Sexpot Apothecary Is Expanding The Medicine Cabinet With Herbal Sexual Wellness Remedies

The relationship between sexual health brand founders and their customers is often deeper and more complicated than simply buying and selling merchandise. As far as society has come in destigmatizing sex, it’s still shrouded in shame, and buying any sex-related products can be an emotionally charged event.

Case in point: Jessica Godfrey, founder of Sexpot Apothecary, recently fielded an angry email from a customer upset that the box delivered to him from the brand had its name on it. “I called, and we had a conversation about judgment and about shame,” recounts Godrey, “And I told him, ‘Of course, I’ll be very careful in the future, and I’ll make a note not to put anything on your box, but let’s talk about this. Fuck anybody who’s judging somebody who’s got this box of medicine, and it doesn’t mean something’s wrong with you.’”

The pep talk was on the house, but for some customers dipping their toes into the sexual health space, this type of one-on-one guidance can be as essential as the goods they paid for.

Godfrey launched Sexpot Apothecary in 2021 with three plant-based ingestibles designed to support the full spectrum of sex and intimacy. Its assortment has since expanded to six products, including No. 24 Male Virility Formula and No. 16, an aphrodisiac for women. The formulas consist of five tinctures and one electuary, a paste with herbs pounded into honey, that feature organic ingredients like shatavari, tribulus, maca, black cohosh, red raspberry leaf, lady’s mantle, muira puama and ashwagandha. Prices range from $26 to $40. 

Godfrey has been learning about and utilizing herbs virtually her entire life, starting as a child taking plants from her German-born grandmother’s garden and turning them into teas, salves and tinctures. “Then, as a difficult American teenager, I realized that that was a unique part of my life that my girlfriends didn’t know how to do. They didn’t know about local plants,” says Godfrey. “It was such an enriching and beautiful part of my life.”

She went on to study herbalism and naturopathic medicine everywhere from Nepal to West Africa, where she did an apprenticeship with traditional healers and chronicled botanists’ practices. “The African traditional medicine system is one of the least recorded,” says Godfrey. “That was really beautiful work.”

Rooted in her learnings, Godfrey concocted herbal wellness products at home for friends and family members. In the fall of 2019, a friend discussed his nervousness about an upcoming date with Godfrey, a discussion that ended up being a catalyst for Sexpot. “He tells me that the performance just isn’t what he wants it to be, and he’s feeling bashful. I tell him to come by my apartment on his way to his date,” she recalls. “I make him a little potion. I tell him how to take it, and he calls me the next morning and says, ‘I need more of that right away. That was the most profound sexual experience of my life.’”

The friend, a Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania graduate, spotted a business potential in Godfrey’s herbal wellness products and urged her to make them a business. When she began investigating the market, she was unimpressed with the available sexual wellness options. “A lot of them were these kind of truck stop, for lack of a better term, potency herbs. There’s just a bunch of crap in them,” she says. “Also, these brands that are sourcing a lot of plant material at once are often not able to be on top of quality control and sourcing something that’s really fresh, really mindfully cultivated with medicinal grade herbs and made in small batches with a lot of attention to detail and in traditional ways.”

Believing she could do better, Godfrey invested $12,000 from her personal savings into developing Sexpot. One of its first formulas was the yohimbe tincture that proved so successful for her friend. While the product performance was evident, getting a sexual wellness brand off the ground wasn’t easy. Godfrey underestimated the amount of censorship Sexpot would face. The brand’s payment processor dropped it, and Godfrey had to secure a lawyer and insurance, expenses she didn’t anticipate. After its social media accounts were initially shut down, they were operational by late spring. 

Two years in, Godfrey reports Sexpot is expecting just under six figures in revenues this year—without spending any money on advertising. “I’m not allowed to, at least yet,” she says. “Hopefully, we’ll get there. It’s been a lot of word of mouth, and it’s grown organically.” 

More than half of Sexpot’s sales are from its direct channel. The brand’s products are sold by a tightly curated mix of niche retailers, naturopathic doctors and sex therapists. “I love having conversations with sex therapists about incorporating the herbs into their practice,” says Godfrey. “The formula that I find sex therapists are drawn to and using the most is Number 16 for female libido with female clients that are working through trauma around sex or shame around sex or ‘I hate my body.’ They’re in that place and working through those things with the support of the herbs.”

Godfrey vacillates between being proud of what she’s built at Sexpot in a tough category and wanting it to achieve faster growth. “I’ve had a couple of investors interested and then ultimately decided that those weren’t the right relationships, so I’m keeping it where it is for now,” says Godfrey. “I love this stuff. I’ve been doing it my whole life, so it feels very authentic. I don’t want to blow up. That’s not really the goal. I don’t necessarily want to be in Target. I want something that feels sustainable and authentic and intimate, so slow growth.”