Women’s Viagra-like sex serum coming to Neiman Marcus, Bergdorf Goodman, Saks, and Nordstrom

September 3, 2021

After years of scientific research, Worcester, Massachusetts-based Vella Bioscience has introduced what it describes as “a revolutionary pleasure serum that promises to increase the frequency, intensity, and satisfaction of a woman’s orgasm,” reports Forbes.

Developed by a medical team—including Dr. Harin Padma-Nathan, the lead principal investigator for Viagra and Cialis—Vella works locally to relax the smooth muscle tissue and increase blood flow to enhance sexual arousal and orgasm in women.

And Forbes says, while Dr. Padma-Nathan is quick to say Vella is not Viagra for women, but from a layman’s—or more accurately, a laywoman’s—perspective, it sounds a lot like it.

“Viagra for men is very different. Viagra is a prescription medication that works systemically to treat erectile dysfunction,” he explains. “Vella is applied locally and doesn’t treat sexual dysfunction. Rather it works to enhance sexual pleasure from the potential that is already there.”

Unlike menthol-based drugstore topicals, which can irritate, or lubricants that only lubricate, Vella delivers a carefully regulated dose of cannabidiol (CBD) through a nano-encapsulated serum that penetrates the delicate tissue in a way the topical application of oil can’t.

Rather than taking a pharmaceutical approach, as a comparable Viagra for women would, Vella aims at the rapidly growing sexual wellness market.

“We wanted to give half the world’s population—women—equity in sexual fulfillment in a manner that is safe and effective,” Dr. Padma-Nathan continues. “We are focused on augmenting a woman’s normal function or recuperating a lot of that function if lost, as in post-menopausal women. And in our studies we found two out of three women overall will respond.”

The idea has been quick to catch on: With women now demanding equal time in the pleasure department, established retailers are scrambling to find ways to serve her. Bloomingdale’s, for example, has opened a “Sexual Wellness” shop online, offering “body-positive, female-led” brands as the “ultimate in self-love essentials,” with an emphasis sex toys.

Vella’s packaging is designed to look like prestige beauty and sit alongside a woman’s beauty products and on a retailer’s beauty counter.

Priced at $65 for 16 carefully regulated doses, it is pricey but its research-based technology justifies the price tag. However, it is also available in a single-use packet for $8; and, this holiday season, the company is releasing a gift-boxed skew for $30 with five applications.

In May it was introduced on the company’s direct-to-consumer website and quickly gained interest from retailers. Bergdorf Goodman’s trend-spotter and creative director Linda Fargo was one of the first to bring it into the store.

Also taking the in-store plunge is multi-brand luxury beauty retailer Cos Bar. It is now carried in five of its 19 stores, though it is planning to add two more locations soon. Cos Bar was founded in 1976 and is renowned for leading with beauty innovations.

Other luxury retailers, including Neiman Marcus, Saks, and Nordstrom, offer Vella online, but not yet in-store.

Research contact: @Forbes

September 4, 2024

Sizzler is a bit of an anomaly: Despite having shrunk to a fraction of its former size and retreating primarily to the West Coast, it’s a brand that remains a ubiquitous cultural touchpoint—in movies and online, on South Park and Saturday Night Live. And even if you’ve never eaten at one, you probably know what it is.

This made it a dream client for Mike Perry, founder and chief creative officer of Tavern, which collaborated with the beloved yet beleaguered chain on a comprehensive brand refresh spanning from its website to its stores, reports Fast Company.

“This brand is weirdly working backwards—it exists within the mind, but not necessarily in the world or in the hand,” Perry says. “It’s the most fun to take the brand that has been beaten up for decades and restore it. It’s not fun to take the shiny one and push it a little further.”

Digging into Sizzler’s past

When it launched in 1958 in Culver City, California, Sizzler helped invent the casual dining chain restaurant. It had its ups and downs over the years, but for an eatery known as much for its endless salad bar (which accounts for 40% of its business) as its affordable steaks, a global pandemic was not a great development.

The chain filed for bankruptcy in September 2020 and has been building back since. Today there are 75 locations (down from 270 at Sizzler’s peak). Christopher Perkins—formerly of Anheuser-Busch InBev—joined in 2019, and is now president and CEO.

Perkins says the brand had lost its way, and he knew it needed more than just a new coat of paint. He aspired for Sizzler to become a brand not locked in the past, but rather one of Southern California’s regional landmarks, like In-N-Out Burger, or Wawa on the East Coast.

In addition to losing its way, Perkins discovered that Sizzler had also lost its history, quite literally—there was no robust archive of assets and other ephemera. So he began to do a bit of archaeology into the company’s past, at one point sending a marketing intern on missions to the brand’s storage facility to see what could be dug up.

Prior to launching Tavern, Perry had worked on the Budweiser account at Jones Knowles Ritchie, which is where he originally met Perkins. Once Tavern came on board the project, Perry and Perkins immersed themselves in all things Sizzler—from store walk-throughs to the corporate side of the business—and did a bit of brand excavation of their own, buying up everything they could find on eBay.

In the end, Tavern saw the solution to Perkins’s problem as a “modern heritage” approach.

“It’s the search for timelessness,” Perry says. “The real tension between modernity and heritage and finding that is taking the old and ultimately making it new—and making it new so that it can continue to work in the future …. If you’re always trying to balance that, that’s really where the good stuff starts to come out.”

A cast of characters

One archival find was a steak-shucking bull character rendered in a Hanna-Barbera-esque style, which they dubbed Ribby Ribeye.

“All great brands have characters,” Perry says. “[Ribby Ribeye] is exactly what embodies a famous Southern California brand from both the midcentury and today, and it seemed like a no-brainer to bring back.”

Tavern built out a supplementary cadre of characters representing the brand’s other best-known offerings—the cheese toast, the unlimited shrimp, a lobster tail; and Perry’s favorite, the Salad Barbarian, an amorphous blob on a plate representing all the goods available at the beloved bar.

For the brand’s fonts, Tavern again turned to the past. Perry says Sizzler had used cuts of Windsor and Caslon Black Swash from its beginning through the mid-’80s or so, and they felt very Southern Californian in design and aesthetic, so his team utilized Windsor EF-Extra, Emfatick NF (a take on Caslon Black Swash), and Block Berthold Heavy and Condensed. For a contemporary feel, all the elements are blended with modern messaging and photography.

Tavern was given a mandate not to mess with the logo, so the team only slightly messed with the logo. They essentially cleaned it up—ditching the black background and dialing it back to a single color; refining the type in minute ways, and flattening it out. They also slanted it at an angle to drive home the notion of the brand’s cattle-brand element.

The Sizzler glow-up

Of course, all of these aesthetic updates mirror larger—and perhaps more consequential—changes. Tavern also worked on the restaurant interiors, uniforms, the living “brand” of how workers talk and embody the restaurant (think Chick-fil-A and all those “my pleasures”), the plates, and more.

It’s safe to say that if you stepped inside any of the competition in the category—Outback, Chili’s, Applebee’s, etc.—in the absence of a logo, you’d probably have no definitive idea of where you were. They all tend to look more or less the same: dark environments, menus with food shot on dark backgrounds, which Perry says doesn’t exactly convey freshness or taste.

So, the team sought to separate Sizzler from the rest of the pack by resurrecting the brand’s ownable red color, aiming for a bright and friendly overall vibe. The new website is now live, and Perkins says the changes will be rolling out to physical restaurants in phases.

In many ways, the rebrand is an attempt to remind the world that Sizzler is an anomaly. It exists in a space between chain restaurant and steak house, not to mention past and present. As for the future, the team says the key to all that nostalgia not feeling dated is to maintain a constant understanding of what is culturally relevant today—and then looking to the brand’s heritage and seeing what resonates with it.

As always, time will tell. For now, Perry says, “[After working] on big brands, we get bored of the brand a lot faster than the consumer. And just frankly [with Sizzler] I’m not—and that’s what I think a successful rebrand is.”

Research contact: @FastCompany

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