Our History

The Nookie isn’t your typical sex shop.

Our award-winning founder, Veronica Kazoleas, is a former healthcare executive with a Master's in Social Psychology. That means we do things a little differently. In fact, we think we're so different that we don’t even consider ourselves a sex shop. We're a sensuality shop. And we don’t think of our products as sex toys. They're pleasure products. We only opened in 2017. But our foundations were laid in 2002 when Veronica was researching sexual fantasies at the University of Alberta. 

It struck Veronica how few women felt empowered to assert their desires. She thought this stemmed from both the social expectation that women don't have sex for the sake of their own pleasure and the lack of accessible resources for sexual exploration. 

To address the first factor, Veronica advocated for a change in dialogue around female sexuality. Her innovative views resulted in an invitation to speak on the need for sex research reform at the 2006 annual meeting of the Canadian Psychological Association. For the second factor, she envisioned a welcoming space that supported people throughout their sexual journeys.

Veronica believed her vision was an important step in promoting sexual wellness, but she didn't think the business would reach its potential under the social climate of the early 2000s. So she left academia in 2006 to pursue a career in healthcare reform, all the while dreaming of one day opening The Nookie.

Flash ahead to the wild success of the Fifty Shades of Grey franchise. Veronica viewed this as representing a widespread change in women’s openness to exploring their sexuality. This shift led Veronica to end her career as a healthcare executive and move across Canada to launch The Nookie. After a year of research and planning - involving everything from attending European sex toy conferences to inadvertently signing up for an orgy - The Nookie was born.