About Us
About CAYA Co-operative
Founded as a worker-owned co-operative in 1997, our mandate has always been guided by our collective love of providing accessible gear and information to anyone who wanted it, since we sure weren't finding it elsewhere! We built our collective via Come As You Are by offering sex toys, gender gear, and adult feminist videos & literature with an eye to supporting indie makers, marginalized communities, and, to make the world a more embodied place. In retrospect, we ended up being part of a 90's wave that saw small sex-positive and feminist indie shops open across North America - and, we are honoured that we're still going strong, over twenty years later! CAYA Co-operative has now evolved to offer this website that's totally safe-for-work, parent-appropriate, and has no sexuality products on it at all so it won't be blocked by your firewalls! After all, who wants to shop for a gaff with their mom on a sex shop website? And what social worker wants a sex shop in their browser history at work when they're just looking for a binder for a client?
CAYA Co-operative 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 our businesses collective and accessible, we have been able to ensure that our shop reflects diverse genders, orientations, and life experiences - rather than just one person's idea of what gender and gender-related 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 stocking amazing products is what makes us happy. Learn more at www.cayacooperative.com