Playground

A skincare company that happens to sell lubricant

There is a durable, slightly funny fact about the personal lubricant business, which is that for roughly forty years it was a category where the ingredients got worse than the ones in your face cream. The products worked, technically. Nobody wanted to talk about them. The branding assumed you were embarrassed to be holding the box. Playground, a sexual wellness company founded in 2022 by Catherine Magee and Sandy Vukovic, looked at that arrangement and asked the question that launches a surprising number of consumer brands: why is this like this?

The answer Playground arrived at is that it did not have to be. So the company built a line of clean, vegan, water-based lubricants and intimacy oils formulated the way you'd formulate something you actually wanted people to read the label of - hyaluronic acid, vitamin E, bamboo extract, and a set of adaptogens like ashwagandha and horny goat weed that are more familiar from wellness tea than the intimacy aisle. The formulas are FDA-cleared and, per the company, clinically tested to be both vagina-healthy and libido-boosting. That last "and" is the whole business. It is the claim that a product can be good for you and also do the thing you bought it for, which is the same bet clean beauty made about moisturizer a decade ago.

Playground's tagline - "intimate wellness, your way" - is the polite version. The launch tagline was blunter: less stigma, more stimulation. That is genuinely the strategy, compressed into four words.

The receipts

Figures compiled from public reporting (Beauty Independent, Femtech Insider, Wikipedia). Sales figure is an industry estimate and should be read as approximate.

Christina Aguilera didn't endorse it. She co-founded it.

The standard playbook for a consumer brand that wants celebrity heat is to bolt a famous person onto a finished product near the end and call them a "creative director." Playground did something structurally different: it announced Christina Aguilera in March 2023 as co-founder and Chief Brand Advisor, an actual seat on the founding team rather than a photo shoot. The distinction matters because the brand's entire premise is candor. It is hard to run a company whose pitch is "stop being weird about sexual wellness" while treating your own celebrity like a secret.

In 2024 that logic produced Pillow Talk, Aguilera's signature lubricant - vitamin E, hyaluronic acid, bamboo extract - launched alongside a phone number: 1-888-PLY-GRND, a working sexual wellness hotline. A hotline is a strange thing for a lube company to build. It is also a very good one, because it converts the exact awkwardness that keeps people out of the category into a thing you can dial. The marketing and the mission are the same object.

The founding team

Magee runs the company as chief executive; Vukovic owns product as CPO. Rounding out the brain trust is sexologist Emily Morse of Sex with Emily, who serves as chief sexologist and sits on the company's Sex & Wellness Council - and who, along with Call Her Daddy's Alex Cooper, also put money into the seed round. It is a cap table that doubles as a distribution channel, which is a tidy trick when your product depends on people being willing to talk about it.

What's actually in the box

Why it reads like a supplement label

Playground's marketing claim is that its formulas do double duty - hydration and vaginal-health support on one side, libido on the other. Here's a rough map of what the brand leans on, and what each piece is doing. Consider the bars a stylized guide to emphasis, not a lab assay.

The exclusion list is arguably the more important marketing document. The formulas are free of phthalates, parabens, PEGs, petrochemicals, mineral oil, propylene glycol, gluten, sulfates, dyes and hormones. In a category where "what's not in it" is often the entire purchase decision, that list is the product.

Direct-to-consumer, then the endcap

The business model is the familiar modern consumer arc, run quickly. Start direct-to-consumer at helloplayground.com, where you control the story and the margins and can say whatever you want on the product page. Build enough proof - awards, press, a celebrity co-founder, a $2M seed round closed in 2024 - and use it to earn shelf space at retailers who normally treat this category as a locked back-aisle afterthought.

The retail win is the tell. Playground rolled into a quarter of Target's nearly 2,000 stores, with three of its lubricants - Date Night, Love Sesh and Mini Escape - priced at $19.99. It also sells through Amazon and, from April 2023, Urban Outfitters. Getting a clean sexual wellness brand onto a national mass-retail endcap is a distribution achievement that quietly does more for destigmatization than any campaign, because it puts the product where people already are instead of asking them to seek it out.

A short, fast history

Who wrote the checks

The $2M seed round was led by Palm Tree Crew Holdings, Fourward Ventures, Goddess Fun+d and Amboy Street Ventures - the last of which is a fund built specifically around sexual health and wellness, a sign the category now has dedicated capital rather than having to argue for its own existence. The angel list leans into audience: sexologist Emily Morse and podcaster Alex Cooper both invested, which means some of the brand's most effective distribution is also on the cap table.

Who else is in the aisle

Playground sits inside a crowded, fast-growing femtech-adjacent shelf. On the design-led clean side it shares oxygen with Maude, Dame and Foria; in intimate-health it brushes against Momotaro Apotheca and Sustain; and it still, ultimately, competes with the legacy incumbents - K-Y and Astroglide - that defined the category for decades and that Playground is explicitly reacting against. Its wedge is the combination: clinical claims, clean formulation, a genuine celebrity co-founder, and mass-retail placement, run together rather than one at a time.

Five things that stick

See it in motion

Product demos, founder conversations and Christina Aguilera's brand announcements live across Playground's social channels and press coverage. Start here:

Links & sources