Sex Tech Companies Are Having More Fun Than the Rest of Us at CES
Sexual health and wellness companies were allowed to exhibit their wares for the first time this year….
It will be soft-launched throughout the year, she told me, without acknowledging the pun potential in the slightest.
DiCarlo has whole-heartedly embraced her role as the figurehead for women’s sexual liberation at a traditionally male-centric tech bonanza. By her own account, in just a few short years the former Navy midshipman went from holding administrative jobs, attending night school, and modeling on the side, to running her own business in Bend, Oregon. She’s not sure of exactly how many employees she has, which I asked about again later on; a public relations rep tells me they’re in the process of hiring. DiCarlo says the company has raised more than $5 million in grants and angel investments.
On Tuesday morning, after we climbed out of the glass truck and made our way to the Lora DiCarlo booth in the Sands, DiCarlo demoed the Ose for me. This was the device that caused all the drama last January. It finally went on sale in November 2019.
DiCarlo told me the company is rigorous in its approach to product design. It made the bendable part of the Osa’s phallic-shaped component extremely flexible, so that it might fit comfortably in as many unique anatomical spaces as possible. There are three buttons on the bottom of the product, which, when it’s inserted, won’t be visible to the user. These are tactile and varying in size, so that you’ll be able to identify the buttons even when you can’t see them. The products don’t work with an app yet; DiCarlo claimed the company’s engineers are still considering where to put Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chips in a product that goes inside the body.
This year at CES, the company is showing off a couple of new devices called Onda and the Baci. They are the two key parts of the Ose—the G-spot stimulator and the clitoral stimulator—rendered as individual products. They’ll go on sale this spring. For the second year in a row, Lora DiCarlo has won CES innovation awards—only this time, they haven’t been rescinded.
After that, we took a tour through a couple other sex tech booths. We examined a strapless strap-on from a Southern California company called Ergo-Fit. It was one of the more anatomically accurate products we’d seen so far, and a company representative named Mona took us through its features. “Do you offer other colors, aside from white skin colors and pink?” DiCarlo asked pointedly. “Yes, there’s also black,” Mona replied. DiCarlo nodded approvingly.
We came upon a trailer, wrapped in bronze, shoved in the back corner of the Sands showroom. “Build-a-Vibe Workshop,” the door of the trailer read. A woman in an egg-white, utilitarian jumpsuit shrieked when she saw DiCarlo. She threw her arms around her. “Girl, this is the reason why we’re here!” the woman said. This was Ti Chang, cofounder and vice president of design for Crave. She asked for a photo with DiCarlo.
“We struggled when we tried to come here in 2016,” Chang told me. “I feel like they kind of hid us,” she continued, gesturing to the corner position of her booth. “But it’s OK. We’re here. I think they’re taking baby steps.”
“Yes, we have demonized female sexuality for millennia,” DiCarlo added. “They are taking baby steps. It’s understandable, because the last thing you want is to open the floodgates to entities that aren’t respectful to human sexuality…but sexual health is health and wellness.” It was a line she would repeat throughout CES.
Chang’s product is a stainless steel, pendant-like sex device, manufactured and assembled in downtown San Francisco. The “Build-a-Vibe” workshop she was hosting at CES didn’t really involve building a vibrator from scratch, but rather, obtaining a Crave vibrator, plugging in a Crave-provided USB stick preloaded with a web app, and programming the device to deliver your preferred vibration pattern.
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