Bloomingdale’s, Sephora and the Embrace of Sexual Wellness

While Dame is more focused on devices, it also carries a $30 “arousal serum,” an $18 aloe-based lubricant and a $95 adult-oriented pillow called, much in keeping with start-up parlance, “Pillo.”

The companies tend to emphasize their products’ clean and natural ingredients. Descriptions like “aloe-infused” and “contains jojoba oil” are common.

The styling of the products has caught some retailers by surprise. For example, Mr. Aldridge said Madewell, a clothing retailer, had initially balked at the idea of carrying Maude products on its website. But then a buyer saw the items on a colleague’s desk, marveled that they “looked like a beauty brand” and decided it was worth adding them to the company’s online marketplace.

Cristina Nuñez, a co-founder of True Beauty Ventures, a venture firm that invested in Maude, said the products were crafted with an eye to the “shelfie,” meaning that people can feel proud and comfortable displaying the items in a photograph on social media.

“We would joke around that the vibe was something that you could leave out on your night stand and not be embarrassed that you had a vibrator on your night stand,” she said. “There wouldn’t be that stigma around it because it wasn’t crass.”

It’s difficult to estimate the size of the sexual wellness industry, particularly because increasingly it can cross over into beauty products. Many of the key players are private companies, and both Maude and Dame were unwilling to share their sales figures. But Ms. Nuñez, who studied seven or eight similar brands before investing in Maude, said many of the companies her firm had looked at made in the “low single-digit millions” of dollars in revenue. She said she was optimistic about the path to tens of millions of dollars in revenue and beyond.

“The opening of retail to these brands will help them get there,” Ms. Nuñez said, “because historically, they really were only able to get to that point through direct-to-consumer, and now they’ve got multiple outlets, from mass, to prestige to luxury department store channels.”