How A Big O Turned Into A Big Co: #WCW Lora Haddock DiCarlo, CEO and Founder of Lora DiCarlo
By: Emily Fields Joffrion
Tags: Feminism, Sexual Health, Consumer Electronics, Sextech, CES

Lora Haddock DiCarlo with her award-winning products, Onda, Osé, and Baci

In 2019, women’s health startup Lora DiCarlo was banned from CES, and their award for Innovation revoked. Why? Their product was focused on the female orgasm and therefore deemed obscene. The message was clear to CEO Lora Haddock DiCarlo and many women and allies in the hardware industry.

“We validate tech for men but we call tech for women obscene — whether it has to do with sexuality or not. You look at the way we view period panties, at breast pumps, at kegel exercisers or any other tech for women, it takes a long time for it to come to market because we stigmatize it. Because women don’t deserve technology? I don’t know!” — Lora Haddock DiCarlo

A year later, Haddock DiCarlo was the darling of Las Vegas, re-writing CTA’s policies to make it more inclusive, advocating for SexTech to included in the show and integrated into the show floor, and winning numerous awards with her robotics technology. We caught up with Haddock DiCarlo after her tour in Vegas and Los Angeles to talk more about her journey taking on taboos and making space for a conversation around women’s bodies and pleasure.

A lot of founders build companies that solve a problem that they directly experience. Was that true for you and Lora DiCarlo?

Most definitely. My company started with an orgasm. I had a blended orgasm when I was 28. Many people don’t know this, but the closest thing you can experience to it is a seizure, so I basically seized off the side of the bed and laid there drooling, thinking, “That was cool. How do I do that again by myself?”

I was looking for a product that would do it with something that would move like human partners do, something that could fit me and fit multiple people, and something hands-free that let me focus inwardly. Feminine orgasms are 80% mental, so it takes concentration and focus to do that, so I wanted to get rid of those distractions.

How did you start developing your idea for the product?

I dove into anatomy and physiology so I could understand how to make the product fit women’s bodies. I was pre-med at the time, and I couldn’t find it in any medical journal, which seemed so strange. I later realized that when going through med school, doctors get less time in sexual education than they do bedside manner — and you know how bad we are at that.

So, research started with me asking 200 people face-to-face to measure where their clitoris was and where their g-spot was. And I learned three things. First, people start feeling shameful and scared, then they move into curiosity and then excitement. The second thing was that they didn’t know enough about their anatomy. They didn’t know where their clitoris or g-spot was, so I had to teach a lot of people how to measure. Some people would even say, “I don’t have one.” And I would have to tell them that’s not true. The third thing was that everyone wanted to know why I was asking, and when I told them I was working on a customizable product that could provide a blended orgasm, they got really excited. They wanted to know when it would be ready!

So, you had a sense that you had product-market fit from early on?

It’s funny because some people have called us niche. Everyone with a vagina is a potential customer for this product — that’s half the world’s entire population.

Tell us about your technology and robotics.

Let’s talk about what it’s not. For the last 80 years, the vibrator has essentially been the same. It was developed for doctors who used to stimulate a woman’s clitoris manually to manage female hysteria. We’ve pretty much been making vibrators the same way since — wrap it in silicone, add pink or purple, a couple of rhinestones and call it innovative. I think we’re due for a change.

We do this by starting from scratch with simply the problem we want to solve, user data and fresh engineers who have never been in space before, that don’t come with biases. We are creating micro-robotics — so we’re taking robotics and shrinking them down into a tiny envelope and still creating biomimicry, or the mimicry of human motions. So our Osé vibrator recreates that “come hither” motion of a human partner’s finger when sweeping over the Gräfenberg spot on the interior wall of the vagina. The Osé cup fits into the external labia and holds its place so it stimulates over the glans clitoris (or clitoral hood), which is the most sensitive part of the clitoris. The cup flutters and almost pulsates, so we stimulate the same erogenous tissue, the same clitoral body from both sides, internally and externally.

We went through over a thousand iterations over almost two years to get here. We have filed ten patents, many of which could be used in other medical applications.

In 2019, you went toe-to-toe with the Consumer Technology Association, which runs CES. How did you handle them revoking your Innovation award?

We applied for and won a CES Innovation award for our technology, which meant we needed to secure exhibitor space so we could participate in the showcase. When we went through the process of getting our booth space, we were told that we couldn’t be in the show because we were an adult company. When we pointed out that we had received an Innovation award, they went dark for three days before coming back and telling us that the administrators had deemed our product immoral, obscene, indecent, profane. Because of that, they were taking our award away.

That’s when we said, “Oh really? Because we find female sexuality to be quite sacred.” We fought them on that. We pointed out the CTA’s track record of being overly patriarchal and that this was not the time for you to make atrocious decisions like this that are clearly gender-biased. We cited the other products that were on the floor — SexTech products geared at the male gaze or male sexuality. I pointed out the contradictions in their history and choices: that they validate tech for men but call tech for women obscene and had, up to that point, only one female award-winner at CES. It didn’t work. We were banned from the show.

So we fought back. We put together a press kit with an exclusive and an open letter that was deeply researched. Everything went live the night before the show started and it caught fire.

This year, you were the darling of CES. What changed?

It was a relief to see how much support we got. Months later, Gary Shapiro, the CEO of CTA, reached out. He apologized and said that they should never have taken our award away. We talked about how we could learn from this and help them make CES more inclusive, safer for everyone — including women and people of color and people in the LGBT space. We offered to help CTA and ended up rewriting a lot of their policies and their language.

We also lobbied for SexTech as a category to be allowed at the show and further required that it be integrated into the show floor, not sequestered in a dark space in the back. Making it a destination introduces a stigma instead of it being a regular part of walking through the health and wellness section. This is how we are helping educate the public and normalizing exposure to sexual health and wellness products in mainstream spaces.

This controversy has actually been a good thing for us. It launched me as an individual and as a female leader. That allowed me to bring this conversation to bigger spaces and audiences. I’ve now spoken at SXSW, ForbesWomen Summit, TechCrunch Disrupt, Tech Open Air in Berlin, and plan to continue speaking about women’s sexual health and wellness this year.

One year later, how is Lora DiCarlo doing?

Our goal for the first year was a million dollars, which for a startup is a huge goal. When we opened up for presale on November 25th of 2019, we made a million dollars in the first five minutes. We passed $1.5 million in 36 hours, then we made $3 million in 5 weeks at the end of 2019, and then close to another million at CES in sales.

It’s funny. Yesterday somebody called us a niche — that we are serving a niche market. And I just laughed at him and said, “You know what’s a niche market? Erectile dysfunction drugs. You are responsible for about $6 billion of the market share and we’re responsible right now for close to $30 billion and we are on an uptick toward $35 to $50 billion in the next few years.” It’s not a niche market. Our market is everyone with a vagina.

You’ve been able to turn a sex toy into a brand that represents sexual health and wellness, gender equity and innovation. What’s the most important thing you want women to take away from your brand?

This space is for everyone. We want to ask people to ask themselves who owns their pleasure. What’s the cost of having someone else in control of that? Can you imagine what you can do if you own that powerful experience and it’s at your fingertips and nobody else’s? I always laugh because I had an orgasm and it started a company. But it makes people feel empowered and more in control of their own bodies and that’s what empowers them to go out into the world and take control of spaces and spread out. That’s precisely what we need in tech and business, more inclusion and more diversity right now.