We often get asked, “Is Flare just for women?” and the answer is No. At Flare, we take safety personally. It’s something that everybody feels and it affects everyone.
We value the unique experiences of all people who need Flare and we recognize how critical inclusion is in helping change the rhetoric around assault and safety in general. That’s why we use non-gendered pronouns in our mobile app and when talking to our customers about the product as a small way of making sure that we are communicating to anyone who is using Flare. We wholeheartedly encourage anyone who needs our product to use it.
We focus on women first, but our product is not for women only. Our first product was designed with the needs of those who identify as women in mind because, as female co-founders, we designed the product based on our experiences moving through the world as women and our unique insights and expertise about how sexual assault affects young women.
We also knew that starting a company is hard and that to be successful we needed to first approach a market that we understood and where there was also a disproportionate need for our product. 1 in 6 women in the US has been the victim of an attempted or completed rape in their lifetime, compared to 1 in 33 men. Women ages 16-19 are 4x more likely than the general population to be victims of rape, attempted rape, or sexual assault. Women in college are 3x more likely than women in general to experience sexual violence.
Women’s unique needs have not been served by the personal safety market, but women have developed an intuitive sixth sense when it comes to their safety and have learned to listen to their gut. They have shown incredible strength and resiliency when navigating their personal safety, despite the challenges they experience daily. We believe that it shouldn’t be that hard. We want to ease that burden by creating innovative technology that is designed by women for women’s unique experiences.
After successfully serving the needs of the female-identifying community, we will be able to grow. We are excited about the opportunity that our growth will give us to create products and services for many different groups of people based on each of their unique experiences and safety needs. We care deeply about the needs of the LGBTQ+ community who are targets for sexual harassment, assault, and hate crimes, as well as men who face threats to their personal safety, people who experience domestic violence, people with mental or physical disabilities, people with health conditions, the aging community, children, and anyone who feels like they could use a little backup from time to time.