When people talk about FemTech, many immediately think of menstrual care, pelvic floor training, menopause support, or fertility treatment. But in reality, women’s sexual wellness is just as essential and should never be overlooked. In this article, we would like to introduce Saki Baba, a Japanese female entrepreneur who entered the world of Japanese FemTech through her personal family experience and went on to establish BONHEUR, a brand centered on female-focused intimate product design, intimate care, and female self-discovery.

It Began with Her Mother’s Collapse: Why Did She Enter the Women’s Health Industry?

In 1991, in Imabari, Ehime Prefecture, Japan, a young girl’s mother suddenly fell ill at the age of 47. The pressure of work and the weight of housework came crashing down on her body all at once. Years later, Saki Baba mentioned this experience in a fundraising announcement, explaining why she entered this field in the first place.

Since then, she has kept asking herself the same question: What do women fundamentally need in order to live healthy lives? That question eventually led her to a space long overlooked in Japan and rarely addressed with sincerity by brands— women’s sexual wellness.

In many Asian cultural contexts, women’s physical and emotional care is often expected to come after family, roles, and responsibilities. Yet true wellness should not be limited to food, sleep, and exercise. It should also include intimacy, body awareness, and the ability to understand pleasure and comfort. This is exactly the gap that Japanese women-focused technology brands and the wider world of FemTech are working to fill.

Who Is Saki Baba, Representative Director of BONHEUR?

Saki Baba studied information engineering at a technical college and originally planned to become an engineer. As she later shared, the work she entered after graduation was entirely different from engineering. Yet the feeling that she wanted to do something meaningful never left her. What ultimately gave her direction was her continued questioning of how a women’s wellness brand should exist and how it should genuinely respond to women’s real needs.

Over time, she came to realize that sexual wellness had long been excluded from the list of things women are encouraged to care for. Many products in the market were still shaped largely through a male perspective. Women lacked not only reliable and accurate information, but also products truly designed around their needs. In 2020, she founded BONHEUR Co., Ltd. in Fukuoka.

BONHEUR represents more than the launch of a brand. It is also a clear statement: women’s sexual wellness should not be marginalized, and women-friendly intimate products should not simply repeat the old aesthetics and logic of the existing market.

Sexual Wellness Inspired a FemTech Startup: From Night Care to Intimate Care

In September 2020, Saki Baba launched her first crowdfunding project on Makuake, introducing CBD lubricant, CBD oil, and a vape product line. The concept was positioned as a “gender-free night care brand.”

On the crowdfunding page, she wrote that sexual wellness, like eating and sleeping, is part of a person’s most basic human needs. It is a core foundation of living well, and a right that everyone should inherently have.

This statement clearly conveys her understanding of FemTech: sexual wellness is not a taboo side topic, but part of overall health. She did not enter this field to deliberately break taboos. She did so because, in her eyes, this was simply something that deserved to be taken seriously as part of women’s health—and as part of intimate care.

Someone who once planned to become an engineer ultimately chose manufacturing, long conversations with factories, and repeated refinements of design and user experience because she believed that this field had rarely been built seriously from a woman’s perspective. That commitment has made BONHEUR one of the most noteworthy Japanese women-focused technology brands in recent years.

A New Design Perspective for Intimate Products: How WEHVE Redefined the Japanese Massager

Later, Saki Baba also launched a crowdfunding campaign on Campfire for her own massager line, WEHVE. She observed that the Japanese market had long been saturated with products designed for the male gaze, while designs rooted in women’s feelings, women’s aesthetics, and women’s everyday life contexts remained extremely rare.

WEHVE was born as a response to that gap. Instead of relying on the pinks, blacks, and overly explicit visual language often associated with intimate products, the brand adopted a calm navy blue tone—one that conveys stillness, maturity, and emotional balance. This is not just a difference in color. It is also her redefinition of female-focused intimate product design and Japanese intimate product design: intimate products do not need to conform to stereotypes; they can also feel quiet, restrained, and beautifully refined—like part of everyday life.

From the beginning, her vision for the product was never limited to personal solo use. WEHVE can be used alone, shared between partners, or even given as a thoughtful gift from a man to his partner. This design philosophy expands the product from a single-use object into a more complete tool for intimate care, and also offers women a more reassuring, more refined option for self-discovery.

On the crowdfunding page, she also openly acknowledged how difficult it is for sexual wellness products to gain visibility under SEO restrictions, advertising limitations, and platform rules. Because of these barriers, opportunities for brands to be seen and understood remain extremely limited. That is precisely why she chose crowdfunding—to allow more people to encounter the brand directly, rather than remain trapped within the old constraints of the industry.

The BONHEUR Brand Philosophy: Redefining Modern Women’s Sexual Wellness

BONHEUR is built around the theme of “redefining modern sexual wellness.” From ingredient sourcing and manufacturing methods to the overall design language, the brand aims to create products that truly fit into women’s everyday lives. This approach has made BONHEUR one of the most talked-about Japanese FemTech brands in recent years.

Redefinition here does not mean trying to create controversy or attention for its own sake. It means putting women’s real needs back at the center of daily life. From comfort and safety to use context and visual language, every detail answers the same question: women deserve more thoughtful, more complete care.

From this perspective, a FemTech massager is no longer simply a product category. It becomes part of women’s self-understanding, self-discovery, intimate care, and everyday body awareness.

Becoming an HHCOM Brand Ambassador: Where Japanese FemTech Meets Taiwan’s Women’s Wellness Values

In 2025, Saki Baba became a brand ambassador for the Taiwanese FemTech brand HHCOM. The question she had long been asking— “What do women fundamentally need in order to live healthy lives?”— had found others in Taiwan who were asking the very same thing.

HHCOM founder Joe invited Saki Baba to share her values and journey with women in Taiwan, helping more people understand that sexual wellness is not a subject to be pushed aside, but an essential part of how women care for themselves.

Through this collaboration, Saki Baba also hopes to inspire more women in Taiwan to pay attention to their minds and bodies, explore pleasure, and place sexual wellness back into their personal care routines. What women of previous generations may not have had the chance to reclaim, this generation can begin to take back—one woman at a time.

This partnership also shows how the values of Japanese FemTech and Taiwanese women’s wellness brands can resonate with each other, together pushing forward a more mature and more compassionate conversation around women’s health.

Why Does This Story Deserve to Be Seen by More People?

In the women’s health industry, the growth of Japanese FemTech is helping more people rethink what women truly need. What women need is not merely functional products, but ways of living in which they are understood, respected, and treated with care.

Saki Baba’s story shows how a Japanese female entrepreneur transformed concern for her mother and her questions about women’s health into brand values and product design. This is not just an entrepreneurial story. It is also a practice in how women reclaim agency over their bodies and learn to understand their own needs again.

For HHCOM, this philosophy matters because we have always believed that pleasure, wellness, reassurance, and refinement can—and should—coexist.

Conclusion: Bringing Sexual Wellness Back into Women’s Self-Care

From BONHEUR to WEHVE, from Japan to Taiwan, everything Saki Baba has done points back to the same core belief: women should not only be taught to endure and give; they should also be supported in understanding their bodies and listening to their needs.

That is what makes FemTech so compelling. It is not about forcing technology onto women, but about recognizing women’s lived experiences and responding to them. As more brands begin to take women’s sexual wellness, female-focused intimate product design, intimate care, female self-discovery, and women-friendly intimate products seriously, we move one step closer to a more complete understanding of women’s health.

Further Reading & Product Selection