“Founding and growing a company is a completely different experience from working a 9 to 5 job. Not everyone will be able to understand or relate to the experiences you’ll have while on that journey.”
– Raven V. Faber
I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Raven Faber.
Raven founded EngErotics in 2016 in response to a clear lack of design standards and safety regulations in the sexual wellness industry. She has over a decade of engineering and sales experience and she is very passionate about using the fundamentals of engineering, math, and science as the basis for the design and development of high-quality sex toys as well as CBD infused intimate body care products. She is extremely passionate about normalizing the conversation surrounding sex and sex education and believes very deeply in the need for engineers and scientists to have a direct influence on how the world looks at intimate product design, formulation, quality, and safety.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
You are so welcome! I’m really glad to be interviewing with you! In short, breaking off my engagement to my ex-fiancé so that I could pursue my own interests is how I ended up where I am now. This was 12 years ago and long before I was the Founder and CEO of EngErotics. It was a very pivotal moment in my life and the one that would set me on the path that would allow me to follow my own dreams and goals.
I was a 22-year-old graduate student in engineering with a growing fascination with sexual wellness and a strong desire to explore that fascination via pitching pleasure products to rooms full of women in my spare time. At that time, I was engaged to a less than supportive partner who took severe issue with my keen interest in doing this and who was anything but subtle in letting me know how he felt. In his opinion, my future venture was “lewd and shameful”. Now, there were plenty of similar red flags that came along beforehand, and they all had something to do with shaming my personal interests and suppressing who I was. However, it was his irrational anger with my decision that really drove home the message that this was not a loving relationship at all, and I finally recognized his emotional abuse towards me. His attempt to make me second-guess my decisions while shaking my confidence made it clear that I had a very important choice to make. I could either marry this man and live my life making decisions based on his approval or I could throw the entire man out and move in the direction that felt right to me. I chose the latter. I chose me. Of course, it wasn’t simply about selling pleasure products. It was about having the freedom to be me and to pursue my personal interests unapologetically, whatever they may happen to be. Even then, I recognized my worth and I wasn’t willing to settle down with a man who didn’t recognize it as well.
