Women In Wellness: Dominnique Karetsos of Healthy Pleasure Group On The Five Lifestyle Tweaks That Will Help Support People’s Journey Towards Better Wellbeing
An Interview With Candice Georgiadis
Leadership is a lifelong commitment to learning and listening to others. But, just as important is your loyal daily commitment to your own integrity and staying true to yourself
As a part of my series about women in wellness, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dominnique Karetsos.
A born entrepreneur and resilient optimist, Dominnique Karetsos is CEO and Founder of The Healthy Pleasure Group, the only global outfit dedicated to the Sexual Health & Technology industry.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Our readers would love to “get to know you” better. Can you share your “backstory” with us?
My name is Dominnique Karetsos, I’m the CEO and co-founder of Healthy Pleasure Group, a pioneering collective that seeks to define, reshape and revolutionise the sexual empowerment of all generations and pave the way for healthy sexuality and healthy pleasure for everyone.
Having spent my youth in both Greece and South Africa, I studied in Sweden and I’m now based in London, with the Group also holding offices in Barcelona and Los Angeles. I’ve worked in more than 40 markets globally, helping start-ups and market leaders across beauty, retail and health improve and increase their sales, marketing and distribution channels.
As women, when we have questions about our autonomy or our sexual health, we look for permission to even ask them. For instance, on the Greek side of my family the generation before me would never discuss money and business at the table and on my mother’s side, children were to be seen but not heard. So, you didn’t have a voice, a choice or an opinion. It’s interesting to understand the taboos our parents’ generation fought to dismantle so that we can create our own fibres, weave our own way. I myself have been through a crippling divorce, which left me bankrupt when I was forced to take the crippling economic blowback for my ex-husband’s decisions. I was left with nothing, not even a roof over my head. Today we have the Domestic Abuse Bill which covers economic abuse that was brought into the UK parliament in 2017 to support women, but back then I made my way through this enormous situation myself. That is why I am very proud to have recently been asked to be a member of the UK charity Surviving Economic Abuse, sitting on the Experts by Experience Group. I am determined to ensure that no other women need go through what I did and that everyone is made aware of the support that is out there for them.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career? What were the main lessons or takeaways from that story?
I can give you one example of the state of the Sexual Health & Technology industry when I first joined it around eight years ago. I was working with an intimate health brand and we were trying to get a mainstream pharma category buyer to list a menstrual cup. To gain access to point of sales we had to get through the buyers, most of whom were men in their early 20’s. In order to make sure that the phone wasn’t just immediately slammed down on us, we bought the advertising space in front of a lead buyer’s parking spot for three months. When we eventually got him to answer our call, he said, ‘Where have I seen this brand before?’ those few seconds were critical in allowing us to start the conversation of how putting menstrual cups on the feminine hygiene shelves was going to make a positive impact to his bottom line, but most importantly change the lives of women. Perseverance and creative persuasion is often what we need to to thrive and get through to the naysayers.
Because, how does one communicate the need for a product that has no relevance to these young men? It’s not easy to explain to mostly male buyers that there is a difference between a tampon and a menstrual cup. Or that you pee in your pants after you’ve had a kid. Women have been categorically ignored and marginalised when it comes to our health needs. We had the products, but we needed a buyer who would listen to us.
It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about a mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
I had so many meetings where I was not supposed to say the word sex! The amount of Boardrooms and now parents’ Whatsapp groups I have previously been kicked out of, is insane! On one occasion I distinctly remember telling my bosses at a leading beauty company to invest in male grooming as the future of the beauty category and they dismissed me out of the boardroom. Now that male grooming is mainstream industry worth billions, it gives me more confidence to stand by my beliefs and hold fast on my convictions. This space moves quickly, but my experience gives me that competitive edge for future trends. Looking back on this now, thankfully we’ve come a long way.
As the CEO I am today, I understand that my role comes with leadership, accountability, mentorship and ownership of our mistakes & successes. It’s important to make decisions that are in the best interest for the company, our people and our partners. I see my biggest responsibility as committing to continuous learning and sharing my knowledge with those same people.
Let’s jump to our main focus. When it comes to health and wellness, how is the work you are doing helping to make a bigger impact in the world?
The work we do is intrinsically geared towards creating opportunities, products and education to support underserved communities and ultimately democratise sexual health globally. From supporting one client focus on improving access to STI testing for women in LATAM, to building a competitive advantage for a fertility tracking brand to position its new technology to educate girls and young women about their first menstrual cycle.
We want to enable the facilitation of innovative pleasure, insightful pleasure, investigated pleasure and ultimately, healthy pleasure — for everyone. Fortunately, I’m seeing a lot of changes and a collective effort, but we need to continue to normalise language around sexual health, a new way of dismantling taboos and stigmas. As these things are gaining momentum, policy makers will need to react, too.
From democratising sexual pleasure beyond binary understandings to removing stigma and barriers to reproductive healthcare, we refuse to accept the way things have always been. Ultimately, we built Healthy Pleasure Group to create behavioural change through three vital economic motors; Education, Innovation and Investment.
If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of wellness to the most amount of people, what would that be?
Healthy Pleasure is a movement. We define Healthy Pleasure as sexual self fulfillment, a state of wellbeing generated by perceiving yourself as sexually healthy. It’s about having coherence between what you want, think and do in every aspect of your sexual life. Encompassing three core values of respect, intimacy and care, Healthy Pleasure is not related to sexual frequency or sexual activity. Even if a person doesn’t have sex, as long as they are happy with that decision, they are sexually self-fulfilled.
For me, it is all about agency. Agency over our bodies, our finances and our equalities within the societal and political constructs that we inhabit. I sat as a delegate for UN Women UK last year at the Commission on the Status of Women, which was an eye-opening, global view on what we all face across every fabric of our lives. For me, the understanding and mis-understanding of a woman’s autonomy starts with the moment you tick that box on a form to declare if you are a Mr, Miss, Mrs or Ms. It may sound small, but that one declaration can have a massive impact on the way our needs are prioritised, especially for women. As soon as we tick that box, a lot of assumptions are made and a lot of regulations automatically apply in your life that affect you. Access to childcare, pay disparities, our health and more. I hope that will change one day. But in the meantime, women, just like men, should have a choice whether or not to declare this imposed societal status. They should be informed about what it means.
So now I’m just Dominnique Karetsos. I don’t tick the box. If I have an app and it forces me to do it, I just don’t sign up.
What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why?
- Time is not money. Time is time and we should learn to live recognising that it is an non-replenishable resource. You decide how much of it you want to dedicate to the things that bring you joy.
- Energy is not woo woo. Where energy goes, money will come
- No is a full sentence
- When I have the confidence to ask for what I want in the bedroom I will have the confidence to communicate what I want and need in the boardroom
- Leadership is a lifelong commitment to learning and listening to others. But, just as important is your loyal daily commitment to your own integrity and staying true to yourself
Sustainability, veganism, mental health, and environmental changes are big topics at the moment. Which one of these causes is dearest to you, and why?
Healthy Pleasure as a cause and a movement, of course. Our sexual wellbeing is the most innate human experience and it dictates how we relate to everybody and everything in our lives. With our children, our partners, our colleagues. How we move through the world. Healthy Pleasure provides a new lens on how we view ourselves and this can be a lens of confidence, empathy, kindness but it can also be insecurity, depression or trauma. Healthy Pleasure is a movement that everyone must sit up and take notice of.
What is the best way for our readers to further follow your work online?
You can follow me directly on LinkedIn, read more about Healthy Pleasure Group on our website www.wearehpg.com and sign up to our monthly newsletter that brings you the latest news and updates from across Sexual Health & Technology industry here.
Thank you for these fantastic insights! We wish you continued success and good health.
Women In Wellness: Dominnique Karetsos of Healthy Pleasure Group On The Five Lifestyle Tweaks That… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.