Good Clean Love is a brand that offers a wide range of organic/vegan intimacy and love products, aiming at enhancing our ability to enjoy the passionate sides of life to their fullest extents. I sat down for a Skype interview with founder and loveologist Wendy Strgar, talking for nearly two hours about how to make love work, the inexhaustible fuel that fantasies are, and how ‘work’ and ‘love’ are, in the end, the same thing.

“I was living on the alternative green side for a long time before I ever even considered creating my own brand of intimacy products. I shopped in green stores, I experimented with natural remedies for common illnesses whenever I could, have been making little potions my whole life basically,” says Wendy.

“It wasn’t until I had four kids and nursed them all for at least three years each that the problems, and thus Good Clean Love, started: I was dry all the time, had a lot of pain during sex, and I just could not find a single product that not only worked, but also didn’t hurt. Every intimacy product on the market contained harmful petro-chemicals, which is not something you want anywhere near your most intimate of areas.”

Vaginal dryness is a common occurrence for women, in particular for women who have nursed, Wendy explained to me. As the hormonal balance shifts, lubrication for some women sometimes returns after nursing, but for others, especially after multiple pregnancies and long periods of nursing, it never comes back, causing a myriad of problems in the bedroom.

“So, I started experimenting, creating my own little potions, making sure each love oil, as I called them, was completely organic and free from harmful chemicals. It revolutionized my sex life, to say the least. At first I gave little bottles to friends to try as well, and the responses were overwhelmingly positive. Not long after, I decided to try to sell the stuff.

The Business Side of Love

Wendy recalls laughingly how little knowledge she had at the beginning of this journey on how to start a business, or even how to successfully market her products: “The first sample bottles I gave away didn’t even have a company name on them, it was ridiculous.”

After supplying small stores from her home, things really started to take off in 2010 for the company. “That’s when I met my creative director,” Wendy explains. “He completely rebranded our entire product line and website, and re-launched the whole concept. That’s when things really started to rock and roll.”

Today, Good Clean Love is being sold in large chain drug and grocery stores all over the States. The company is looking at being sold at 8000 more stores in the USA this year alone. Overseas, Good Clean Love works with Amazingy in Germany, has distributors in the UK, and is working on launching the products in Australia and China in the near future.

It wasn’t just steady growth and a smooth paved business path all the way, Wendy adds.
“Over the years we had many different brand names and logo’s, we changed the recipes of certain products on a regular base. Whenever I learned something new, read a new study, I couldn’t just ignore those facts: they had to be incorporated into my products, ensuring that Good Clean Love products would be as good and effective as they possibly can be.
My manufacturer often teases me that we’ve had more versions of my products than most other companies have of all their products combined.”

The Most Meaningful Resource in Life

The business side is however just one part in a bigger scheme. Good Clean Love’s mission is to increase the experience and awareness of love around the world. To this end, they create organic intimacy products designed to put the pleasure back in sex, with Wendy’s tireless writing and teaching work on making love sustainable being the drive behind everything.

“I really feel that one of the most meaningful resources in our life, is the love that we cultivate. A lot of people think that love is only love when it’s easy. In reality, that’s just biology taking over in the first few months of being together.

Real love happens in all the efforts you make to live with someone. This effort becomes a big storehouse of intimate support – it’s like an emotional bank that you keep putting deposits in, and where you withdraw the strength and perseverance from when things start to get hard.”

Wendy herself has been married for 32 years, raised four children, and is happy to be able to say that she is still has an extremely active and loving sex life. Not all couples are that lucky, Wendy found.
“A lot of studies tell us that the peak of sexual enjoyment with a partner takes place during the first year of being together, when sex and passion sweeps you away and you don’t really have to do anything to keep things exciting. But when that first year passes, what happens then? Suddenly, you have to take responsibility for finding the sexual arousal that may not be so automatic anymore, and a lot of people don’t want to take that responsibility. This can be challenging, in part because so many of us feel shame and guilt about being sexual beings. Many couples don’t make it past those few early months or years, and sex declining in both intensity and frequency is all too common.”

Tips for Amazing Sex: It’s All About Fantasies

Wendy has more than a few tips to share on how to maintain a happy and healthy sexual life. According to her, good, lasting sex happens with people that love you, people who you entrust your erotic self to. She has written two books on the subject. The first one, ‘Love That Works: A guide to enduring intimacy’, and ‘Sex that works: Claiming your erotic soul’. From this book, she shares two major tips that can help reignite the flame in the bedroom for a lot of people:

“My first tip is to finally acknowledge yourself as a sexual being, as someone who is allowed to have fantasies, and is allowed to enjoy sex to the fullest.
As you release all the shame, guilt, and inhibitions that keep you from being sexual, you begin to grow up sexually.

Here in the States, a lot of people grow up with different types of inhibitions, be it because of the church, or from judgments that got passed on by their families. In Europe, sexual consciousness seems to be more evolved and liberal, but for many people in the States, these limitations prevent them from claiming their capacity to be sexual – they are afraid of their erotic selves. Looking at our sexual fantasies, which are often not socially appropriate or politically correct, can be very intense and frightening. The truth is, that everyone has fantasies, fantasies that we develop in our subconscious minds during puberty, when we experience sexual feelings for the first time.
I remember how long I suppressed my own fantasies, until one day I decide I could just take a look. The imagery and stories I made up in my head, the stuff I was too ashamed to even look at – those things turned into rocket fuel for my sex life with my husband.
I didn’t even necessarily have to share all of them with him – sometimes it was just enough for me to acknowledge them to myself, and he is part of the experience without knowing a thing about what is going on in my mind.”

Wendy’s Second Tip: Learn How to Feel Again

“We spend our lives running from our own experiences,” Wendy starts to explain. “We eat but don’t really taste the food, being distracted by phones and televisions. At some point, many of us stopped paying attention to the rich information that our senses bring us.
When you’re not really smelling and tasting life anymore, this can easily translate to not fully experiencing what is it to be sexual either.

As you actively start to practice paying attention to your senses again, tasting, feeling, smelling things, you bring these new sensations with you to the bedroom. Your body is more awake, and you have more inner material to bring with you to sex again.”

This is where the Good Clean Love products prove their value even more:
“Our products, like the Love Oil and the Body Candy, are natural aphrodisiacs, as they aim at waking up the limbic brain, where arousal is activated through scent.
Besides, everyone knows that any bod part slippery is way sexier than the same body part dry,” she remarks with an audible grin.

New Products, New Scents and Plenty of Love to Go Around

There’s more in store than books for the coming months: Wendy is working on releasing two new perfumes, ‘Myths’, a more floral scent, being aimed at women, and ‘Legends’, a spicy scent with ancient aphrodisiac woody undertones, created for men.
In addition to perfumes, Wendy is working on launching a new CBD Caragold personal lubricant, containing organic CBD hemp oil and Carrageenan. Studies have demonstrated that CBD oil from hemp can have a remarkable anti-inflammatory and pain relieving effect, which can be beneficial to many women struggling with pain and dryness due to lack of lubrication. Next to that, Carrageenan has been associated with blocking HPV.

Creating and Re-creating Good Clean Love – It’s A Lot of Work, But Also A Lot of Love.

“All this lovework, which is how I like to call it, comes from the same place: my passion for helping others to make love sustainable, in every form. I grew up in a family that didn’t have any of that, and I noticed early on that people who grew up being surrounded by people that love them had a different way of handling life. I spent many years trying to fill the void of not having had a functional family. In part, that is why I believe I had so many kids – to learn how a family worked.
It wasn’t always easy, my husband and I never had a fairytale marriage. We had to work long and hard at it, we’ve had our problems. But we are both stubborn people: We were determined to find out what this thing called ‘love’ is, what ‘family’ is. Now that our kids have left home, we have to find out again, because after 27 years, it will just be the two of us again. We have to learn how to be together again.

When I think about it, about Good Clean Love, about sex, love, marriage, life, in the end it all comes down to this: In the final moments of your life, it’s all about the people that you love, and the people that love you. It’s the reason we are here: Love that works.”