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Client: Vancouver-based Buzz Marketing and Associates (now Lift Strategies) provided boutique sales and marketing tools to small and medium-sized businesses.

Product/Service: Buzz client O’My Natural Products (now O’My Discovery Products) sought to enter the emerging sexual health and wellness marketplace with an all-natural personal product, O’My Lubricant.

Document: I researched and wrote an editorial-like science/health/business story for the company’s communications department titled “A Little Something For The Bedside Table”. Buzz included the piece as part of their marketing package. An editor picked up the story and assigned a related editorial health piece.

Sample (full text):

A Little Something For The Bedside Table

Rumour has it Sex In The City’s Amanda keeps a bottle of something special in her bedroom side table. And like TV’s over-forty sexophile, real women her age are discovering that the secret to delicious sex is not a bottle of chilled champagne, but an easy-open, hand-sized bottle of personal lubricant.

Lube nowadays is more sexy, more slippery, more economical and more healthy than champagne, too. Thanks to curious lady boomers and some creative entrepreneurship in Vancouver, Canada, the K-Y of yesterday’s drug store counter is being replaced by the O’My of today’s health food shelves.

Traditionally only available at XXX shops or pharmacy aisles, lubricants have been ~ for the most part ~ male oriented. Probe, Maximus, and Eros do battle against the likes of Trojan, ForPlay and Astroglide in a virtual warfield of water-, petroleum- and even silicone-based formulas.

Their location near the condoms doesn’t do much for a woman’s sensibilities, and their ingredient lists look like a drugstore themselves: methyl paraben (a microbial growth inhibitor and low-grade toxic substance) mixed with diazolindinyl urea  (a urine-derived preservative and primary cause of contact dermatitis) and propylene glycol (“used by the chemistry, food, and pharmaceutical industries as an anti-freeze,” – Agency For Toxic Substances and Disease Registry) add up to a sour cocktail, let alone something you’d want to introduce to your private parts.

Caught on a slippery bridge between the need for an accessible, sex-friendly lubricant and a healthy, body-friendly moisturizer, the lube selection for women has been precipitously limited. Cue Andreas Maulhardt of O’My Natural Lubricants, to the rescue.

Having already dabbled in natural hair care products, Maulhardt couldn’t let the opportunity of a playful and all-natural line of lubes for women slide through his hands.

With the enthusiastic contributions of a custom lab, a health store distributor, an assortment of herbalists and sex boutique owners, and a horde of keen product testers, O’My All-Natural Lubricant, reputedly the only of its kind, was born.

It’s free from chemicals, loaded with herbs, sugarfree, water-based and, according to sexpert Josey Vogels who swears by it in her Messy Bedroom column, “it’s great and you should get some.”

Womyn’s Ware, a Vancouver boutique with loyal retail and website shoppers, is “thrilled” with the product. “Once we brought this new lube to our customers’ attention,” write the staff in the womynsware.com website, “the first question on their next visit was Does it come in a pump size?’”

The shop joins others across North America in recognizing womens’ need for more all-natural products. “More and more women are turning to products that have natural food ingredients in them,” observes Sebastian Yeung of Montreal’s Joy Toyz (joytoyz.ca).

“They are more moisturizing, and the texture is closer to their own organic lubrication. As well, many of these food items can be ingested, so people feel more comfortable using them for personal care.”

Rachel Venning of Seattle’s Toys In Babeland (babeland.com) reports that her O My “dedicated fans” appreciate the lube’s herbal “excitement.” While other lubes such as Probe include natural ingredients, an all-natural like O My ups the ante.

In O’My, for example, clinically documented natural remedies such as Damiana, Siberian Ginseng, Guarana, and Yohimbe join the newer grapefruit and hemp seed extracts in a female-oriented ingredient list. Siberian ginseng, for example, is a traditional energizer that uses a natural store of glycosides to increase alertness. Hemp seed oil contains substantial quantities of linoleic and linolenic acids: essential fatty acids that contribute to its moisturizing properties.

“Shopping for lubes is a lot like shopping for processed food,” advises Yeung,  you’ve got to “read the label to see what you are getting.”

Clearly, the increasingly vocal female market is becoming increasingly particular about what we are putting on ~ and in ~ our bodies. It only makes sense that when the time comes for that little bottle of kiwi-strawberry flavoured personal lube to pop out of the bedside table, it should be a little more, well, personable. Oh my. ###

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