Last week we had the pleasure to interview Heather of Bump’n for the Bondi Innovation Forum 2022.
Heather is the Founder of Bump’n, on a mission to create the first line of accessible sex toys for people with disabilities. Heather and her brother, disability consultant and activist Andrew Gurza, brought together an amazing team of sexual health and design experts, occupational therapists, and of course, the disabled community. They started by creating the first line of sex toys for people with hand limitations, but there’s no limit to what they want to achieve.
In this interview, she discusses this along with how she sees Bondi’s future growth.
Reach out to Heather on Slack to tear down the taboo and talk openly about all things sex + disability. No topic is off limits.
She also invites suggestions and feedback to help building the very best and most accessible company possible.
Transcript
My venture is called Bump’n. And we are on a mission to create the first line of accessible sex toys, which is disability driven for people with disabilities, hand limitations, spinal cord injuries, ageing, arthritis, basically anything that has to do in and around. So my younger brother, Andrew, he lives with cerebral palsy, and he also works as a sex and disability activist. And through his lived experience, and also the work that he’s done, he gave me a light bulb moment a couple of years ago, which is that a lot of people with physical disabilities are unable to self pleasure. And usually that that involves some sort of limitation in and around hands, whether that’s pain or weakness, or being able to sustain the motion for long enough, or reach. And as a result, they can also not use the toys on the market now that the toys have been designed specifically for people with hand limitations. And so very naively, I was, yeah, I was shocked. And I said, you know, maybe we should try and fix that. And maybe we should start that. And he just as I usually agreed, and here we are two years later, and we have yet we are just about to launch our first product. Getting this product to market, and it has been a journey. And I say we are a bit naive in sort of taking on this challenge because neither one of us had ever heard the the outage which is now I guess quite familiar in startup land purchase hardware is hard. And it’s expensive at the upfront. But we have persevered. And we have launched pre sales for the bumping joystick, which is our first product off the rank. And we are shipping anticipated in September. Well, we’re a small startup, but we have very big dreams. World domination obviously factors into that. But we look, we see that disability is a huge spectrum and sexual preference is a huge spectrum. And to think that you’re going to fix everybody’s needs ability wise as well as sexual preference wise with one device is not really realistic. So our ambition is to really have a full range of sex toys that leans into different disabilities and different needs, that people can sort of pick and mix what’s going to work best for them based on their disability or level of ability, and also based on their sexual preference, what they’re into, so that they can sort of have access to things that rest of us take for granted.
I think it’s big, I think when you look around Bondi, when people aren’t at the beach, there is a lot of creative people here. There’s also a lot of passion here. And I think there’s a lot of drive and people who are looking for maybe a bigger purpose than just themselves. And so I think there is a lot of people doing really interesting things and who are innovating in their own space who are starting to look at, well, what can I do beyond kind of being tied to the man or a workplace that maybe I’m not happy in. And I think the pandemic, as it has in a lot of the rest of the world has probably really spurred that on as well. I think first and foremost, we need to bring people together. So I think there are a lot of creative people here. But I think unless you dig beyond the surface, or really start talking to people you don’t actually know I’ve been in startup world here for over two years. And I know that there are people doing really interesting things, but actually don’t necessarily know who they are. And there doesn’t really seem to be a collective or somewhere that we can come together and learn from each other and share our experience. It seems like a lot of those forums, you have to go into the city or you have to kind of go outside of the bubble, and who wants to leave the bubble. I don’t. And so with so many of us working from home as well, or when you’re in the startup, like the idea of paying for office space, or even a co working space sometimes isn’t doable. And so I think there needs to be first and foremost more of a sense of community and outreach and bringing us together. And I think second we need probably investment so you can have all the great ideas that you want, but without the backing behind them and the support of the investment community as well as you know, people who’ve done this kind of thing before then you’re going to hit a lot of roadblocks as you go and you might not have the support either financially or from a mentorship point of view to keep going.
