Five years after it began as a conversation within the walls of Harvard Business School, Flare, the Boston-based startup behind a smart bracelet designed to get the wearer out of potentially dangerous situations and prevent sexual assault, has made its debut.
Flare made its official launch on Feb. 11, having closed a $3 million seed round led by Lerer Hippeau. It will begin shipping its flagship product, the Nova Cuff—$149 each and available in three different colors—out to customers this week. In addition to developing new bracelets and expanding its existing inventory, Flare will use the funding to hire across its engineering and marketing teams.
For co-founders Sara de Zarraga and Quinn Fitzgerald, Flare is personal. Both have spoken openly about their own experiences as survivors of sexual assault. In January, Fitzgerald wrote a blog post on The Aura, Flare's space for discussions about survivorship and safety, called "I Didn’t Report My Assault - Instead I Shared It With Thousands of People." In the piece, Fitzgerald writes about the power she gained by sharing her story with other survivors.
"The fact that I think about my assault so much more, because of the work of Flare, sometimes challenges me in a way that I wouldn't have wanted it to, but it also is the reason why we can emphasize with our users," Fitzgerald said in an interview with BostInno. "When Sara and I originally came up with the idea for Flare, we thought about what would have worked for us. But we didn't want to assume that would have worked for everybody else. It gave us this knowledge of, while no two assaults are the same, there are still commonalities that we can talk about and identify by talking about them."
In the U.S., one in three women and one in six men have experienced some form of contact sexual violence in their lifetime, according to statistics compiled by the National Sexual Violence Resource Center. And as Fitzgerald and de Zarraga both noted in our conversation, most of this violence is not random: More than half of female survivors were assaulted by intimate partners and 41 percent by acquaintances. In eight out of 10 cases of rape, the victim knew the perpetrator.
The idea behind Flare is to empower the wearer to get out of a potentially dangerous situation without escalating it. Press a discreet button on the bracelet once to get a phone call as an excuse to leave, or press and hold it to text a friend. de Zarraga and Fitzgerald emphasized that the bracelet isn't the end-all solution to sexual assault, but it fills a gap in the market by empowering wearers before a situation becomes an emergency.
"If you picture one end of a timeline as you're 100 percent safe and the other end as you're 100 percent in an emergency, most of the time, you're not on either end of that spectrum," de Zarraga said. "Most of the time, you're somewhere in the middle, where you realize that something is a little bit wrong about a situation that you've come to be in, and you're not really sure how to deescalate it or get yourself out. That's really where we started connecting and thinking about safety differently."
de Zarraga and Fitzgerald have been working on Flare since March 2015, when they were both students at Harvard Business School. The startup was incubated at Harvard i-lab in 2016 and 2017.
In the nearly five years between Flare's early days and now, de Zarraga have spoken with thousands of people to perfect the product: through one-on-one interviews, focus groups, surveys and several rounds of beta testing. Flare also partnered with Her Campus Media, the Boston-based media company directed toward college-age women, to collect data on what potential Flare users had experienced.
Those survey results are sobering. de Zarraga said that 91 percent of respondents said they had been in a situation where someone was making them feel uncomfortable for crossing the line but felt pressure to go along with it. Additionally, 58 percent said they were in that situation at least once a month, and one-third said they were in that situation in the last week.
"Personal safety has been about fear and vulnerability and all the things that you shouldn't do or can't do because it's not safe," de Zarraga said. "When we thought about safety, it became much more about, how do we enable and celebrate all the amazing things that you can do when you're feeling safe, when you have security? The confidence and control you can have over your life and that feeling of agency that creates—that's really how we we want to change the landscape here."
In addition to the survey, Flare has partnered with Her Campus Media on an ambassador program, through which 40 ambassadors spread the word about Flare's bracelets on college campuses. Making the product accessible to college students is a particular focus area for Flare. If users sign up with a .edu email address, they'll receive 20 percent off their order.
Flare has also partnered with the organizations the United State of Women, Period.org, the Army of Survivors and Surviving in Numbers.
These partnerships are evidence that de Zarraga and Fitzgerald believe in a holistic set of solutions to prevent sexual assault—Flare isn't acting alone. Both women also believe there should be better education about the definition of consent, bystander intervention and law and policy changes around how rape and assault cases are treated.
But the bracelet is a start.
"Flare is so much more than a bracelet," Fitzgerald said. "Safety is a means to something that's so much bigger. It's about not making compromises. It's about bringing your whole self to life and creating positive change. We imagine what the world looks like when you don't have to make compromises for your safety, when everyone can feel confident and in control and have their own agency to set their sights high and and to actually go after their goals."
