Let’s Talk Dirty With UVee Founder Carrie Martz

Sponsored by: UVee

Imagine that you have over 30 years of advertising, marketing and branding experience. Life is going well. The next obvious step is to sell everything and go into business with your daughter in the sexual wellness industry.

Wait, was that not obvious?

Carrie Martz is a doer, rather than a dreamer. She leaps where many of us may question. She asks the questions that we should have been asking a long time ago, such as, have you even thought about cleaning your sex toys?

Carrie and her daughter Brooke invented a product that not only cleans 99.9 percent of harmful bacteria from your grown-up toys, but also stores and charges them.

UVee is one of the first adult products to have a Kickstarter campaign, proving that this mother-daughter duo can break down all kinds of barriers (if only Facebook would get on board):

Q:

It was brave of you to leap not only from a secure job, but to an entirely different industry!  

A:

(Laughs) It was a big switch, wasn’t it?

Q:

Did you have any trepidation?  

A:

Not at all. At the time, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. In my advertising life, I had [brought a product to life] on the backend for many products. We would create the brand demand. I thought it wouldn’t be that hard to get a product manufactured.

It was my lack of understanding of the process that made me think I could do it. If I had known too much, I would have been afraid, but you stick your toe in! We are ¾ of the way pregnant. We have to deliver this baby!

Q:

How has it been in the sexual wellness industry?  

A:

That was a bit of a challenge personally. I am a little shy. Now I’m on stage and I have to act my way through it so that I am comfortable. People think I am very outgoing. Maybe I am now, but it took practice.

I went to a trade show in Las Vegas. I did my very first interview on camera and I was rethinking what I said. I didn’t realize how open people are about sexual wellness and fulfillment [in those environments].

When you let people know where your focus is, they really take care of you. My daughter was really impressed that there were so many women her age inventing products. It is an area women feel passionate about. It can make them feel more confident.

Q:

How has it been to work with your daughter so closely?  

A:

It is a pretty crazy thing. I am grateful my daughter is around and supportive. The idea originally came from her. What started as a comment turned into a real, live business.

From my daughter’s standpoint, she is a little more guarded because she has two young children. We did a redesign to make a case that was locked to protect my grandchildren from the products and toys.

It’s not always good to be working day to day with family yet when my granddaughters are here, I get to be grandma. We put the business aside and we are a family.

Q:

What has the response from the outside world been thus far?  

A:

I’ve been really happy to receive support from the industry. They think it’s brilliant. It’s going to take education and some time. Anytime you disrupt the way people are thinking or doing things, it requires repetition in that messaging.

Q:

What messaging are you wishing to put forth?  

A:

[People ask]: Why do I need to clean my toys if I’m not sharing them? We are trying very hard to educate people on this. It’s not just the exposure to your own bacteria. It’s the environment.

You can’t sanitize where you put your toys without a product like this. You are unable to kill bacteria without some form of germicidal light. You are exposing your body to millions of germs.

It is as simple as understanding why a person might want to consider sanitizing their toothbrush. It’s not just germaphobes that are using hand sanitizer.

We are in a taboo category, but we’re the only product that is out there that is doing what we do. If you use toys, then you should be concerned with how you store and protect them.

We’ve put a USB charging station in our container to take away the inconvenience of having to plug it in. The simple thing is after you use a toy, you wipe it off, put it in the case, and plug your toy in.

It automatically turns on, charges it and cleans it in 10 minutes or less. Plus it is charged up and ready for the next time. There is no inconvenience.

Q:

It’s interesting that we haven’t thought to clean these intimate products.  

A:

Personally, I never thought about it. For years, I had toys in the nightstand that may have only been run under water. I went to my gynecologist and was too embarrassed to admit that I might have got an infection from a toy.

In the last 10 years, people have given more thought to sanitizing things, like their hands and their toothbrushes. We started to think about dust mites in the nightstand, in your socks. Wherever you put toys, [the dust mites] are there. Germicidal light is the only thing that breaks them down. It is so easy to put these toys in our UVee System and know that you have preserved your body.

Q:

It seems like something that could be found at CVS.  

A:

We are designing another product that is perfect for general retail. We’ve done a lot of research for CVS. They have adult products in their aisles.

We are designing something we think will fit right in. There are over 60,000 adult products on Amazon. It’s big business!

If you have a toy or two kicking around in your life, consider contributing to this female and family-driven Kickstarter campaign. After all, it is the only scientifically proven, patent pending solution to getting harmful bacteria far away from your nether regions.

This could make a great holiday gift for your — ahem! — open-minded family members.

Edited by Jody Smith

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Tags:

• Sex & Relationships
• Wellness