Latina and sexologist-led Bloomi empowers everyone to embrace their sexuality

Rebecca Alvarez Story has forged her own path within the intimate wellness space, creating products and breaking sexuality stigmas within the Latino community.  

Story is the founder and CEO of Bloomi, a Latina-owned and sexologist-led company that is not only bilingual, plant-based and compostable, but also provides inclusive sexual education and intimate health products for all bodies.  

In 2022, the brand became the first Latina-led brand to launch in the sexual wellness aisle in over 1,200 Target stores nationwide as well as Saks Fifth Avenue. But six years before its launch, Bloomi started small when Story quit her 9 to 5 job as a clinical researcher in 2018 to fully focus on the brand.  

Story is a sexologist so she has made sure Bloomi also highlights how important sexual education is by providing inclusive self-care resources for all bodies through their site Intimate Talk. Readers can find articles on the site discussing intimate care, sexual wellness and relationships, along with Bloomi’s Intimacy Care Quiz.  

Story believes that the key to unlocking satisfying intimacy starts with unlearning bad sex education. As someone who did not receive adequate sex education while attending Catholic school and hadn’t realized it was available until college, Story wants others to find comfort in knowing that Bloomi is a resource they can count on.  

“Part of unlearning [bad sex education] is being exposed to more information, giving yourself permission to re-explore and reset what you want for yourself,” Story said. “Sometimes you need support with that, whether that's a friend, coach or a therapist, but it’s about being able to say, ‘Hey, I'm an adult or young adult, mid-20s, 30s or 40s now and I'm longing for these things. I want to learn about them and explore them.’”  

Story is making an impact in the intimate wellness space by creating the first-ever, research-backed Clean Standard in the sexual wellness industry, with a list of both banned and approved natural aphrodisiacs.. According to a recent Bloomi study researching tampons, pads, sex toys, intimate care washes and more, up to 98 percent of these items contain at least one toxic ingredient, allergen or irritant. To make matters worse, Latina and Black women are disproportionately impacted by toxic ingredients in intimate products, making them more susceptible to yeast infections, bacterial vaginosis and sexually transmitted diseases.  

As an antidote to these issues, Bloomi has developed plant-powered essentials — sex toys, lubricants, oils and more — with formulas excluding vulvar allergens such as glycerin, gluten, phthalates, sulfates, parabens, alcohol, artificial dyes and fragrances, which, as the founder of the brand, is incredibly important to Story. 

“I wanted to address that [impact] for me, my friends and my community,” Story said. “From there, it made sense for the entire brand to be clean and sustainable. We don't allow any fragrances and we don't allow any glycerin. People are shocked to learn that glycerin is great for the body, but bad for intimate skin because it can cause yeast infections. We are proud of these developments because everything we make is safe for intimate skin so you don't have to worry. There is already enough to worry about with intimacy.”

Inaccuracies in sex education and negative views of intimacy are commonly intertwined with growing up in Latino culture, which often creates stigmas around sex, periods and one’s relationship with their body. These stigmas can usually be the result of being passed down generationally, religious beliefs or sexual trauma that are, unfortunately, embedded within the community.  

“Even more seriously, there's a lot of abuse in our culture because it’s not discussed,” Story said. “When something negative happens, it's so hard to talk about sex in general, so imagine how hard it is to talk about something negative about sex. All of these layers make it complicated for us to feel comfortable. It's so important for women, especially Latinas, to know that there are so many beautiful things about being sex-positive or learning and being in tune with your body, pleasure and love. There are a lot of us who are teaching our moms, tias and our cousins. It's cool that things are changing positively. There's a conversation happening.”

But having conversations that acknowledge the nuances of sex, creating healthy relationships with our bodies and understanding the mind and body connections are great ways to start breaking these stigmas, according to Destiny Padilla, 26, a sex educator and Bloomi’s senior coordinator. 

“I didn't have conversations about sex growing up so I had to look out for resources to educate myself and make informed decisions,” Padilla said. “If I had had something like Bloomi or seen Rebecca speak, it would have helped remove some of the shame that I was carrying as a young adult. Encouraging people to see sex as a more holistic topic will help people have conversations about everyday things that are happening, like, ‘I have a crush on this boy at school,’ or ‘I just had my period.’ Or not knowing which preventative like birth control to use. It's so multifaceted.”

As she actively normalizes conversations around sex and encourages individuals to embrace their sexuality through Bloomi, Story is also representing the Latino community through her major accomplishments, such as being one of the few Latinas in the United States to raise over $1 million in venture capital. And despite the challenges she has faced while developing Bloomi, the lessons she continues to learn mean that there is a way for first-generation and first-time entrepreneurs to be successful, according to Story, and she wants to do all she can to help fellow Latina entrepreneurs as they embark on their journeys. 

“If you have a fire lit inside of you to build something, or to see something through, you have to follow it,” Story said. “When I started Bloomi, I met with a few founders I admired who had built large companies and I asked them the secret to making it as an entrepreneur. They all said the same thing: “Don't give up.’ Don't give up if you know that your idea and your product is working. If you have validated that with data and if you can convince people to join your team, you just have to keep going. It's just a matter of time.”

After having worked with many startups in the past, where she coached and consulted individuals on anatomy, relationships and how to navigate the two, Story became inspired to create Bloomi from these experiences. First coaching clients through educational workshops, the entrepreneur found herself sending them links to products or information she recommended, which she then curated a list for. 

“I created [Bloomi] as a marketplace first, to have all the brands that I would recommend because, unfortunately, there are a lot of toxic ingredients in our space,” Story said. “It's heavily unregulated. That morphed into us creating our own products and once I saw that it had so much potential as a business and a startup, I raised [capital] and ended up partnering with Target to launch a full line.”

Though the catalyst of Bloomi’s creation happened just a handful of years ago, it was heavily inspired by Story’s upbringing. Born and raised in the Bay area as a first-generation daughter of two Mexican immigrants, copious amounts of love and Spanglish surrounded the budding CEO, but there was not a whole lot of sexual education. Without this knowledge at home, the norm for most Latinas, she decided in high school to pursue her passions of entrepreneurship and sexual wellness at the University of California, Berkeley. 

“Even in a liberal area of the country, I had abstinence-only education,” Story said. “My paths ended up crossing in college when I realized that there was all this information, but there weren't a lot of sex educators. And the university didn't even have a major in sex education although they had a lot of classes. I was very entrepreneurial in the sense that I've always created a path with sexual wellness. I helped them make a major and got a master's in the [intimate wellness] space. I've also invented several products in the space.”

The first to receive a bachelor of arts in women’s health and sexuality from UC Berkeley, Story continued to carve out her own path at San Francisco State University, where she received a master of arts in sexuality studies. But being the first, while a beautifully gratifying feeling, was also scary. 

“Usually, you grow up and you feel like you know what the blueprint could look like if you go to a certain type of school, but I continued to follow my passion,” Story said. “I would get very riled up to see that there were still so many issues happening in the country with women and young adults that were, in my opinion, preventable with great information. Still, that information doesn't get shared a lot so I felt like I was going to make a bigger impact going into this space.”

When Padilla first started with the brand two years ago,  she couldn’t believe there wasn’t an existing standard for sexual wellness products before Bloomi’s launch, she told CALÓ News.

“From a marketing standpoint, Bloomi is shifting what should be the standard, which is serving as a turning point for other brands to follow suit,” Padilla said. “We want our peers to also create products that are good for the customer because, when there are more options to choose from, it allows everyone to have a better experience with pleasure.”

Bloomi not only celebrates plant-based ingredients and aphrodisiacs, but the wellness destination also prioritizes being bilingual, in Spanish and English. “There are not a lot of women of color founders in this category so it's important that the packaging is bilingual,” Story said. “When we launched with Target, we were the only brand focused on being bilingual.”

Sustainability is another pillar of Bloomi. Beyond their clean ingredients, all their packaging is recyclable or compostable with treeless cartons and sugarcane packaging. Along with creating products that are both good for the body and the environment, Bloomi Essentials are also made for all bodies, including their new caress full-body massager, which has a pleasure ball and handle side meant for pleasure or to release tension in the body. To ensure their products are appropriate for consumers, Bloomi Beta, Bloomi’s intimacy focus group, allows interested individuals to test products, which helps with development.

“With other intimacy brands, you'll find that they’re catered only to women or men,” Padilla said. “But we want everyone to feel like they can use our products, such as the cleanser, the intimate moisturizer or, with the toys, you can be creative with how you use them.” 

As society evolves in a positive and inclusive direction, Story is proud to see the younger generation embrace the idea of a nonbinary world that isn’t dependent on how one identifies oneself.

Bloomi’s future includes an upcoming partnership with Dr. Viviana Coles, a relationship and sex therapist who was previously on Lifetime’s “Married at First Sight,” and a launch at a new retailer this summer.

“I don't care if you're a man or a woman or if you identify as cis or trans, it doesn't matter,” Story said. “What matters to me is, ‘Are you enjoying your intimate life? Are these products enhancing your intimacy?’ We make products for intimacy and intimate skin. It doesn't matter your gender. Everything is tested on a variety of different folks and different bodies. I am proud of that. It's becoming more common, but when we started five, six years ago, it was like, ‘What do you mean it's not [just] for women?’ Most of our customers tend to be women, but I like being inclusive because I think that's what's right.”