Rebecca
Alvarez Story

Rebecca Alvarez Story runs Bloomi, a clean intimacy brand she founded in 2018. Today it sits on shelves at Target and Saks Fifth Avenue. But the more interesting fact is how she got there: by deciding, early and often, that the existing path was not built for her.

When she arrived at UC Berkeley, the program she wanted - a serious, academic study of women's health and sexuality - did not exist as a major. Most students would have picked the nearest approximation and moved on. She designed her own course of study instead. It is a small detail, but it tells you almost everything. The instinct to build the thing that should exist, rather than settle for the thing that does, would later become an entire company.

She grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, the daughter of Mexican immigrants and a first-generation college student. Her high school taught abstinence-only education, the kind of curriculum that answers questions by refusing to ask them. The gap between what she was taught and what people actually needed to know became the through-line of her career. She went on to earn a master's in Sexuality Studies from San Francisco State University in 2017, completing the degree while parenting and working full-time as a sexologist. She has said her daughter sometimes came along to class.

For roughly a decade she practiced as a sexologist, logging thousands of hours of coaching. That clinical work was the research-and-development phase for a company she had not yet started. She kept hearing the same things from clients, and she kept noticing the same problem on store shelves: the products were an afterthought, and the marketing was worse.

Bloomi started in 2018 not as a product company but as a curated marketplace - a shelf of intimacy brands she handpicked herself, vetted the way a sexologist would. It was a clever way to test a thesis without manufacturing anything. The thesis held. When she finally developed her own product, an arousal oil, the response was strong enough to redraw the plan. Bloomi pivoted from selling other people's goods to making its own.

Out of that pivot came the Bloomi Clean Standard, a set of ingredient rules she built because nothing comparable existed in the intimate-care aisle. The brand is also bilingual by design - English and Spanish - because the audience she most wanted to reach had been talked past for a long time.

Then came the fundraising, which in her category was its own kind of obstacle course. A $600,000 pre-seed round in 2021 paid for the clean product line. A $2 million seed round in March 2022 paid for scale. Raising money at all was a quiet act of stubbornness.

The 2022 seed round did something that hadn't been done: it put the first Latina-founded brand in the sexual wellness aisle at Target, nationwide, in roughly a thousand stores. She has described that moment less as a retail win than as a generational one - a product that carried more than its own packaging.

The growth that followed was steep. Bloomi reported roughly 9x year-over-year growth, expanded into Saks Fifth Avenue, and kept adding boutiques and spas. For most founders, a national retail rollout is the finish line. For her, it reads more like a proof of concept for a much larger ambition: to bring quality, shame-free intimacy education to one billion people, with Latin America squarely in view.

She is candid that the early version of herself made the classic founder mistake. She tried to carry the whole thing alone, and learned - the way founders usually do, the hard way - that it doesn't work.

What stands out about her story is the consistency of one move, repeated at every scale. No major? Design one. No standard for clean intimate care? Write one. No investors comfortable with the category? Convince them anyway. No bilingual brand serving her community? Build it. Each decision is the same decision, made larger.

In 2024 she stepped further into the role of educator, launching her own sexology and intimacy-education practice, and continued appearing in national press to talk about heritage, identity, and the myths people inherit. The company is the vehicle. The mission - that everyone deserves the education nobody gave her - is the engine.