Are Germans buying anti-rape "safety shorts"?

Question

From The Express: Safe shorts to STOP women joggers suffering SEX ATTACKS in Germany are sold out, January 1 2017:

AN ENTREPRENEUR from Germany has created trousers with the aim of protecting women from possible sex attacks while they are out jogging - and the first 150 were sold out immediately.

...

The shorts can be purchased online for €149 on the website www.safeshorts.eu and the businesswomen hopes to also make lockable pants for going out.

On social media, one tweet a couple of days ago (January 2018) by conspiracy theorist @PrisonPlanet got thousands of retweets and likes. The video quoted in the tweet had in subtitles of the thumbnail something like "die safe shorts" schützt vor übergriffen achtung nicht erschrecken". I tried google translate, but it didn't work too well.

I came across a comment from a couple of days ago on a politically extreme reddit expressing doubt about this story (link deliberately omitted):

I'm from Germany and I've never heard of these before nor does anyone I know so I just searched for some German articles. There are only a handful which are over a year old and not very reliable.

The Guardian has a 2013 article about anti-rape clothing, but it seems to be a different "product". The problem with anti-rape underwear

Are Germans buying anti-rape "safety pants" or "safe shorts" in any meaningful numbers?

Answer 1

They do exist (the shop is here; they have two different models), but are likely not bought in huge numbers.

Focus - a more or less reliable German news magazine - had an article about this in January 2017. They in turn name this WAZ article as source.

The WAZ article does indeed mention that, according to the owner, the shop sold out of "Safe Shorts" - all 150 of them. The owner also claims that she already has requests for 250 more:

"Anfangs wurde nur eine Kleinserie mit 150 Hosen produziert. Diese waren schnell vergriffen", sagt Seilz. Jetzt würden größere Stückzahlen produziert. Nachdem in der ersten Kalenderwoche dieses Jahres Anfragen für rund 250 Hosen kamen, hat die Unternehmerin jetzt bei der Produktion 5000 Hosen in Auftrag gegeben.

[...]

Die Nachfrage steigt weiter. Stündlich würden neue Bestellungen rein kommen. 80 Prozent der Anfragen würden aus Deutschland kommen, aber es seien auch schon welche aus Neuseeland, Italien, Skandinavien und den Vereinigten Arabischen Emirate gekommen.

_{My translation: "At the beginning we only produced 150 pants, but they were sold out quickly" according to Sailz. They will now produce more pants. After getting 250 new requests for pants in the first week this year, the businesswoman ordered the production of 5000 more pants. [...] The demand is increasing. According to the inventor, 80% of requests are from Germany, the rest from New Zealand, Italy, Scandinavia, and the United Arab Emirates.}

According to Der Westen, the pants are only available online and in one retail outlet in Gladbeck. Amazon carries them, but they have 0 ratings so far.

The facebook page of Safe Shorts is here. The average post has 0-2 likes with a single exception (one post in July with 2k likes) .

It will be difficult to get exact numbers, but given the numbers from the producer, the fact that there are not many articles about this available, and that almost all of the articles that do exist are from the same timeframe (January 2017), that there are no actual customer reviews available online, and that the social media interaction with potential buyers seems to be low, it is probably fair to say that this was an item which only gained marginal interest in reaction to a specific event (New Year 2016).