Andrew Quitmeyer, Paul Clifton and Craig Durkin, founders of Comingle, are taking sex to the people. Sex toys to be exact, and not just silicone and AAAs. Imagine a sex toy that can connect to a body piercing and turn your partner’s whole body into a touchable dildo controller. Open your eyes and your wallets. Its here and that’s not all it can do.
Boys and girls, we are talking about DIY dildos.
Clifton from Comingle turned us on to everything the company has been up to, including their current project, Mod, which is currently being funded on Indiegogo.
Comingle is an open-source sex toy company focused on encouraging open conversations about sexuality through technology, and promoting technology education through sex. We design and sell sex toys that innovate in stimulation, interaction and DIY, and sell components and kits to support DIY sex-technology projects.
As if that didn’t get blood pumping, the innovation of taking a product that has been yearning and longing for individuality should.
As technology enters the bedroom more and more, it’s important for people to have the tools and skills necessary to use technology to create their own preferred sexual experiences. Current sex-technology products tend to do one thing. By creating and documenting sex toys that are easily modifiable and support different add-ons, we make it easy for people to explore the possibilities of sex-tech and to customize the experiences to suit their preferences.
Yea. This isn’t some ‘Art of Seduction‘ spice in the bedroom. This is Techie Spice. And before we even get to the mods, the base model is eons past Granny’s Rabbit (don’t picture that).
Sex toys have been pretty similar since the 70s. They vibrate. Recently, most sex toy innovations have come from changing the form and the visual appearance. This has gone a long way towards making sex toys more visible and accepted by mainstream markets. Digital technology has been appearing more and more in sex toys in the last few years; however it is unclear what the “killer app” for sex-tech will be.
Aside from designing a great product, fitting for the times, what makes Comingle so unique is that they aren’t selfish about it! They aren’t keeping all the fun and secrets to themselves.
We’ve created an open platform that lets people experiment with sex-tech experiences, which will encourage further innovation in the sex-tech field and lead to new products for pleasure and possibly promote sexual health. By documenting our projects and providing resources for hackers, we open up a new market for sex-hackers and will bring conversations about sexuality to the tech industry.
While Comingle does have competitors, they still cross a few barriers and are truly one of a kind.
Our competitors are mainly larger sex toy companies, Lelo and Fun Factory for example. Both innovate in the sex-technology space, but they tend to focus on stimulation. Fun Factory, for example, makes a toy that simulates thrusting. Other sex toy companies also support open-source, but focus on technological advancements from an engineering perspective. We are a user-experience focused company, and we are the only company building a sex-toy platform. We design the experience from the ground up to make using and customizing our toys easy, but keep them completely open so that people can make whatever they can imagine. As we grow, we will provide more web based tools for creating patterns and learning coding to work with out toys. We will also provide plug and play attachments that make it easy for anyone to experience a broad range of sex-tech possibilities.
So while I grab a cold drink, let’s get into where this hot idea came from!
After a DIY electronics workshop Andy ran for field biologists living in the jungle in Panama, a participant asked him if he could help her make a vibrator. From there, Andy and Paul realized that there was a lot that could be done with technology in the sex toy space, and that they wanted to do what they could to both innovate and support innovation.
Lucky for us, calling Atlanta home was a no-brainer for the team with strong roots in the area and a love for the people.
Craig and I grew up in Atlanta, and have benefited from the support of the close knit networks of people in their communities. All three of Comingle’s founders are previous or current Georgia Tech students. The communities of creative people in Atlanta and the support these communities show each other make Atlanta a great place to start a creative business. Atlanta is very diverse, and understanding diversity and thinking about how to support people with different preferences is extremely important for work that deals with sexuality. Finally, access to technology development resources has helped us overcome some of our more complicated challenges around manufacturability and electronics design.
Now that you’ve got all the deets, see it in action: