Dame founder Alexandra Fine’s 10-year journey to launching sex toys in Walmart

Sexual wellness brand Dame is among a growing number of retailers bringing a distinctly female touch to the sex toy industry, which has traditionally been dominated by men, both in terms of business leadership and customer base. 

Like Dame, Maude and Unbound Babes have found success by flipping the focus to women. 

Founded a decade ago, Dame is on a mission to make sexual wellness products accessible on every level possible. That includes everything from creating reasonably priced stock-keeping units (SKUs) to fighting to ensure that sexual wellness products geared towards women can be advertised in similar ways to those marketed to men. 

The brand’s recent foray into big-box retail giant Walmart represents a major milestone in that journey.

Designing Dame

Before launching Dame, founder and CEO Alexandra Fine had a very different plan for how she wanted to tackle taboos surrounding sexual wellness.

Fine had attained a Master’s degree in clinical psychology from Columbia University and was on her way to becoming a sex therapist when she began to delve deeper into the hypocrisy of how sexual wellness products were considered taboo for female consumers, a group that is often oversexualised but rarely satisfied. 

“The narrative around these products was not aligned with the way that people with vulvas are using them,” Fine observed. 

Fine quickly realised how few female-founded brands there were in the sexual wellness market, especially at the time in the early 2010s.  

Fine enlisted the help of an MIT-trained engineer, Janet Lieberman, to help her craft some female-friendly designs. After the brand’s concept and several product designs were drafted up, Fine and Lieberman took the idea to crowdfunding platform Indiegogo and raised US$575,000 in 45 days. 

Two years later, Dame raised another round of crowdfunding on Kickstarter, which had relaxed its policies around sexual wellness brands. 

The brand later went on to launch on Goop.com and to become one of the first sexual wellness brands to launch with retailers including Sephora, Revolve, Bloomingdale’s and Target.

Looking back, Dame’s growth journey sounds fairly straightforward, but in reality, the path was much more challenging.

Fighting for representation 

One of the major issues Dame faced, and one that women-centric sexual wellness brands still experience today, was the lack of marketing opportunities available. 

Digital platforms such as Facebook still place tight restrictions on the types of products that are allowed to be advertised. In metropolitan cities, like New York City, there are also limitations on billboards and other outdoor advertising.

In 2019, Dame filed a complaint against the New York Metropolitan Transporation Authority (MTA), alleging that the organisation’s rejection of Dame’s advertisements for sex toys was unconstitutional. The rejection seemed especially unfair because the MTA had previously approved ads for dating services with suggestive images, including ads for the Museum of Sex and sexual health products for men, such as those related to erectile dysfunction.

Several years later, Dame and the MTA reached an amicable resolution of the lawsuit, with the sexual wellness brand launching an agreed-upon paid advertising campaign on MTA subway cars in November 2021. 

In addition to fighting for visual representation of sexual wellness products for women, Fine has also focused on ensuring Dame’s products are as physically accessible as possible.

“It just makes sense to me to be able to find [sexual wellness products] in the same place you would find tampons and toothbrushes, it just feels right,” she said. 

Reflecting on Dame entering big-box retail chains such as Bloomingdale’s and Target, Fine said she is “really proud to be a part of the change”.

Dame’s foray into big-box retail

In September, Dame added a new big-box player to its list of retail partners and entered nearly 1000 Walmart locations nationwide, including major markets like Los Angeles, Chicago and the tri-state area. 

To mark the brand’s launch into Walmart, Dame released Zig, a compact vibrator featuring medical-grade silicon and a water-proof USB-C charger that retails for US$19. 

In addition to expanding its product offering with items such as Zig or Eva, a hands-free device designed for partnered activity, Fine said there are plans to explore brick-and-mortar expansion in the next 10 years of the business.

The post Dame founder Alexandra Fine’s 10-year journey to launching sex toys in Walmart appeared first on Inside Retail Australia.