Safely’s Co-founders on Teaching Women Runners How to Use Pepper Spray

While attending business school at the University of Texas, Ashley Raymond and Meagan Doyle were paired with two other female students to develop a product and pitch it to their classmates. Safety was top of mind for nearly everyone on campus, as two students had been recently murdered in separate attacks. So, the group focused on a safety-related product.

After graduation, safety concerns remained on all four women’s minds. They regrouped, launched a self-defense brand called Safely, and began designing a multifunctional pepper spray device — for women, by women.

“We probably spent too long designing it,” Ashley says. “Everyone’s always like, ‘Oh, just get a minimal viable product out there.’ And we’re like, ‘No, if it’s going to be a safety device, we want it to be as perfect as we can make it.”

They worked with safety experts to ensure the design would be accessible and easy to use. Those efforts resulted in the patent-pending Sidekick, which includes a pepper spray, flashlight, alarm, two grip options, and a glass-breaker attachment.

Meeting the highest standards for a lab-tested pepper spray was a non-negotiable: the maximum strength you can legally carry, UV dye so attackers can later be identified by law enforcement, a 10-foot spray distance, and potency that doesn’t lose effectiveness for four years.

Today, Ashley and Meagan work full-time to grow Safely’s brand presence and equip more women with their self-defense devices. The two other co-founders, Margy and Danna, continue to be involved in the brand when time allows, in addition to pursuing their respective careers.

Commitment to Empowering Women Runners

While Safely’s audience extends beyond runners, Ashley says the running community is one of the most important to the brand. In fact, nine out of 10 women runners have felt concerned about their safety while out for a run, and more than half worry about being attacked.

Runners themselves — Ashley for most of her life, and Meagan just beginning her running journey — they hope to empower women runners to feel confident and prepared.

“The number one factor for target selection, if somebody is going to pick someone to target, is likelihood of success,” Meagan explains. “If you’re holding something in your hand that’s clearly visible [and shows] that you’re not someone to be messed with, that immediately lowers your chances significantly of being targeted.”

But it’s one thing to have a self-defense device and another to know how to use it. This is where Safely’s focus on education makes all the difference.

At community engagement events, Ashley and Meagan encourage people to practice spraying a pepper spray device that’s filled with water so they feel more confident about using the real thing. In Austin, they partner with run clubs and recently teamed up with the Longhorn Run, a large 10K and 5K race at the University of Texas, to teach runners how to use pepper spray.

The co-founders also travel nationwide to participate in events at running stores and conferences such as The Running Event and CrimeCon. Their reach is extended through Safely’s ambassadors, who are encouraged to share safety tips with their audiences and bring practice pepper spray devices to events in their communities.

But the work doesn’t stop there.

Ashley and Meagan are involved in advocacy efforts to make pepper spray more accessible.

“Right now, if you live in New York or Massachusetts, you can’t get pepper spray delivered to your doorstep because there are laws that prevent that,” Ashley shares. “You have to go to a licensed dealer, which is like a gun store, to buy a pepper spray. And someone that’s buying pepper spray might not be comfortable going to their local gun store.”

Other laws they’re working to change include addressing certain states’ limitations on pepper spray potency and by-ground-only shipping restrictions.

Below, Ashley and Meagan share more on launching the self-defense brand, how the Sidekick differs from other products on the market, why it’s important to practice using a pepper spray device, and what’s ahead for Safely.

How did the four of you meet, and how did you develop the idea behind Safely?

Ashley Raymond: We were in a random class project where the teacher told us to come up with an idea to pitch, and she had put us all together …. We started thinking about what we would change at the University of Texas on a very basic level.

A very heavy topic at the time was campus safety. Two students within pretty much a year of each other had been murdered on our college campus. It left everyone feeling very, very unsafe. And you don’t go off to college to experience anything like that. So we started looking into the issue of safety, and quickly realized just how big that issue is.

Looking at the companies that were out there, there are some with great products, but they’re male-dominated, male-owned. How could they fully understand, as women, what we go through on a daily basis? We felt we could really do something different, as far as teaching people how to use the products, beyond just selling a product.

Meagan Doyle: At the time, we came up with a different idea for the class project for a safety device. It turned into a college company that didn’t work out. After we graduated, we still wanted to do something safety-related and really help women. So we went back to the drawing board and kind of reimagined what our vision was and how we were going to get there.

In 2021, we launched Safely. We started selling pepper sprays in 2022, as that was something that is a safety tool women are familiar with and women carry already. We also knew that there were other tools that we would like to carry, but the other options were to have individual tools, and carrying them all in a key chain doesn’t mean that you can necessarily grab one and use it effectively whenever you need it.

We were thinking through: How do you have all these tools in your hand or ready to go without them being clunky and overwhelming? And that’s how we came up with the Sidekick device.

What is the Sidekick, and how does it differ from other pepper spray and self-defense devices?

Ashley Raymond: The Safely Sidekick has five features in one device. You have your pepper spray that’s maximum strength. It has the UV dye inside of it, in case you have to spray somebody. You have the grip, where you can do knuckles or a strap grip — whichever one you prefer. And with the grip, too, you ensure you’re always pointing the pepper spray the right way, in case you had to use it, and it’s in your hand already. It’s not, you know, in the bottom of your bag or something like that.

Then with the flashlight component, as someone who’s been a runner almost my entire life, it’s so important to be able to see where you’re going and see your surroundings when you’re on a run. But it’s also bright enough that if you pointed it at someone’s eyes, you would temporarily blind them for a second. So it’s multipurpose for the flashlight.

On the bottom, that’s where we have our glass breaker that you can attach. You could also do a key chain if you don’t want to do the glass breaker. Some people have told us they use the key chain part to hook it up to their dog leash, and it makes it the ultimate dog leash.

Lastly, we have our alarm, which is 130 decibels …. It’s pretty much one of the loudest personal alarms that you can find.

Since it has so many features, [one runner] might be comfortable protecting herself with the pepper spray or with, let’s say, the glass breaker. But someone else might want an approach where they just do the alarm and the flashlight, and that’s all that’s needed to get them out of the situation safely. So it has multiple levels of defense in one device.

How is Safely taking a different approach to product messaging in the self-defense space?

Ashley Raymond: When we think about Safely and about the long-term vision of not even needing a company like Safely, there’s no reason to make women more fearful than we already are. Everyone knows it’s a problem. We don’t need to be consistently reminded of that, or say something to make someone have this fear in order to encourage them to purchase a product.

I think, instead, [we’re focusing on] the preparedness aspect and really learning and understanding in an environment you’re comfortable in. And having that confidence so that if you do have to use it, you’re prepared, but you’re not walking around with a device in fear that you might have to use it.

Meagan Doyle: The confidence aspect is one of the things that you can naturally produce and exude …. Somebody’s not going to mess with someone that’s more confident or is giving off that energy. So there shouldn’t be a fear aspect.

It should be, ‘Carry it with confidence. Walk with confidence. Keep your head up high.’ That’s more intimidating. Trying to foster that…is our biggest goal. It shouldn’t be [communicated as] a world that you feel unsafe to go outside or do anything that you want to do. You can do it, just here’s how to do it safely.

How do you help people gain confidence with Safely’s products?

Meagan Doyle: You [only] have so many seconds to react in a situation, and most women haven’t ever sprayed a pepper spray — which is great! But whenever we give it to them to try out, [they] fumble with it for a few seconds. You’re unsure of how it’s going to go off. And if that were a real-life situation, you don’t have time to tell someone, ‘Wait one second. Let me figure out how to make this work.’

We also had that realization as we were starting to learn how to use pepper spray, and the lab that we work with had practice sprays to teach us. So we thought, why not help more women know how to do this? They’re more than likely never going to need to use their pepper spray, but just in case, they should be prepared, and it should be second nature. So that’s why we came out with the practice spray.

Ashley Raymond: The first event that we did it at, we realized, too, just how much fun it could bring to a scary topic like self-defense. We got a Freddy Krueger — cut-out, life-size — and then we now have our pink skeleton that we use all the time. It draws people in to also want to learn, and if they see other people doing it, it becomes less intimidating and less scary. Having that practice and the muscle memory is just so, so important, and so we’ll keep doing these events forever.

What is your vision for the company’s future and its influence on women’s safety?

Ashley Raymond: We want to be the hub. If anyone needs anything safety-related, they come to us. We might not have everything in-house, but we can point someone in the right direction. Whether they need to find an app, like Running Mate, or a local self-defense expert. Then, too, just to continue to provide the very best experience and empower people with how to use [our products], and not just send them a product that they don’t know how to use.

Meagan Doyle: The more conversations we have…or just getting more women to learn how to use pepper spray, the more women out there that have that safety knowledge, and we would expect to have a safer world just because people are more prepared and actually empowered to take charge of their safety and be ready for anything.

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“Looking at the companies that were out there, there are some with great products, but they’re male-dominated, male-owned. How could they fully understand, as women, what we go through on a daily basis? We felt we could really do something different, as far as teaching people how to use the products.” - Ashley Raymond, co-founder of Safely