The 10-year-old sexual wellness brand Dame has made its first acquisition of fellow sex toy brand Emojibator.
WHO: Co-founders Joe Vela and Kristin Fretz launched Emojibator in 2016. The company partially started as a joke when Vela was inspired to make a vibrator that looked like an eggplant, a phallic euphemism within emoji language that was a viral success. The brand evolved to focus on fun fruit- and vegetable-designed sex products as well as accessibly priced lubricants and other sexual play products.
Founded in 2014 by Alexandra Fine (a sexologist with a master’s degree in clinical psychology from Columbia University) and Janet Lieberman-Lu (an MIT-educated mechanical engineer), Dame is one of the brands leading the sexual wellness revolution as a women-powered resource for game-changing products for pleasure and supportive content. Through in-depth research, smart design, community input, and plenty of empathy, the Dame team has designed a line of exceptional tools to enhance sexual wellness for vulva-havers and their partners everywhere. Dame is not only revolutionizing toys for sex but changing the way we experience, understand, and explore sexuality as part of holistic well-being. Since 2014, the team has opened doors that have long been closed to the sexuality industry, becoming a key player in the movement to bring pleasure to the forefront of wellness.
WHY: Institutional investors are still reluctant to invest in the sexual wellness category. The acquisition will create back-end operational efficiency and may not be the last for Dame.
IN THEIR OWN WORDS: “We have a lot of operational efficiencies,” Fine told Beauty Independent. “I think Dame feels sharper too now that we have Emojibator. So much of what Dame has always been trying to say is that pleasure is fundamental to healthy sex. We’ve always been very intentional with how we are fun because we don’t want to diminish the importance or seem like we’re trivializing sexual wellness through jokes and silliness.”
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