 Well, part of your brand still needs work. I have to say this, in public, our packaging. It's pretty good, but it doesn't say Dame on the front. Who does that? Ah! Alexander Fine, co-founder of Dane. You ready to answer some questions? I certainly am. Why sex toys? Sex toys because I think that everybody deserves pleasure and that there's a huge inequality in who feels entitled to that pleasure, and I wanted to bring more pleasure to the world. What brands were on your mood board while creating Dane? You know, I'm really inspired by Glossier, Casper. They're both like intimate personal care and also bedroom brands. So those are two brands that sometimes we look at. Who did your branding and what was the brief? We had different people do parts of branding at different time. Everything from a strategist who really helped us think about like what was our overall purpose. And we also had a freelancer who did our first, she made our logo and she actually went on to become the creative director at The Wing. And then we worked with an agency as we got a little bit older who really helped us, I think, bring all those things together and bring them to life. And they were called Play Lab and they are awesome. What was the brief? I think our brief is always getting the world to approach this category from a different angle. So for us, the brief was bring our female focus, pleasure to life in a way that makes everybody comfortable. I'm gonna go with a personal one. Okay. Have you ever been embarrassed to say what you do? No. Another personal question? Yeah. What would you do if you weren't the founder of Dane? I think I would be a couples counselor or maybe like a founder counselor. I'm really, I love interpersonal relationships. How important is the name Dane? And could you have done this with any name? No, I think names are really important and powerful and language helps us shape reality. And I think it took us a long time to come up with Dane. I think it was an excellent choice. What part of the brand are you most proud of? Changing policies. When you get an institution to change their policy and regard female sexuality differently than how they had been before, that feels really gonna make me a difference in the world. What institution have you changed? Like Kickstarter, for example. They didn't allow us originally to run our product on their platform. And then when we presented to them that we were just makers trying to solve problems that we saw in the world simply because we had vaginas, they were like, yeah, you guys are totally right. You're aesthetic. What you're trying to say is different than what we feel like this category has been trying to say. It opened their eyes to like what the world could be. And that was, that felt really good. Is part of your called shtick to say the word vagina in interviews? No, it's an arresting word. Is it? I don't even notice it. I'm not uncomfortable. I'm just curious from a PR strategy is coming out with that word. Some people like to use the F word in interviews. That's an arresting play and I was curious. So it's funny cause like I'm trying to be buttoned up for this and to me, vagina is the most buttoned up word I can use to describe the part of the body that I'm talking about. How did you decide on your brand aesthetic? I, for us, we really spent time thinking about what our purpose was and what we cared about and what we were trying to say through our existence and then creating that, the visuals on top of that and the feeling on top of that. But it first just came down to like, why are we showing up and doing this every day? I can't help but feel that there is this birth of millennial brands from Great Jones to Dame to Glossier and it feels like everyone's cut from the same cloth in some fashion with color, palette, aesthetic font. Yeah. Do that concern you? Is that helpful? Is there some subconscious thing that's that signals were a millennial brand hymns? There definitely is something there but then you also want to stand out and be saying something different. And I think there's something also, I think the trend exists for a reason and to me the reasons are simplicity, being clear. Like, I think we've just gotten better at communicating through design. And for us, when we were thinking about what do we want to say about sex and sensuality, I think our very first logo, so our designer gave us two logos. We wanted to look different from what was in our industry and we wanted to feel more human and we wanted to feel more down to earth, which I guess, you know, that's also what I think Casper or Glossier, a lot of those other brands are also trying to tap into. And then we picked this much more, this bolder, this more curvaceous, I think it's much more enticing. What's the hardest part about building a sex toy brand? I think the hardest part about building the brand, which is the same reason why I decided to build it, was about changing the taboo. I think what I thought existed in the world was that if you create something and people want it, it'll work. But what I've discovered is I've made something and the people want it and that there is these institutions that are sometimes in between and they can regulate and restrict your ability to tell people about what you do and let them make the choice for themselves. What individual piece of hit, of campaign run to hit a show, whatever, what's been the most impactful to your business? Great question, two-fold. I would say on the one hand, we were on the Today Show with Megan Kelly and that in a single day did like two months of sales. But we were also in the New York Times and got a feature then and we also did really great that day. And for a while, I was able to use those articles on social media to direct more traffic to pay to get more people there. And now it's a scalable, continuously converting piece of media and then Facebook decided that the New York Times piece was not appropriate. It really impacts my ability to get people to learn about us and let them make their own choice. It's frustrating. Well, part of your brand still needs work. Oh my God, every part. I have to say this, in public are packaging. It's pretty good, but it doesn't say Dame on the front. Who does that? Oh! If you had one marketing dollar to spend, where would you spend it? I only had one. It would be on branded key terms and in Google paid ads. Do you do focus groups? Yes. And if so, how? Oh my gosh. Okay, so we have, we do a lot of different kinds of focus groups, everything from product testing, which I think is the one, the how. Have you ever held one of those mirrored room group setting focus groups? No, no. We did, okay, Janet did one time bring products to a sex party and watched. What's the biggest media marketing investment you've made today? It was in Facebook. So when Facebook was working for us before they started shutting us down, we spent quite a bit of money there and it was really, really effective. It was hard to do other things when it was working so well. It was hard to like take resources away from it. And then they took it away from us. Well, no, well, no. Personal, what do you love about yourself? I love my spunk and I love my energy and I love the way my brain does. It's both pretty realistic, but I sense that I have an easier time seeing the good and being positive and yeah, I'm appreciative of that chemistry and the curiosity I was putting in. If you had one superpower, what would it be? It's so tough. I guess I would like to be able to control time. What's the most basic thing you do? The five minute journal every morning. What's your favorite idea you never executed? I wanted to make a dating app that was connected to your Amazon and your shopping behaviors. I still think that's a great idea. If you could start over again, what would you do differently? I'm not quite sure I would have bootstrapped just as intensely as we've bootstrapped. I think having the capital to execute things correctly the first time would have gotten us further. Thank you so much for being with us. Alexander Fine, co-founder of Dane and I'll see you next time on I'm With The Brand.