So far this year, Las Vegas store Pepper, New York City store Contact Sports and London-based e-tailer Iloh have announced closures. The Lake, a Toronto-based sexual wellness lifestyle retailer that launched online in 2022 and subsequently opened a location, has pivoted to becoming an art-focused workshop and shopping space.

In a LinkedIn post, Sarah Spoor, who founded Pepper with her husband Lincoln, says, “Lincoln and I are proud of what we created the past several years – which was a beautiful physical and online environment for people to ‘connect more,’ we are saddened that we couldn’t make it work and wish others in the sexual wellness space all the best.”

The physical space shuttered in January and the online shop closed last month. The Spoor’s mission of helping people connect more lives on in Rompy, a gen Z-focused sexual wellness brand launched last year by Lincoln and Sarah’s daughters, Blakely and Savannah Spoor.

Bren Gauthier, who founded The Lake with her husband Philippe Gauthier and whose father Yvon Gauthier pioneered the Canadian pleasure retail space in the 1970s with boutique-style adult shop Seduction, suggests several reasons why sexual wellness retailers are struggling, including the necessity for diversity in assortments to attract broad swaths of consumers, the barriers to promoting sexual wellness goods digitally and a fading of the media spotlight on sexual wellness in the last two years. Retailers and brands previously jumped into the sexual wellness category amid buzz, but today the storm around the category seems to have calmed.

Gauthier says, “Because we are trying to appeal to the general population who don’t tend to over consume sexual wellness products on a per customer basis, it has been our experience that it is a majorly expensive and frustrating uphill climb to acquire customers at a rate that can sustain growth when you have a sole focus on the pleasure products category, which is severely impeded by social media’s active removal/blocking of sexual wellness brand advertising unless you are a massive retailer, then they let it slide.”

Certainly, sexual wellness stores aren’t immune from the issues affecting small retailers generally, for example, consumer caution, fierce competition and increased costs. Éva Goicochea, founder and CEO of sexual wellness brand Maude, says, “Retail is difficult no matter the category, and while I do believe concept stores for sexual wellness could thrive, you do have to factor in how people shop for these products: It’s not on a Tuesday afternoon, and it’s not every day.”

When it opened in 2020, 6,000-square-foot Pepper was the largest store at Las Vegas resort and casino destination Resorts World. It featured a sex toy bar and private event area fashioned after a luxury condo. Pepper carried sex toys from its own brand and others as well as lingerie and books.

Contact Sports was created by another husband-and-wife team, Justin and Chelsea Kerzner, who opened it last year in the Manhattan neighborhood SoHo in a 750-square-foot shop occupied in the past by Babeland. They made it a super cool and luxe venue with around 70 products, including sex toys, lubricants, condoms, candles and ingestibles, from brands such as Dame, Maude, Future Method, Champ, Kiki de Montparnasse and Flamingo Estate.

According to Business of Fashion, the publication that broke the news of Contact Sports’ closure, its sales totaled just over $500,000, and it didn’t achieve profitability. Justin Kerzner has turned his attention to Magic Molecule, a hypochlorous acid-centered brand incubated by the company Squared Circles. The Kerzners own the building at 43 Mercer St. that housed Contact Sports and can rent it out for a pretty penny. The firm Cushman & Wakefield reports retail rents in SoHo have surpassed pre-pandemic levels. The firm CBRE tallies the average asking rent in Manhattan’s retail corridors at $688 per square in the first quarter of this year, up 3% from the prior quarter, and rents for spaces in key SoHo corridors are even higher.

Calling Pepper “stunning,” Nicole Leinbach, founder of consultancy Retail Minded and sexual wellness trade show Stimulate, posits the scale of the store and its location were tricky. “Anyone who had the fortune of visiting this space knew that getting there was not easy and often felt like a challenge,” she says. “The path to purchase for customers should not have to be complex, but the Resorts World in Vegas made it that for many of its second level tenants. This undoubtedly resulted in less foot traffic and meeting the rent demands in exchange for this space I am sure factored into its closing.”

Leinbach figures that better marketing of event capabilities and, in Contact Sports’ case, improved merchandising could’ve been a boost for business, but probably wouldn’t be a savior. “In a space like sexual wellness, making inventory easy to access without employee support is also important, and I think their inventory was displayed in a way that inhibited some consumers from feeling as if they could grab the display items versus having to ask for help in capturing additional products tucked in drawers or out of sight,” she says. “Over time, this loss of potential sales adds up, and from a customer perspective, it created a barrier to purchase.”

At Iloh, economic sluggishness in the United Kingdom and the tough road to nailing down investment contributed to the closure. Founder Jemma Sawyer observes consumers cutting back spending on discretionary items like sexual wellness products and seeking the most affordable options for them at places such as Amazon and Lovehoney. Personally for her, juggling a full-time job along with managing the business played a role in Iloh’s closure, too. She says, “The toll it was taking on my health led me to make the difficult decision to prioritize my wellness.”

Iloh specialized in sexual wellness and intimate care products by and for women from brands like Dame, Crave, &Sisters and Into the Wylde. Since its launch in 2021, it participated in a number of pop-ups around London, including at Caviar Caspia, One Hundred Shoreditch Hotel and Oakley Court. Sawyer believes pop-ups are a smart strategy for sexual wellness brands and is open to the idea of exploring pop-up opportunities in the future.

The end of retail concepts like Contact Sports, Pepper and Iloh cut off an important stepping stone for emerging sexual wellness brands on the way to larger retail partnerships. They enable the brands to get their retail distribution sea legs and gain exposure with target consumers.

However, there are alternative avenues for emerging sexual wellness brands such as Amazon, branded stores and the adult novelty channel, which market research firm IBIS World estimates encompasses about 5,150 stores in the United States. Sexual wellness brand Personal Fav Co. is sold at roughly 200 adult novelty stores and Goop. It’s looking to open its own store and roll out to big-box retail in the future. This week, Personal Fav launched on Amazon with its third—and first CBD-free—product: flushable intimate wipes it developed in collaboration with sustainable wipes brand Biom.