From stay-at-home mom to sex toy entrepreneur
Who
Melody Murison, 50
Where
North Gower, Ont.
What she was
Stay-at-home mom
What she is
Sex toy entrepreneur
Not in her wildest dreams did it ever occur to Melody Murison that she would one day be jet setting around the world selling sex toys.
The fashion district of Paris, the Oscars in Los Angeles, and trade shows in Las Vegas, Australia and Germany are the workplaces of this unassuming mother of three from a small town just outside Ottawa. “As a stay-at-home mom for 15 years, my life was about juggling hockey practices, coaching ringette and fundraising for nursery school, not selling vibrators,” says Murison. “The contrast is still staggering to me.”
Rewind to 2003 when her husband, Bruce, a closet inventor, lost his engineering job in Ottawa due to downsizing at Nortel, where Murison had also worked part-time as a training consultant. When she lost her job and Bruce got a buyout package, the couple pulled their kids out of school, rented their house and travelled the world for seven months. Their adventure included a Survivor- style stint on several remote islands in the Great Barrier Reef of Australia. “You learn how little you need to survive when all you have is your tent, your water and food,” recalls Murison. “Even if we lost everything when we got back to Canada, I knew we’d be okay because we were happy living with very few possessions. The experience changed us.”
Short on income and with little savings except the equity in their home, the Murisons returned to North Gower and started brainstorming. Bruce, the risk taker in the family, asked his wife what she’d think if they mortgaged their home to finance an idea he had for an invention they’d talked about in passing a few years earlier. He wanted to build a vibrator that could be worn while making love, one that both the man and the woman could enjoy, and could stimulate both the clitoris and G spot simultaneously.
