Talk Pleasure to Me
Foria’s Origin Story with Foria CEO Jon Brandon
Talk Pleasure to Me is our series where we talk to experts on sex, relationships, and caring for your body (& mind) so you can get inspired on your pleasure journey and learn from the best. On Foria’s 10th Anniversary, we’re chatting with Foria CEO Jon Brandon to dive into the origin story of Foria and the meaning behind the brand. From a career in real estate, finance and law, Jon made the unusual switch into becoming a sexual wellness-focused entrepreneur. Jon opens up in a vulnerable way about why he wanted to start a sexual wellness company and what the brand means to him.
Watch the full interview with Jon on Foria’s Youtube channel and subscribe to keep learning.
What was the spark or idea behind creating a company that was focused solely and specifically on sexual wellness?
If you go back to the early 2010s, especially in Colorado (I'm based in Boulder, Colorado), a lot of conversation was related to the compassionate uses of cannabis. There was a movement regarding the different types of legalization of cannabis. That was a debate that was happening across the country but ultimately Colorado was one of the first states to take action and create the right regulatory framework for cannabis. And a lot of those conversations were centered around the compassionate uses of cannabis. It wasn't all recreational and people getting high. It was interesting and creative ways that people could use cannabis for a variety of wellness type products and wellness things in their lives.
Then on a personal level, I was going through something pretty profound. Let's just say it was quite an inflection point or a transformational time in my life. What I'm referencing is that my marriage pretty much came to an end around 2010. And for me, that was a very painful and challenging thing to experience and to go through. At the time, I had two young children, a six-year-old son and a three-year-old daughter.
What it forced for me, was an evaluation of my priorities. What were the things that I was passionate about? What did I care about? Who was I? The really big existential questions of life! It was a deep thinking time and a time to evaluate not just who was I, but who did I want to be in the world and on what did I want to put attention? What did I really care about? What could or would I be passionate about?
In going through kind of a multi-year process, honestly around that, and in meeting a lot of folks here in Boulder in particular, the notion of doing good in the world while also having a for-profit or a business orientation. That was something that was novel to me at that point in my life. Having grown up in New York and over most of my life prior to that time period, I was fairly transactional focused and very straight up business focused. What I began to appreciate was the level of entrepreneurship and community here in Boulder that was focused on social purposes.
And not just from a philanthropic or a charitable perspective, but actually combining those and using social purpose, social benefit as a motivating force for business and using entrepreneurship and business as an agent for change in a variety of social benefit contexts. And so that was sort of the environment that I was living in, both personally and culturally at that time.
Those were the conditions from which Foria emerged for me. That’s the orientation that I had from the beginning, and it's still the core value that we have – being of service to people in their lives. The particular way that we're focused is to really help people with connection, connection, embodiment to oneself and by extension to one's partners or to people in one's life.
It sounds like there was this merging between discovering what mattered to you, seeing an opportunity to do good in other people's lives along with helping them with connection and interpersonal relating in a way that would have benefited you. It's interesting how when people go through a crisis or a heartbreak or something that fundamentally shifts the direction of their life, it impacts the way they show up in the world and their purpose. Was that the motivating factor for you?
I can honestly say that being oriented around a specific purpose and being of service to other people was the clarity that I was able to find during that time. Extraordinary change is not something that most humans willingly embrace. It's hard work, right? It can be extraordinarily painful.
There's a fear that if I let go of this version of me, who am I? And how does that feel? And so it was a pretty profound time in my life. And that’s the reason that I feel, and have felt for the last 10 years, more on-point and on-purpose in the world than I ever have. It’s because of how challenging and painful it was to feel like that sense of not knowing what was gonna happen. The depths of the challenge led to the feelings of gratitude and curiosity. The premium that I place on things in my life now are a direct line from how difficult and challenging those times were.
How have your views around sexual wellness changed over the last decade of Foria?
The opportunity at the beginning was very pleasure focused. The enhancement of pleasure was the primary way of thinking that we had at the beginning – this discovery of the use of plants to enhance human pleasure. It was a very exciting idea to happen upon and to start to nourish and develop concepts around. We felt the profound potential was to enhance pleasure and to deepen states of embodiment and connection, but via the enhancing of pleasure.
Not too long after we got going, we discovered how meaningful it was for folks, not just on the pleasure enhancing side, but on the pain relieving or the discomfort. We started to appreciate people who are experiencing an obstacle to the pleasure side of things. Those experiences are even more profound and extraordinary. And that wasn't necessarily obvious at the beginning. It was more of a process of really carefully listening to people's experiences and having experiences myself or ourselves as a team. The depth of people's experience when it was helping reclaim or find something that was challenging or unavailable for a myriad of reasons. That was really something that was not obvious at the beginning and was really a joy to discover, to lean into and to communicate.
We really share this notion of building a community. We've held from the beginning that the important communications are peer to peer. It's someone who has an experience and can share that in service of someone else who might benefit from hearing from their friend or some trusted voice in their life. It's not so much brand speak, brand communication. We're trying to steward conversations.
We're obviously handling and working with material and conversations that in some places are deemed taboo or carry with them a lot of shame – just all of the cultural things around sex and intimacy and relationship. These are not things that the majority of people find super easy to share about or to talk about. As a company and as a brand trying to be a facilitator, we’re trying to create a safe space. We’re trying to give people permission to be able to talk about these things, to learn about things and to have products that support people in their explorations of their own experiences around intimacy. That’s been kind of a bit of a surprise and a fun piece of this experience, is just to really relate to people in whatever ways that they're relating to the material.
Tell us more about how products have been developed at Foria over time.
Honestly, that's been supported by practitioners. People who are in those moments with people where they have something, either something they're striving for or something that they're not experiencing that they would like to experience, all of those different ways.
So whether it's pelvic floor practitioners or even the medical community, our community has really provided important guidance and feedback. There's been a lot of support and also a bit of serendipity. For example, our Chief Education Officer Kiana Reeves showed up at the time she did and helped elevate the ability to articulate and discuss and work with these concepts.
It's been really magical in a lot of ways, just in terms of the voices and the people that have put their shoulder behind the rock here for this cause. We're a very passionate bunch and it's been really wonderful to see who's shown up when with what ideas that could help advance the cause.
We started in the cannabis space and now we’ve even developed products that don't contain ingredients from marijuana or even from hemp. There's been an evolution and arc in the product space, in the development, in the marketing, and in the languaging. So it's been kind of an interesting journey with a number of twists and turns along the way that weren't scripted ahead of time.
There's no playbook for how to be a plant-based sexual wellness company in 2010 to 2025. It's a process of just trying to divine what's the next right move. It’s to create awareness and give people products that are highly effective and meaningful in their lives.
Every time we have introduced a product, it's because it's extremely effective against an important need or need state that people have. It's not like we had all of that written down back in 2013 or 2014. It’s been very much an iterative and collaborative process, with a number of really special people providing great input and participation.
How has Foria been able to navigate the challenges around taboo and around the things that have gotten our way from being able to grow?
I would say that the number one thing is that we have been extremely resilient and demonstrated a lot of perseverance. There's the plan and then there's what happens when you get punched in the face and have to figure out what’s your plan look like now? And so we've taken a lot of hits in that regard, whether direct censorship of ads, ad accounts being closed, or trying to process transactions and take credit card payments. The cultural resistance to the larger subject matter is still very real.
There's been a tremendous amount of progress and evolution, culturally, just over this decade but the social injustice aspects of it are still extraordinary. We can't gloss over the fact that if you're selling male erectile dysfunction or sexual function products, you can speak about it. But if we're talking about female pleasure subject matter, it gets scrutinized, policed, and regulated completely differently. There is a real lack of equity.
One of the things that we have done to address that is to change our formulations to make them more accessible to more people on more platforms. We now have a suite of products that are botanicals only and don’t have certain ingredients. For example, Amazon came to us a couple of years ago and said, “Hey, there's a lot of people looking for the brand on the platform. You can't sell CBD products on Amazon, but we see that you just developed products that don't have CBD in them.” (Foria’s Amazon store) So we've figured out how to stay alive, right? And then how to find people, right? And how to connect to our core audiences.
Cultural acceptance of the underlying subject matter is also quite different now than it was at the beginning and has changed a bunch over time. If you look at our cultural appreciation for wellness, independent of sex or female pleasure, that has also gone way up. There's more attention and awareness of the value to people of feeling good within all aspects of their life. There is a nice cultural tailwind that I think we've benefited from. It no longer feels like something that we're just out there by ourselves. There's a whole lot more companies and awareness culturally of the value of wellness-related businesses and activities.
What is a really special/favorite Foria milestone for you?
In business you tend to measure things in numbers. There's a tendency to reduce everything to a P&L or a quantitative milestone. Qualitative milestones are something that I've kind of riffed on for myself through the years. It’s the feedback that we've gotten from our community versus a milestone per se in the numerical sense.
The most moving moments that I've experienced are hearing from people directly using Foria products. I remember one testimonial/share from a consumer that was a couple of years ago now. I remember the depth of the gratitude that this woman was expressing in terms of the impact on her life and the connection that she felt to herself. She used the word ‘decades’.
It had been decades since she had felt as turned on and connected to herself. ‘It literally saved my marriage,’ were her words. It revitalized the connection and the passion that they had for each other. That one just really sits with me.
Just in looking at it from a quantitative standpoint, we added up the number of people whose lives we think were directly impacted. We're now well into a couple million was the last count. When I came into this, I used the phrase, “my goal is to make a meaningful impact in a lot of people's lives.” I have a tough time quantifying what “a lot” is, but a few million, which where we sit right now, certainly feels like that's been worth it, right? That's been worth a decade of my life. Just knowing that literally millions of people's lives have been positively impacted by the work that we're doing lights me up. That gets the juices flowing. And that's worth fighting for.
Where do you see the Foria future going? What are you most excited about? What's the thing that's like, ooh, yeah, this feels important and no one's really doing it yet.
The next frontier for Foria is less about adding a specific product pillar that's not present. From a business perspective, there's just so much work to be done in creating more awareness of the wonderful suite of products that we have. The next phase is more about shouting it from the rooftops and making sure that people are aware and have a good understanding of what's possible with the brand and with the products.
What you'll see from us next is a bolder posture of how we expand and extend into the world at a higher level. And I'm sure that there will be continued innovation in products because humans being humans and plants being plants, there's just so much more that we can do to harness the beautiful synergies that are possible.
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