Dame Products’ New Fin Pleasure Object
We speak with co-founder Alexandra Fine about women designing for women
Co-founded by Alexandra Fine and Janet Lieberman, Dame Products‘ mantra is to “make the world a happier place, one vagina at a time.” Fine and Lieberman met two years ago, after they both (separately) founded their own sex toy companies based in Brooklyn. They hit it off immediately and soon after co-founded Dame. Fine tells us, “I have always been interested in the psychology surrounding sex and trying to make the subject more relatable for a wider audience, while Janet [a mechanical engineer] was plagued by the fact that the sex toys she was using were not held to the same standards as the products she was making at her day job.” Seeing an obvious void, the pair started working on their first product and in October of the same year, Eva (a hands-free, non-intrusive vibrator) was launched and became the world’s number one crowd-funded pleasure object. Fine says that was evidence “there was a significant audience out there interested in what we were doing.”
The most recent way Dame is planning to make the world happier is with their second product: Fin. Launching on Kickstarter today, Fin is unlike other vibrators—it’s worn between the fingers, making it easier to use and control. Featuring a removable tether, it can be worn at the fingertips, the palm or even on the back-side of the fingers. Fines says, the tether was one of the most satisfying problems they overcame during the design and testing process, “We were finding that some people loved the tether while others wished it weren’t there at all. So we got to work trying to make sure all the components could fit in the bulb in order to make the tether removable if the user wanted to remove it. We were really pleased to discover that we could get all the components into a small enough shape, so the tether could be removable.”
Made from medical-grade silicon, Fin features a three-speed motor and has been designed for solo use or between partners. With Fin (and all their products), Dame’s mission is to “close the Pleasure Gap” which exists more often in heterosexual sex. Fine says, “We are a female-founded company in a largely male-dominated industry, which allows us to make products for women, by women—a rarity in this space. We’re makers at our core—listening to consumer feedback and working to invent products that address real consumer needs. Rather than assuming we know what people want, we listen to what they tell us they do.” Ultimately, it’s about making toys that increase pleasure and satisfaction, and in doing so decrease awkwardness and stigmas. “We think what we do is NBD. We definitely think sex is important and sensational, but we think that being able to talk about sex like we talk about any other subject is important and helps inspire real conversations,” Fine concludes.
Dame Products’ Fin is crowd-funding on Kickstarter now.
Images courtesy of Dame Products
