One Woman?s High-Touch Bid to Upend the Sex-Toy Industry

This was the same event from which it had been disinvited just the year before, when its female-pleasure-focused products were labeled “obscene.”This time, Lora DiCarlo would get the royal treatment: prime positioning for its booth, panel-speaking slots for members of its team, nonstop party invitations, and scads of glowing press for its groundbreaking debut device—the very one that had been the source of scandal 12 months earlier, a sensual massager called the Osé.This feature appears in the November 2020 issue. A squad of roller derby players, brought in for the event, skated around the show floor wearing black and yellow tank tops printed with the phrase “Seize the Yes!” This was all a tribute, of a sort, to Lora Haddock DiCarlo: self-professed “anatomy geek,” medical school dropout, self-taught inventor, feminist provocateur, and now a data-driven, visionary entrepreneur.DiCarlo's fight with CES the year before had been the twist that turned her into a tech celebrity. There she was, snorkeling in Bora Bora, on the stage at Women in Tech Stockholm, touring the Vagina Museum in London, posing with the NBA All-Star power forward Blake Griffin, and on a panel at TechCrunch Disrupt with her pet Pomeranian, Enzo Ferrari Drift DiCarlo, stretched across her lap.And then, there she was again at CES, like the X-rated version of Steve Jobs, as much on display as the breakthrough tech that she'd invented.Lora DiCarlo’s founder and CEO, Lora Haddock DiCarlo, with her dog, Enzo Ferrari Drift DiCarlo.The Osé robotic Massager for Blended Orgasms doesn't look like a typical sex toy. “I saw an opening in the marketplace for a physiologically appropriate design for people with vaginas in the sex-tech space,” DiCarlo told the Hustle last year, “and I decided to … fill it.”Lux AlptraumLauren GoodeEmma Grey EllisThere was more: The Osé has “biomimetic” engineering and design, according to the company, which swaps machine vibration for something more like human touch; and its prototype was developed in partnership with the robotics department at Oregon State University. “In a culture where the biggest companies are Google, Amazon, and Apple, if you want your product to be taken seriously, you call it tech, which makes it highbrow,” Lieberman says.Lora Haddock DiCarlo was not the first sex toy entrepreneur to make a play for this prestige. By the end of that year, an MIT-educated mechanical engineer named Janet Lieberman-Lu, with close to a decade of experience designing and manufacturing at companies like MakerBot and Quirky, had cofounded another forward-looking, female-focused sex toy company, Dame Products.For many in the business, DiCarlo's arrival on the scene in 2019 felt like the culmination of that long endeavor. (“Sloan's speculation about Osé technology and manufacturing costs for Osé is incorrect,” the company said, noting that the US Patent Office has deemed the device novel and unique.)At first glance, Brian Sloan seems like the yin to Lora Haddock DiCarlo's yang: Where DiCarlo makes products that help women discover their bodies, Sloan's flagship product, the Autoblow, advertises “unlimited, perfect blowjobs” for men. “While CES has (commendably) helped to lift the stigma against sexual devices for women by allowing them to be displayed as mainstream consumer electronics,” he wrote, “CES has reinforced the stigma against sexual devices for men (and the related shame) by disallowing them based solely on the one feature that happens to be highly linked to their commercial success: human orifices.”Few tech publications reported on Sloan's letter. He did not get invited for an interview on This American Life.Lora DiCarlo’s Onda, which debuted at CES 2020, mimics the sensation of fingers stroking the G-spot.Around the same time that Sloan dismantled the Osé over a video call, a disconcerting post appeared on Lora Haddock DiCarlo's Instagram feed. She is just who she is.” (Hooper left the company this summer, along with Kulp and director of sales Sarah Brown.) Around the office, there's frequent talk among the team of “Brand Lora”: the notion that, independent of whatever products the company might produce, DiCarlo herself is a marketable quantity, a femtech visionary ready to inspire the world.Indeed, DiCarlo has gone the extra mile to promote her company and to emend its image—her image—as required. In response to further inquiries, the company told me that DiCarlo was never enrolled in medical school or at Portland State.It's also not clear whether any robotics faculty at Oregon State were actually involved in the design of the Osé. In the months after her company's open letter, the CTA approached DiCarlo, among others, for advice on revising the rules for sex-tech exhibitors. More sex-tech companies at CES has meant more legitimacy for the product category, says OhMiBod cofounder Suki Dunham. Nobody ever gets it even close to perfect.” A few minutes later, she pivoted to telling me about the company's newer offering, a sex-education and coaching platform called WellSX that will eliminate shame around sex by providing users with a “high-touch human experience.”Lora DiCarlo was on to other sex toys too. “You're building up the bubble, and then you're trying to build the structure in place in the hopes that when that bubble pops there's something there to catch your company.”Could this be sex tech’s Juicero—a humdrum gadget bested by your own two hands?That's not how things typically work in the sex-toy industry. In spite of $120 million from Silicon Valley investors, Juicero's product—described as a new “platform” for food delivery—turned out to be about as good at pressing the company's proprietary produce packets as a human's grip.Could the Osé be sex tech's version of the same—a humdrum gadget potentially bested by your own two hands, dressed up as innovation and sold at twice the price of competing products?