I have often referred to Good Clean Love as my fifth child, the one that was born a few years after my youngest daughter, when I was desperately searching for a way back into my body and my sex life. Good Clean Love became the answer to how to sustain a sex life with my husband of then 20 years despite the complications from 4 live births over the previous decade. This was the child that I tended late at night when all the others were finally asleep and was in many ways a way into my finding myself- and my own purpose and meaning beyond the roles of mother and wife that I loved, but knew that there was something more for me.
As we approach the 21st birthday and independence moment of this last child of mine, I can more easily see the pivotal moments that made this business what it is today. Even our name, Good Clean Love was a work in progress in the early years, having tried other variations in trying to capture the real work of the company I was building. And although it seemed like a happy accident when I finally landed on Good Clean Love, it is the meaning of each of these words which has guided and informed what we have become.
We were the first to celebrate and embody the concept Good in Consumer products with our iconic flag logo that first caught shopper’s attention at shelf. The meaning of good was baked into us early as we were one of the first B corps in Oregon and now one of the oldest. Although many consumers still don’t understand the meaning of this certification, it is at its essence a way to measure the good that a business does for employees, community and planet. For us it served as a compass by which to make decisions- big and small- using bioplastic packaging in all our products, our various giving programs- for me the good was the real value that kept me going all the years when we didn’t make money.
Clean was the main reason I started the business in the first place as I needed products that didn’t leave me suffering with hours of side effects from toxic ingredients. I began with an attention and focus on using only non toxic ingredients. It was our inclusion in a NIH funded study in 2010 and the subsequent revelation of being the safest product in the market was the turning point in the business direction and my own career that changed everything. In early 2012 the idea of clean truly crystalized for me when I learned about the biophysical impacts of osmolality and better understood why ingredients like propylene glycol were so damaging to vaginal tissue. As I learned more about the science of biomimicry for vaginal health, we developed our patented BioMatch formulations which not only do not disrupt the critical balance in the vaginal microbiome but also maintain the optimal pH level and support the growth of healthy lactobacilli. This was the moment when the Good Clean Love mission expanded beyond solving sexual health issues into creating a product line to address the dynamic and misunderstood issues of vaginal biome science.
I was so blessed to have a bio physicist mentor who share all his career learnings with me and helped me learn to ask better questions. The more that I learned, the more enraged and passionate I became about serving the needs of women’s health in way that would help women feel better.
Our biggest challenge in developing innovative product solutions begins with the ways in which the standard of care for vaginal health conditions has remained stagnant for decades. Currently all vaginal conditions are considered disease states and require prescription treatments. The FDA is still using a code from 1938 that does not include the words “woman”, “vagina” or “pregnancy”, still referring to these nouns as these “other conditions”. In designing products, there remains only the single use case of “easing penile insertion” for all new product development. Although we frequently read about the violation of reproductive health rights in terms of the right to choose and abortion, current regulatory language and education prevents women from having agency over their vaginal health in important ways.
These are exciting times for Good Clean Love to come into its full maturity and potential. So many women are fighting for funding for more research on women’s health and so many new options for learning more about your health are becoming available. We are playing our part through our sister Biotech company Vaginal Biome Science is pioneering an exciting new vaginal microbiome qPCR panel and national data collection trial to better understand the relationship between vaginal health and microbiome conditions.
