About Us

Founded as a worker-owned co-operative in 1997, our mandate has always been guided by our collective love of sexual health, pleasure, and education and our profound sense of dissatisfaction with the "sex industry" as a whole. For the totality of the history of modern sex toys, the sex industry has relied on misinformation and their customers' sense of shame to deliver toxic, poorly-made sex toys to an unsuspecting public. After thirty some-odd years of this shame-based sex retail, a handful of small indie companies - inspired and educated by the Good Vibrations model in San Francisco - began to open small sex-positive and feminist indie shops across North America.

Come As You Are was founded as a co-operative specifically to "keep us honest" by ensuring that our worker-owners would never be tempted by the profitability of poorly made or harmful sex products. Further, by keeping ownership of Come As You Are collective and accessible, we have been able to ensure that our shop reflects diverse genders, orientations, sexualities, and life experiences - rather than just one person's idea of what sexuality and sex products should be about.

Over time, our membership has evolved greatly, but our aims and ethics remain fully intact. As an anti-capitalist co-op, we're able to offer low prices, honest information, and amazing products while providing a fair wage for our members. Without external shareholders or a capitalistically-inclined owner who needs to extract a profit from our organization, we're never put in a position where we have to bend our personal and professional ethics to make the boss happy... we're the boss, and having solid ethics and amazing sex toys, books, and DVDs is what makes us happy.

Read more about co-operatives, check out our bylaws, or learn about our core values and culture!