Sexual wellness has a distribution problem. The science, the consumer demand, and the investment are all in place. What's been missing is the infrastructure. The kind of scale that moves a category from conversation to convention.
Enter Adam & Eve. Founded in 1970 as a Chapel Hill storefront selling condoms and lubricants, the brand built by parent company PHE, Inc. has spent five decades as America's most recognizable adult retailer. Now, it's making a different kind of statement. Its first strategic equity partnership—with Kindra, a clinically backed intimate health brand—isn't just a commercial deal. It's a repositioning at scale. And it signals something the industry has been building toward for years: sexual wellness doesn't just belong in the wellness conversation.
"Sexual wellness isn't emerging anymore," Glenn Mersereau, Chief Strategy Officer at PHE, Inc., told BeautyMatter. "It's being recognized as essential."
The global sexual wellness market is valued at $30.23 billion as of 2025, and projected to reach $68.59 billion by 2035. In the US alone, that's an $8.99 billion market growing at a 7.53% CAGR over the next decade. Solo sex is now self-care: In a 2022 US survey conducted by SpringerLink, the most frequently endorsed reasons for masturbating were pleasure, stress relief, and relaxation. Partnered use of sex toys is accelerating, too, with app-enabled and remote-controlled toys driving a new wave of couples incorporating sexual wellness into their intimacy routines. And 36% of American women report using masturbation to manage menopause symptoms, with 1 in 10 calling it their primary relief strategy.
Historically, the sexual wellness category has been treated peripherally to mainstream healthcare, even though over 40% of women and nearly 30% of men globally experience some form of sexual dysfunction. The gap between need and legitimacy is exactly what Adam & Eve is positioning itself to close.
Lewis Broadnax, CEO of PHE Inc., isn't subtle about the ambition, saying, "By 2035, we envision Adam & Eve as the go-to global brand for sexual wellness and intimacy products," with expansion into Europe, Asia-Pacific, and South America already in motion.
For a company that's spent 50 years selling pleasure, Adam & Eve is now selling something the industry has spent decades waiting for: legitimacy.
PHE, Inc. now describes itself as "the nation's largest, oldest, and most trusted source for sexual health and wellness products." No longer selling just adult products, but also sexual health and wellness products. This semantic shift was the first step.
The groundwork was laid in September 2024, when PHE appointed Lewis Broadnax as President, explicitly tasked with "creating and delivering new strategic initiatives across all channels." Now CEO of PHE Inc., Broadnax's first public output of this mandate is the Kindra partnership.
Adam & Eve's revenue sits at approximately $300 million, nearly triple the $113 million reported in 2009. AdamEve.com draws 60 million annual visitors, ships around 2.5 million packages a year, and generated approximately $197 million in online sales in 2024, representing 71% of total revenue. The company is employee-owned and donates over 20% of annual profits to DKT International, one of the world's leading providers of family planning and HIV/AIDS-prevention services. The retailer’s public health roots (born from a UNC graduate school project in family planning and population dynamics) make the wellness pivot feel less like reinvention and more like a return.
"Our public health roots absolutely matter; they shaped the belief that sexual health and overall well-being are deeply connected," Mersereau said. "This shift isn't a departure from who we are; it's an expansion of our mission."
Kindra, the partner chosen to anchor this expansion, was co-founded in 2019 and co-led by Hasti Nazem and Afshan Dosani. The Santa Monica–based brand has raised $7.9 million to date across three rounds, from investors including Primetime Partners, Anne and Susan Wojcicki, Katie Couric Media, and The Community Fund, including a $4.5 million seed round in 2021, led by Female Founders Fund.
Its products are the first to incorporate peptide technology into intimate care: estrogen-free, backed by more than 160 clinical studies, and sampled by over 7,000 board-certified medical providers across institutions, including Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, and Johns Hopkins. Kindra addresses conditions spanning fertility, postpartum, perimenopause, and the side effects of oral contraceptives and GLP-1s, and has moved the needle from TikTok virality to changing vaginal health protocols inside hospital systems nationwide.
To Mersereau, Kindra stood out in multiple ways. "They combine strong clinical credibility with a thoughtful product portfolio and a leadership team that brings real passion to the work. This won't be our last partnership, but it was absolutely the right place to start,” he said.
The deal is a three-part move that positions Adam & Eve as a long-term investor, not just a retail partner.
The structure of the deal is straightforward. What it signals is not.
For Kindra, the partnership means its full product line lands across AdamEve.com and participating franchise locations, with co-branded marketing across Adam & Eve's owned platforms. Kindra is now designated as Adam & Eve's "official partner for vaginal health and wellness."
"It's a signal that sexual wellness is being redefined at the retail level," Afshan Dosani, co-CEO of Kindra, told BeautyMatter. "Distribution like this reflects a move away from novelty and toward normalization, where intimate health products are merchandised as essential, repeat-use wellness, not discretionary add-ons. It's not just distribution. It's combining scale, data, and long-term alignment."
For Adam & Eve, it means something bigger. The equity stake aligns both companies around shared success and shared ambition. "It signals long-term commitment," Mersereau added. "An equity stake aligns us around shared success and creates a foundation for deeper strategic collaboration. We're focused on building the category, not just participating in it."
Broadnax is explicit about where that leads. "Our strategy is to build a disciplined mix of partnerships, investments, and acquisitions with Adam & Eve as the core anchor," he said. "The goal is not just to do deals. It is to build a more scalable, more relevant sexual wellness platform for the future."
America's biggest adult retailer is repositioning itself as a sexual wellness investment platform. But is the market ready to meet them there?
Adam & Eve is betting on a market that’s been building toward this moment, accumulating consumer demand, investment, and cultural legitimacy in equal measure.
Online retail already accounts for 53.55% of the global sexual wellness market share, projected to grow at a CAGR of 11.48% through 2030. Sex toys and devices are the fastest-growing segment at a CAGR of 10.84%, while the 18–24 age group is the fastest-growing consumer demographic at 11.37%, driven by digital exposure and a generational rejection of stigma and shame.
Meanwhile, women’s health investment has surpassed $5 billion in deal value since 2020, with $1.2 billion secured in 2024 alone. In 2025, femtech raised $615.9 million across 35 deals, with average deal size growing from $11.56 million in 2022 to $15.4 million.
The commercial landscape is shifting, too. Walmart, Target, CVS, and Kroger now stock sexual and intimate health products in wellness aisles alongside pregnancy tests and sanitary products. Amazon reported a 40% increase in sales of vibrators and other sex toys from 2023 to 2024, amounting to 8 million units sold online, demonstrating a move into the mainstream.
Culturally, the conversation has also shifted. A 2025 McKinsey survey found that 38% of Gen Z use social media for health and wellness information, second after general internet search. "Platforms like TikTok have played a critical role in accelerating awareness by enabling more open, creator-led conversations at scale," Dosani said. "For brands like Kindra, that's translated into millions of views and engagement with thousands of creators."
Nazem, her co-CEO, puts it plainly: "Education is spreading more rapidly than ever before. Women are fed up with the constant acute treatments and recurrent issues. It's about shifting from symptom management to preventative, everyday care."
The increasing awareness, autonomy, and advocacy that surrounds the space have made sexual health and wellness too big to ignore.
For a category that spent decades fighting for shelf space, legitimacy, and investment, the Adam & Eve and Kindra partnership is something more than a deal announcement. It's a structural shift.
Adam & Eve has made clear that this is the first in a series, with active conversations underway across hormonal health, intimacy technology, body literacy, and longevity-focused self-care. The model is building equity stakes, collaborative marketing content, and clinical partnerships, which looks less like a retailer expanding its range and more like a holding company assembling a portfolio.
Closing the gender health gap could add $1 trillion to the category’s global GDP annually by 2040, with every $1 invested in women's health generating $3 in economic growth. The menopause market alone was valued at $17.79 billion in 2024, projected to reach $24.35 billion by 2030 at a CAGR of 5.42%, yet a decade ago, the category barely existed as a mainstream investment thesis.
“For Kindra, the partnership is validation of a health-first approach,” Nazem said. "When a major platform prioritizes clinically backed, regulatorily compliant products, it reinforces that intimate health is being taken seriously as a medical and scientific category—not just a consumer one."
For the wider industry, the signal is harder to ignore. When America's oldest adult retailer starts acquiring equity stakes in clinical femtech brands, it isn't just repositioning itself. It's redesigning the sexual health and well-being playbook.
"We'll also feel we've arrived when investors we meet stop calling vaginal and sexual health 'niche'—as we know demand and need are quite the opposite,” Dosani added.
This deal demonstrates that the moment is closer than investors think.