NEW YORK — A New York Times article is spotlighting the growing trend of major retailers carrying sexual wellness products, highlighting beauty giant Sephora's recent partnership with Dame and Maude to offer their pleasure product lines.
“With careful rebranding, word choice and packaging, products like vibrators and lubricants have become newly palatable to higher-end retailers that cater to women,” The New York Times reported today in a story examining this trend.
The Times called the addition of sex toys by the nationwide cosmetics retailer “a significant evolution in the public acceptance of such products, helped in part by celebrity endorsements [which] comes amid a broader focus on wellness and self-care spurred by the pandemic.”
“Dame's partnership with Sephora enhances our message that pleasure is wellness,” Alexandra Fine, CEO and founder of Dame, told XBIZ earlier this month. “We're thrilled to have a national, credible beauty retailer carrying pleasure products alongside face wash and lipstick, as it helps to normalize sexual wellness as part of our holistic beauty rituals. Being welcomed into the Sephora community is a reminder that our sexual well-being matters."
According to Maude’s founder and CEO Éva Goicochea, “Sephora and these other big beauty retailers are saying, 'It’s just like everything else, you can buy it together.' It’s impactful in this subtle way.”
As XBIZ reported last year, major chains Bloomingdale’s and Nordstrom were pioneers in carrying sexual wellness products.
“People are spending more time, energy and disposable income on their own wellness, so it was natural that this expanded to sexual wellness,” Elizabeth Miller, a vice president who oversees cosmetics at Bloomingdale’s, told The New York Times’ Sapna Maheshwari. “It’s evolved so much from what it used to be, maybe 10 or 15 years ago, to be much more approachable.”
The Paradox of Progress and Stigma
However, speaking to TechCrunch about the progressive development, Andrea Barrica, CEO of sexual wellness education platform O.School, cited the “paradoxical issue” that raising money for companies in the sector, even in the new climate of acceptance, “is still no easy feat.”
“When you go into a space where very few people have gone, with a lot of barriers, arguably you need more money, but typically we have to do it with less money upfront,” Barrica told TechCrunch.
“The larger the fund, the more common it is” for it to have a vice clause, she added, referring to outdated venture capital funding policies that “contractually obligate them to pass on companies that offer products or services in categories like alcohol, tobacco, gambling, weapons, porn — and sexual wellness,” TechCrunch’s Anna Heim explained.
Barrica recommends being upfront and telling prospective fund managers or partners, “We’re really excited about sexual wellness as a part of health and wellness. Is this going to be a problem with one of your LPs [limited partners]?’”
As the Times pointed out, social media stigma still results in an absurd situation where Maude “may not be able to advertise its devices on these platforms, [but] can promote its ‘massage candle,’ which melts into massage oil, and its condoms.”
And when Dame’s Alexandra Dime tried posting, “Somebody pinch me — after five years of pitching, we are in Sephora!” on LinkedIn this month, “her post was automatically removed multiple times for violating the professional site’s guidelines against ‘sexually explicit material or language,’” the Times reported today.
