WoW Woman in SexTech I Cecile Gasnault, Brand Director at Smile Makers
Cecile Gasnault is the Brand Director at Smile Makers by Ramblin’ Brands.
Smile Makers is a sexual wellness brand on a mission: to normalize the perception of female sexuality. Created in 2011, the idea was simple but radical: to put vibrators on the shelves of mainstream retail and in the pages of our favourite magazines.
Their products fit naturally among wellness essentials and have been designed based on the latest research on female anatomy. With insights from sexologists, the brand also shares pleasure tips and positive sex education to invite vulva owners everywhere to write their sexual journey on their own terms.
Cecile, tell us a bit about your background and your projects so far.
I have over 10 years of experience in digital innovation in both MNCs and start-ups, and I have specialised in building digital strategies to connect brands with consumers.
When I started my career, the favourite part of my job was to work on focus groups and decrypt consumer surveys to understand deep trends, and to build products and services to better address emerging needs.
I have expanded on that interest at Smile Makers, where I have developed a conversation-based approach to grow the brand organically with our community and to overcome the challenges of being in a very stigmatized category. One of the major outputs of that approach has been the development and publication of our free online course on pleasure-positive sex education for vulva owners, named Vulva Talks.
How did you get into this industry? Has it been an easy industry to get into or have you had many challenges?
Getting into the sexual wellness industry was both easy and challenging. I felt strongly about the idea of changing the way female pleasure is perceived as it is evident that to aspire to gender equality, we need to correct sexist misconceptions we have as a society about the female body and, by extension, female sexuality.
What makes it hard to get into this industry was also what made it feel easy and important to me: the way it is highly stigmatized and tabooed and the misogynistic reasons that underlie that stigma. Many things that are easy for most businesses are more challenging in our category. We have had translation agencies, logistic companies, payment providers refusing to work with us, even though we sell exclusively in the same retailers as their other clients. We have even had an email marketing company refusing to have us as a client for email campaigns to which visitors to our website would have actively subscribed to!
We cannot advertise on social media or do remarketing. But that forces us to be creative and focus on creating useful, valuable content.
How long did it take you to be where you are now? What was the biggest obstacle? What are the challenges of being in the industry you are in?
The company was created in 2011. We started getting listed in some mainstream retailers in 2013, but the first years were slower than we expected. The world was not ready to see vibrators in everyday stores and media. We were met with a lot of circumspection and a lot of “no’s”. The stigma and discomfort around the topic of female sexuality were deeply rooted and hard to remove.
If you are pitching a sexual wellness brand or topic to a buyer or an editor, they most likely have to run it by their management. Since we were only addressing places where the category had never been covered before, this was both new and uncomfortable for the stakeholders involved. The taboo around sex was making it complicated to have the same conversations you would have for any wellness brand, and it was a lot more personal, we had to make everyone we talked to feel comfortable and prove that we could talk about sex in a very normalized, dedramatized way.
Deconstructing this stigma has been and still is a long process, but things have progressed everywhere we operate.
What are your biggest achievements to date?
Our biggest achievement has been to pioneer the launch of the sexual wellness category with mainstream retailers. It has been an uphill battle, but you can now find our friendly vibrators in leading retailers on 5 continents like Goop, Urban Outfitters, Look Fantastic, Cotton On, Ssense, and more. Our most recent launch was at Sephora!
We are also very proud to have grown the brand with a community of thousands of vulva owners from all over the world, whose insights inform our product development, product updates and our content strategy. Our Instagram is basically a constant focus group!
Finally, a major achievement for the brand has been to develop a free, pleasure-focused, science-backed sex education program called Vulva Talks and to lead workshops with public health organizations and student associations from Asia to Europe and North America.
What are the projects you are currently working on?
We are relaunching and expanding our sex-ed program Vulva Talks for sexual health awareness month to make it super easy to digest, to include prompts and call-to-actions to bridge theory and practice and to have a fully inclusive language. We also continue to expand our offering, so watch this space!
Is the #WomenInTech movement important to you and if yes, why?
Tech is shaping our lives in many aspects. It structures our access to information, enables massive data collection and analysis, generates learning, connects us with other people. We know that the way tech is built necessarily carries in the biases of people who develop it. It is therefore essential that it be developed by people from different genders, races, ages, sexual identities, … This is why I find the #WomenInTech movement so essential to ensure that tech factors in and enables the female experience.
What will be the key trends in your industry in the next five years and where do you see it heading?
I think there are 3 main trends shaping the future of the industry.
The first one is technological. We are going to see very interesting developments for new sensorial experiences: new textures, new interfaces (VR, self-learning toys adjusting stimulation to the user’s preferences), more customisable experiences (connected devices, AI-enabled erotica adjusting the stories to what the reader likes,…), new stimulation technologies enabling precision movement for example.
The second is knowledge-related. R&D in the sexual wellness industry is contributing to growing a better understanding of human sexuality. The way the sexual wellness industry develops its offering can fuel the development of new knowledge and the way it delivers its message can advance a respectful, informed and open-hearted conversation about sex.
Lastly, and expanding to the second point, I think we are going to see a more diverse and differentiated offering from the sexual wellness industry to better cater for the realities of human sexuality, that fluctuates throughout our lives, is shaped by our gender expression and is impacted by a life event. For example, I think we will see more gender-neutral toys, solutions to support the sexual health of people suffering from conditions like PCOS, vaginismus, products and services catering for different life phases (pregnancy, post-childbirth, peri-menopause and menopause).
What is the most important piece of advice you could give to anyone who wants to start a career in this industry?
Sexual wellness is a very exciting industry, where we have the opportunity to change the narrative for female sexuality and to enable one that is centered on the individual’s needs and desires.
To do that, you will be going against deeply rooted and antagonist beliefs that are not always conscious but that have a very tangible impact on your business. Case in point: Facebook allows male sexual wellness companies to advertise for erectile dysfunction drugs but forbids female sexual wellness brands to promote lubricants. The rules will be rigged against you and part of your job is to change that.
My advice would therefore be to be capable of patience because deconstructing longstanding ideas takes time and requires creativity. That being said, it is incredibly rewarding!
Who are three inspirational women in your respective industry you admire?
Polly Rodrigues, who founded Unbound Babes and co-founded Women Of Sex Tech. Her journey is very inspiring.
Tania Boler, who founded Elvie, a femtech company that is creating beautiful and high-quality products for post-partum and is doing so with a very energizing and taboo-breaking style.
She’s not exactly in our industry but I want to do a shout-out to Helen O’Connell, a leading urologist in Australia whose work has been groundbreaking and instrumental to better understanding the real anatomy of the clitoris. We owe her big!
Find out more about Smile Makers on their website.
This interview was conducted by Marija Butkovic, Digital Marketing and PR strategist, founder, and CEO of Women of Wearables. She regularly writes and speaks on topics of wearable tech, fashion tech, IoT, entrepreneurship, and diversity. Follow Marija on Twitter @MarijaButkovic and read her stories for Forbes here.