The sex-tech startup Unbound started out as a vendor for vibrators and lubricants. It was founded by Polly Rodriguez of Women of SexTech. Today it offers sexual health products, traditional individual sex toy products, and a subscription to a quarterly box of curated sex products. Additionally, the company started to create its own sex toy line and announced that 2018 will be the »Year of the Bitch«. The vision of the company is to ditch the reselling part of the business completely.
Rodriguez said: »The transition from selling third-party to predominantly your own products isn’t always the smoothest. In the next year, ideally, most things will be made in-house.«
The company just raised an additional $2.7 Million in venture capital. Rodriguez is proud and relieved: »Raising money is always hard but it took an exceptional amount of resilience.« Unbound expects to have generated $2 million in sales this year.
But for Rodriguez, all these early successes are clearly just a starting point. She wants to expand into physical stores and make Unbound a more experience-driven brand focused on sexual wellness and health. She envisions people getting mammograms and other procedures from Unbound. She said: »Female sexual health and wellness can become this thing we don’t dread.«
The forceful funder created Unbound after getting through a battle with cancer. The powerless feeling she had to endure during that time made her realize that she wants to get as much control over her body and sexuality as possible. Her dream is to make unpleasant bodily experiences as comfortable as possible for women. Consequently, she insists that the business with adult products should be seen as an all-encompassing way to make people healthier and more in tune with their bodies.
She said: »People often assume that anything adult is all the same thing. Anything from hardcore pornography to very simple lubricants. One of the things our company and women of SexTech seek to achieve is to really provide more categorization. And it helps to decrease the stigmas and taboos associated with sexual health and wellness.«