McGill start-up Freely is making waves in the adult industry by letting customers play designer. With their 3D-printed sex toys, buyers can personalize everything from size to stiffness, ensuring the fun parts are exactly to their specifications.
"Think of the Sims creator, but for your butt plug or dildo," a Freely spokesperson told MTL Blog.
Mass-manufactured sex toys designed by and for somebody else can often cause discomfort and may not hit the right spot, they said. When it comes to personalizing adult accessories, having a stranger ask intimate questions can be scary and off-putting for some people.
Instead, a group McGill engineering students — Alex Moreau, Ben Lusterio-Adler, Nina-Marie Martinez, and Pierre-Luc Lebœuf —decided to empower individual customers to take control of every aspect of their own toy's look and feel. Applying the principles of design, building and structure from their university program, they developed the online Freely builder and created over a dozen base models to get customers started.
A blue butt plug on a laptop keyboard in front of a screen showing the design in the Freely custom builder.@princess_previews, @freelytoys | Instagram
Users who open the Freely builder can pick a starting design — shapes include bowling pins, pine trees and chess pieces, among other more classic silhouettes — and then drag points along the outline of the toy to change and size, or create an entirely new shape altogether. The exact length and width stats change in real-time so you always know what you're getting.
Once submitted for production, each toy is 3D-printed by the team and then rendered in high-grade platinum-cure silicone.
"The finish on our toys is really, really smooth since the printer and tech we're using can print things as small as one-third the thickness of a human hair. When the light catches just right, you can see the tiny patterns that the manufacturing process makes on the surface which we think looks really cool," according to the team.
There are no 3D-printed parts in a final Freely toy, just smooth silicone, and the quality of the coating has been tested by a third-party lab to confirm it is body safe.
"There's almost no regulation in the sex toy industry. That means a lot of toys on the market aren't guaranteed to be safe to use, which is pretty scary. We take the body safety of our products really seriously to build trust with our customers," Freely said.
Someone clinks a bottle-shaped brown dildo with a real beer bottle.@freelytoys | Instagram
While Freely is about finding a good fit, it's also about fun. The startup's TikTok video of a beer-shaped dildo getting vigorously smacked in the shower has reached over 200K views.
"Ben, one of the co-founders, was 'slapping the God damn fire out of it' (as one TikTok commenter put it). We'd never seen a dildo shaped like that before, so we think it made some folks do a double-take. Ben initially designed the beer bottle dildo for a meme on our Instagram and made it on a whim to test out a suction cup design we were working on," said the group.
"We think the beer bottle is a good representation of what we're trying to do with Freely: show that sexual wellness and sex toys can be a fun, relatable thing that doesn't need to be intimidating."
Each Freely toy costs around $150 (including shipping). The team is now looking into adding vibration, more surface textures and suction to future products.
"We're also working on an AI assistant for the builder, which will help you design a toy based on your preferences and needs," the company's spokesperson said. They noted the lack of major brands offering similar products, which is why Freely is eager to fill the gap.
