressed people for the scene back then. She was the scene,” said Chris Ewen, resident DJ at both the old, and newly reopened, ManRay, and a longtime friend of the late Phelps. “It helped a lot of people over the years find themselves and look great while they were doing it.”
In time, kink communities, and the kink-curious, came knocking, and Hubba Hubba’s menu of sexual health products grew from there.
So did the backgrounds of the clientele. The lives of many ordinary folks were changed here, Pullins said. That was certainly true in the basement-level shop Pullins oversaw, where they could browse the aisles out of sight.
There were the many women who had pain during sex and were desperate for solutions, she said. Or the couples who were saving themselves for marriage and didn’t know where to start.
For the more adventurous, there was what she said was an unrivaled offering of BDSM tools and the knowledge of how to use them safely and to maximum effect. One wall of the store is devoted to anatomical diagrams, which she uses to help explain how the more obscure tools work.
“This is what they didn’t teach you in sex-ed. They didn’t teach you anything. And it’s most likely incorrect,” she said. “There is a whole generation that only got abstinence-only sex-ed. They have no idea how their bodies work.”
Coming to Hubba Hubba had also been a rite of passage for exotic dancers, who came not just to buy skimpy outfits and heels but for advice and spiritual guidance.
“We all work together to help them put together their personas, pick out their names,” she said. “We’re therapists. We’re marriage counselors. That’s what you can’t get online. That’s what we’re losing.”
There has always been a home here, too, for the LGBT community. Among her best memories was helping fit a transgender woman in her first bra, in a judgment-free setting.
“I thought I was gonna cry, it was such a beautiful moment,” Pullins said.
Other customers are straight men who want to try on women’s undergarments — there are more of them doing this than you know, she said — and feel this was the only place no one would look sideways at them for doing it.
“They think they’re odd or that there’s something wrong with them. And it’s like, dude, that’s so normal,” she said. “There’s this huge sigh of relief.”
There is a sign on a wall with a quote Pullins loves: “All clothing is unisex if you stop being a little bitch about it.”
Last year, pop star and Harvard grad Maggie Rogers paid a visit, in urgent need of a wardrobe upgrade.
“She was like, ‘I’m going on stage with Madonna, but I have nothing to wear! All I have are, like, turtlenecks,’” Pullins said. “So we dressed Maggie Rogers.”
On stage at TD Garden that night, she wore a Hubba-approved metal-studded boustier and leather collar.
“I’m so grateful to the amazing staff who came to my rescue when I needed a stage outfit with only hours’ notice,” Rogers said this week. “RIP to an icon.”
For some customers with certain tastes, Pullins isn’t sure where else they can turn.
“If anyone can find and carry ass-less chaps that aren’t $800, there is a huge demand,” she said. “Everybody’s looking for them.”
Hubba Hubba was many things to many people. It was also a business, and business had been trending the wrong way for years. Competition from online retailers wreaked havoc. Rents kept rising. Nearby parking diminished. Tariffs hit her suppliers hard. The cost of fixing issues in her building, including some water damage, would have been too much, she said.
In October, she announced the store would close. Its last day is set for November 24.
Her advice to the would-have-been customers she’ll never get to meet?
“Continue to break the rules,” she said. “I hear so many people in the store who say, ‘I can’t wear that.’ Or, ‘That’s not how that should go.’ And it breaks my heart every day. There are no rules.”
Spencer Buell can be reached at spencer.buell@globe.com. Follow him @SpencerBuell.