Shawné Michaelain Holloway, a Chicago artist and sex educator as well as sex-shop employee, says that her experience on the retail side of the sex toy industry led her to identify a weakness in the marketplace, one that she now hopes to strengthen with her own innovation—sales of strap-on dildos and their accompanying harnesses, according to a recent profile of Holloway by the site Broadly.
“I just continuously saw a lot of shame in that corner (of the store),” Holloway told the site. “Whether that’s because heterosexual couples were fearing that they were doing something gay, or masculine women feeling shameful about the fact that they have to put on a thing at all, or people of color who came in and didn’t see themselves reflected in the things we have.”
But Holloway also says she noticed something even more fundamentally flawed in the strap-on market. Despite the rapid pace of technological innovation in the adult industry, the basic design of the strap-on had not shown any progress in years, or even decades.
Holloway had an idea—to reimagine the strap-on in a way that would appeal to her own peers in the millennial generation. In a Kickstarter campaign, Holloway explained the noteworthy differences between her strap-on harness, which she has dubbed STRAPP, and the traditional version of the device.
The STRAPP features “a high waist, as opposed to the traditional hip hugger, with a comfortable, breathable mesh and side snaps for easy-on/easy-off,” she wrote on her Kickstarter page. The harness also tucks in to itself, meaning that it requires no “mood ruining velcro sounds and any flappy, worn out, straps” that dangle off the side of the belt, distracting from the illusion created the strap-on device.
Holloway stresses that functionality was her focus in designing her new strap-on device, and that rather than obsess over “what is sexy” in her creation of the harness, to concentrate instead on making the harness as easy and comfortable to use as possible, allowing users to focus on the sex they’ll actually have using the device, rather than on the device itself.
“I was inspired a lot by power tool and headphone companies – these brands that provide products that continuously perform a service and make you feel enabled as a result,’ she told the site FGUK Magazine. “I want to remind everyone that these harnesses work for us and they should reflect how we, as a community, move and how we evolve together, too.”
Holloway’s projected retail price for the STRAPP harness is currently $270, but she hopes to also sell a mass-marketed version of the device — created from less expensive fabrics — for just $60, according to Broadly.
Photo by STRAPP Kickstarter
