When Whitney Geller was browsing the condom aisle back in 2020, she found herself shocked by the category’s dated and reductive approach to branding and design. To fill the gap in the market, Geller and her business partner Yasemin Emory launched Jems, a gender-inclusive condom brand.
“It was a quick phone call to my business partner to be like, ‘Have you been in this aisle lately?’” Geller said at Glossy’s Virtual Wellness Forum on Thursday. “There was so much shame, that was the most of what I felt. And what we realized later was that a lot of typical condom packaging preys on men’s insecurities. And we thought, ‘What if we could just create something that would make young people feel good when they’re in this aisle?’”
On Thursday, Glossy hosted its first summit dedicated to wellness, bringing together leading founders and experts in the category, including Perelel co-founder and co-CEO Victoria Thain Gioia and Rael co-founder and CEO Yanghee Paik. During Glossy’s sexual wellness panel, which included founders Lauren Bosworth of Love Wellness, Éva Goicochea of Maude and Jems’ Whitney Gellar, the panelists all agreed: When it comes to lifting the shame and stigma around products related to sexual health and pleasure, branding and design is key.
“Design is one of the most critical pieces of this category and has been the thing that’s cut through the noise and created any kind of change,” said Goicochea, whose minimal vibrators are now sold at the likes of Erewhon and Sephora. “The product should be exceptional, and they should have standards — that is table stakes. Design is the thing that makes people start to understand things, and starts to create destigmatization and conversation for people.”
Safety standards are non-negotiable for condoms, which are regarded as a Class II medical device by the FDA, Geller said. But that doesn’t discount the importance of good branding, when it comes to getting young people to actually use condoms.
“The more stigma associated with a product, the more there has to be [good] design because you have to outweigh it to make something feel good,” said Geller. “STIs are at the highest levels they’ve ever been right now, between the ages of 15-24. Do you want young people to be using condoms? Well, maybe don’t make them something that you’re embarrassed to have out on your table.”
When conceptualizing the packaging for her supplements brand Love Wellness, Bosworth said she took cues from the beauty aisle. She wanted her audience to feel comfortable shopping products associated with vaginal health, rather than embarrassed.
“We call them ‘shy buys,’” she said of products related to issues like UTIs and yeast infections. “I thought to myself, ‘Can I make a vaginal suppository that makes you feel just as good when you hold it in your hands as a lip gloss does?’ In the very early days, design really drove how we thought about the brand and how we made it a beauty-adjacent brand.”
Contemporary and inclusive branding can help consumers overcome the stigma around products related to sexual health and wellness. But there still exist other barriers to marketing and selling sexual wellness products, particularly on social media, where terms and keywords related to sex are often flagged or censored.
Bosworth said Love Wellness discontinued a lubricant because of the challenges with pushing paid promotions around such a product on social media.
“It was so challenging to put paid behind it because the platforms kept dinging our search terms and keywords that we ultimately just discontinued that product,” she said. “It makes it a little more challenging when you have new innovation and you’re trying to communicate what the product actually does, but you’re going up against FDA regulatory guidelines or the guidelines of the bigger platforms. … In the early days, and even sometimes now, we’ll try to make a retail fixture, and the word ‘vagina’ on it will get flagged.”
Not all restrictions are made equal. Goicochea said that online censorship typically more heavily targets products related to female sexual health.
“Our domain is blacklisted on Meta because of the devices, which look like literal paperweights,” she said. “I’m not sure if the audience knows this, but [erectile dysfunction] pills are fine, and they can talk about sex. … If it’s about vaginal health and anything related to women’s health, it gets censored. And with AI monitoring all of this, it’s even worse because you can’t really get to a person. I will put on the record that I’ve spoken to the chief revenue officer of Meta, and [the situation] is not going to change for a long time.”
