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Sir Richard’s Condom Company

By on November 11, 2015

As Diamond Products (Pipedream Products, Jimmyjane), recently added Sir Richard’s Condom Company to their growing family of brands, Synergy took the opportunity to get to know them a little better.

Sir Richard’s Founder, Mathew Gerson , who in 2005 started online retailer Econscious Market, which sells eco-friendly products and donates up to 10 percent of the retail price of each sale to charity, was reading a book about Dr. Paul Farmer, co-founder of Partners in Health. He learnt that condoms, which are cheap to produce and the most effective way to avoid HIV and other infections, were not readily available to those in disadvantaged regions.

So, in 2009 Mathew founded Sir Richard’s. Its’ mission is to address a massive global shortage of condoms. To do this the company has the unique philosophy of donating one condom to a developing nation for every one that they sell. To date Sir Richard’s has donated over 2.2 million of them. With sexual wellness and reproductive health in mind, they chose to make Sir Richard’s condoms of all-natural latex and silicone lubricant. They also left out a range of seriously unsexy chemicals (parabens, spermicide, or glycerin), common ingredients in some other brands’ products.

Design firm TDA_Boulder which created the corporate identities for Crocs and Chipotle, created Sir Richard’s distinct plaid packaging and tagline: “Doing good never felt better.”
Angel investors provided a seven-figure startup fund, and in 2011 Sir Richard’s was picked up by US Whole Foods, which sold the condoms US wide in Whole Foods Market. In 2014 the items was picked up by Kroger USA and sold through their Kroger store retail fronts. Additional retail outlets are Vitamin Shoppe and other natural products stores as well as online at SirRichards.com.

Sir Richard’s is the exclusive condom partner of (RED), 5% of the proceeds from every Sir Richard’s RED Special Edition box go to fight AIDS.

Sir Richard’s has received several awards for packaging design, and has distributed condoms in disadvantaged and disaster torn areas such as Haiti.

Latex in its pure form is a natural, renewable resource coming from the rubber tree. According to Sir Richard’s, some condom companies add all sorts of chemicals during the manufacturing process. People who claim to have a latex allergy could very likely just be having a reaction to the chemicals within the latex. A true latex allergy is rare and affects less than one percent of the population. Some condoms also contain the spermicide Nonoxynol-9, which is basically a type of detergent used to kill sperm and STD-causing pathogens. It can’t decipher between the good guys and the bad buys, so with repeated use it will start killing the skin cells of the vaginal and rectal wall. And this in turn makes someone even more susceptible to urinary tract infections and STD’s.

Sir Richard’s latex products are produced in Malaysia, are vegan-certified and PETA-approved, and contain no petrochemicals or spermicides. More information is available at www.sirrichards.com

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