Podcast Host And Intimacy Coach Cat Meyer Launches Sexual Wellness Brand Head South With A Trio Of Lubes

After launching sex-positive podcast Head South Radio in February, Cat Meyer is heading into sexual wellness products with new brand Head South’s trio of intimacy serums.

The water-based, silicone-based and oil-based “pleasure provisions” are, respectively, $22 Slip Serum, $24 Slide Serum and $24 Oasis Oil. Sustainability is a key part of Head South, and there are plastic tube refills for each of the lubes packaged in glass bottles. Slip’s refill retails for $18, and Oasis and Slide’s refills are $20.

Modern entrants notwithstanding, much of the pleasure products space is still hyper-masculine and hypersexualized. Inspired by the brand Boy Smells, Meyer took Head South in a different, vivid direction.

“They coined the phrase ‘genderful’ versus ‘gender neutral,’” she says. “I love that our brand is very colorful and expressive and runs the gamut and spectrum of gender. I hope that it appeals to all genders versus being gender neutral…When things go androgynous and it’s black and white or gray-scale, that’s beautiful, but it’s not my personal aesthetic. I wanted something colorful to represent all genders.”

Head South is kicking off in direct-to-consumer distribution. However, it expects to strike partnerships with sexual wellness retailers that are both online-only and have physical presences. Meyer, who spent a decade in the haircare industry prior to her therapy career, including a stint haircare as a producer at the brand Hairstory, knows a bit about what it takes to break into Sephora or Target from her time in the beauty industry, and she doesn’t want to put that sort of pressure on her bootstrapped brand just yet.

“I would love that someday, but right now it’s more about smaller retailers,” says Meyer. “And I feel strongly about having a really close relationship with boutique owners and brick-and-mortars that are doing things differently and working with different LGBTQ and youth organizations.”

Meyer spent just under $100,000 to get Head South off the ground. The funding came from her personal savings and friends and family members. Additional lubricants, pleasure devices and what Meyer calls “beginner kink” items are in Head South’s product pipeline. She says, “I’d also love to do collaborations. A collaboration with a Brooklinen to create bedding, that’d be great.”

“I love that our brand is very colorful and expressive and runs the gamut and spectrum of gender.”

Two years ago, New York-based Meyer was in London with Michael Gordon, founder of Hairstory and Bumble and bumble, raising funds for a new haircare venture they planned to partner on. Due to a noncompete, Gordon couldn’t move forward with the new hair venture, and Meyer jumped into sexual wellness—an area she was interested in since she was a teen—starting with podcasting. In nearly 30 episodes so far, Head South Radio has featured guests such as OB/GYN Antonette Whitehead, naturopathic doctor Mary Tracey, intimacy coach Valentin Somma and Emily Sauer, founder of sexual wellness brand Ohnut.

Meyer saw the sidelining of the haircare venture as an opportunity to pivot. “For the past few years I had been revisiting the idea of becoming a sex therapist, which was something I wanted to do when I was 17, not knowing that that was a thing,” she says, recounting that as a teen she would devour books at libraries and stores, looking up “everything I could about sex and pleasure, and then educating my girlfriends in the car before we’d go on dates.”

Although his haircare venture with Meyer wasn’t to be, Gordon counseled the Head South founder on the development of her brand. “It came actually from a dream about lube,” says Meyer. “Head South, the name, came from Michael. It was an idea that he had for a sunscreen brand. It was a denim brand in South Africa when he lived there in the ‘70s, and he just kept it in his mind. When I had that dream, I called Michael up and I was like, ‘What if I did a sexual wellness brand and called it Head South?’ He loved the idea and was like, ‘Go for it.’”