In the Business of Orgasms
A femtech founder broke the rules for playful pleasure
If process reflects purpose then the process should be fun. In partnership with ustwo, House of Beautiful Business explores Play Thinking — a product design ethos that values emotion and experience just as highly as function and outcomes. For this series we spoke with experts in fields like psychotherapy, UX design, magic, even big pharma to explore how pursuing emotional responses as key outputs of the design process — and pursuing playfulness more generally — can improve our work lives, our digital experiences, indeed most any type of task.
In this piece, Lioness co-founder Anna Lee talks about how she adapted her engineering mindset to hectic startup life, and what she learned about risk and creativity in the process.
Picture this. You’re at airport security, and your vibrator goes off. In front of your parents. “It was a disaster,” says Anna Lee, recounting an experience had by her co-founder Liz Klinger, “but we’re still laughing about it!”
Many of us would probably be embarrassed in the same situation, but why should we? Destigmatizing sex toys is a goal shared by Lee and Klinger, who along with James Wang founded sexual health and wellness company, Lioness in 2013. A pioneer in the sextech and femtech movements, the company’s flagship product is the Lioness Smart Vibrator, which uses biofeedback to help users have better orgasms.
“Lioness is the only vibrator in the world that can show you your own orgasms so you can learn how to make them better,” it says on their website.
Lee never set out to make vibrators, or become an entrepreneur. She had a solid job as a mechanical engineer at Amazon in San Francisco when she heard about some sex-toy tinkering going on in a lab across the bay in Berkeley. There, she met Klinger and Wang, and just for fun, she joined them.
Both Klinger and Lee hail from conservative families, where sex — or even talking openly about their bodies — is not discussed. “I was scared of my own body until well into my 20s,” says Lee, who during the early stages of establishing Lioness learned that there’s a major disconnect in what people understand about how their bodies work with standard-issue sex toys, particularly vibrators.
“I had an ‘aha’ moment where I realized I had the superpower of thinking about products with a unique perspective that other people didn’t have,” recalls Lee. “And I ended up meeting a CEO of a sex toy company that doesn’t exist anymore, and I asked him, ‘how do you know what you build makes sense? How do you know you’re building the right product for women, or people with vaginas?’ And he said, ‘oh, there’s an industry standard where you put the vibration on your nose, and that’s what a clitoris feels.’ And I just thought — that’s crazy.”
Lee left her Amazon team of 15 other engineers (all of them male), and joined Klinger and Wang on a journey to establish a company that forced her to confront something she had always been terrified of — her body. Clueless about running a business, but confident in her engineering skills, she threw herself in with a lot of passion and uncertainty. Being the daughter of Korean immigrants, who moved to the U.S. with no money and no English, instilled her with a “can-do” attitude at an early age.
One childhood memory stands out: the time her mom drove her to a UPS store to pick up a package for her brother. She had the slip but since her name wasn’t on it they wouldn’t give her the box. So when 12-year-old Lee walked out of the store, defeated, her mom made her turn around and go back in. “‘I did not drive 15-minutes to not pick up this package. Go get it,’” she recalls her mom saying. “‘You take my ID, show him we have the same last name, whatever you need to do, show him photos of your brother, anything, just figure it out.’ I remember being so upset that my mom made me do that, but it’s stuck with me to this day. There are definitely times where somebody will be like, ‘sorry, we can’t work with you on that.’ And I’ll be like, ‘hey, can I just come in’? Being able to push for things that you need to get done — I think that really comes from my mom teaching me to not take no for an answer, to just make it happen.”
As a first-generation Korean-American, Lee’s friends and family expected her to follow the typical path to the “American Dream.” Go to a good college, get a good degree, work at a big corporation, buy a house. So when she quit her job to work at Lioness, she didn’t tell her parents. Not only would leaving her secure position to work on a passion project be perceived as dangerous and selfish, but the product offer wasn’t exactly something her conservative family would celebrate.
“The stigma around sexuality in Korean communities is very high,” she says. “When I first started, I was scared to tell my friends about it. Some of the people I’ve dated didn’t want to tell their friends what I did for a living. It was a lot of navigating the shame.”
Eight years later, Lee is fluent in sex-business talk. She’ll even tell it how it is to the taxi driver: “Oh I’m just coming from a sex toy convention.” She says her new confidence is a result of growing into your own skin, knowing your strengths, and knowing the people who can complement your weaknesses. “I just have so much more fun with it,” she says. “I’m having a blast just being like, take it or leave it. If it makes you uncomfortable, that’s fine. If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine, but this is where I am.”
She hopes we get to a place culturally where talking about sex openly won’t be so taboo. One place she’s seeing an impact is TikTok. Just for fun, she posted a clip about the Lioness vibrator and was shocked by how fast people reacted to it. It created a space that felt safe for people to have conversations about orgasms — if what they’re feeling is actually an orgasm, if they suffer from anorgasmia and can’t climax during sex, and so on.
Creating space to talk about sexual pleasure is only part of what Lioness is doing. Their other big mission is to expand the research around female sexuality. And since their smart vibrator tracks a user’s biofeedback, recording data like intensity and length of orgasm, they’re already making an impact. “We have the world’s largest data set on female sexual function,” says Lee, “and it’s got over 100,000 anonymous data points.”
Here’s where Lioness gets serious. They’re taking that goldmine of anonymous data — data from users who opted in to be a part of the research — and bringing it into the lab. By partnering with medical researcher teams, Lioness is helping to expand the knowledge about female sexual pleasure–things like how the experience differs for varying age ranges, how certain medications change the experience, etc.
“My favorite thing to say is that men can use the product too! Because anal muscles do the same kinds of contractions — it’s all pelvic floor muscles,” says Lee. “So we do have a lot of customers who are non-binary or trans or cisgender men and when we compare graphs between men and women, they’re actually quite similar.”
Lee is all about female empowerment, but she’s thrilled that there’s a whole range of different types of people who enjoy using her product. And what she’s most excited about is being among a new generation of companies that represents a more diverse and inclusive demographic, from people with disabilities, to people of color, to the LGBTQI+ community. “Just seeing more representation, and people being like ‘hey, we need to rethink how we understand sexuality,’ and really witnessing a change. And what’s incredible is seeing younger generations already thinking about wanting to enter a space that didn’t exist a few years ago.”
Thanks to entrepreneurs like Lee, there’s a whole lot more room for play in the world of business.
To learn more about Play Thinking, download the Play Thinking Playbook at ustwo.com.
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