STEs1e13 - The Shark Tank Effect Show Talks with NightCap Inventor Shirah Benarde

Aug 9, 2023

NightCap was invented in early 2019 by then 16-year-old Shirah Benarde from West Palm Beach, Florida. The idea came to her in a dream after hearing about the horrors of drink spiking from friends who experienced it after going off to college. Fortunately, her friends were okay, but Shirah was determined to come up with a pragmatic solution to this problem to protect her and her friends when they went off to college. She also wanted to make sure the product would be something girls would feel comfortable using. The next morning, she went to her mother’s closet, grabbed a pair of pantyhose, cut them up, and attached them to a scrunchie to create the first NightCap prototype.

Her brother, Michael, 21 at the time, came home from college for the summer and saw the prototype sitting on a table. As someone who had been living on a college campus for four years, he understood how prevalent this problem was — and is. Knowing that there was no product on the market that had been adopted at scale, Michael saw huge potential for NightCap due to its unbeatable convenience and reusability. Together, Michael and Shirah took action and spent the next six months working to bring NightCap from concept to reality.