While online retailers have traditionally invested more heavily in digital advertising through Google and social media, the last 18 months have seen the likes of Adore Beauty and The Iconic venture into television advertising, as Covid-19 has driven more people to shop online.

Flora & Fauna’s campaign has been in the works for several months, Mathers said, but it was delayed and had to be reworked as an animated ad due to the difficulty of filming during the pandemic. Still, the retailer’s message comes through loud and clear. 

“Our purpose is to help everyone make better choices, so we have to get to as many people as possible, but also normalise eco so it doesn’t seem like it’s some elitist thing. It’s something that actually everyone can do,” Mathers said.

In addition to the upcoming campaign, Flora & Fauna has just launched an ambassador program that will see the online retailer select existing customers, rather than influencers, to represent the brand.

“Our criteria is we want them to be a customer, we want them to love Flora & Fauna and we want a really diverse range of people. We don’t care if they have 200 followers or 200,000,” Mathers said. 

“It’s not about them necessarily sharing [content] with their audience; it’s about them creating content that we can share with our audience, so we can start celebrating our customers and showcasing them as true brand ambassadors.” 

The retailer plans to select 10-20 customers to act as ambassadors. It will work with them on the topics it wants to highlight and feature their content on a page on its website.

Founded in 2014, Flora & Fauna was acquired by consumer goods company BWX earlier this year for around $30 million. It sells vegan, cruelty-free and eco-friendly products for the home and body, such as biodegradable bin liners and plastic-free shampoo bars, and recently, it added sex toys to the mix. 

Over the weekend, Flora & Fauna launched a range of eco-friendly sex toys, including Lovehoney’s Love Not War collection of vibrators, which are made out of recycled aluminium and silicone, and the Womanizer Premium Eco vibrator, which is made out of biolene, a biodegradable material, and can be broken into individual parts for recycling. 

“They’re just a more sustainable alternative in terms of sexual wellness,” Mathers said.

Customers had been asking for sexual wellness products for some time, but traditionally, the category has not offered the sustainability credentials Mathers looks for when choosing products to stock. 

“Sexual wellness, until recently, has not been seen as mainstream. I certainly grew up in the era where you’d go to a shop and go down to the basement. It was seen as a little bit dirty and not embraced. And then you layer on top the eco aspect, and that hasn’t been embraced either until recently,” she said.

Retailers like Lovehoney, which recently merged with Womanizer’s parent company to form Wow Group, have done much to normalise sexual wellness and modernise the sector — by developing eco-friendly products, for instance.

“People want this to be mainstream, they want it to be normal, and the fact that we can offer eco alternatives means people can get a toy now that is better for the environment as well,” Mathers said. 

Customers greeted the announcement of the launch on social media enthusiastically. Mathers described it as Flora & Fauna’s most successful Instagram post ever.