“Usually when people have a business, they pray that their customers will use their products and give them feedback. “My line of business is very strange,” says Efua Dadson, the owner of SheDefense, which does 90% of its business on Instagram. Walmart and Target carry hot pink mini tear gas from the self-defense company Sabre.īut the recent surge in self-defense accessories on social media is more local-most of these are tiny businesses, often owned by women of color, that market mostly through social media. Many are from Blingsting, a company founded by a mother-daughter pair in 2013, with the aim of “designing products that girls actually want to have with them.” Blingsting sells a sparkly stun gun iPhone case and a diamanté pepper spray in a shade called Trophy Wife. For years it’s been possible to find at major retailers pepper spray and tasers that look like Elle Woods had a craft night. Marketing self-defense tools for women isn’t new. “I can’t believe that it worked,” she said in a news report. In November 2019 a woman living in Wisconsin said that she fought off an attempted sexual assault in her front yard using a cat-shaped defense key chain. Adorable and often sparkly, they’re meant to be worn on your fingers and used to sharpen a punch-brass knuckles, rebranded. Maybe you’ve seen the increasingly popular “self-defense cat key chains”-kitty-shaped pieces of plastic that have proliferated on Etsy and Instagram.
“What it says is that there’s a big audience,” she says, sounding sad, in spite of her flourishing business. She’s Birdie, a key chain alarm with a Glossier aesthetic, has been seeing sales “beyond what we could have imagined” since it launched in late 2019, says cofounder Amy Ferber. TikToks with variations on the hashtag “self-defense key chain” have been viewed more than 480 million times. Between February 2020 and March 2021, searches on Google for the term “self-defense key chain” increased tenfold.
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