How HOWL became one of the UK's most exciting queer sexual wellness brands

Photography by Alexander Ekholm

In 2019, Samuel Douek and his team launched HOWL with a simple mission: to create a safe space for LGBTQIA+ people to embrace and express their sexual freedom. What began as a community-focused idea has since evolved into an inclusive sexual wellness brand. Despite entering a crowded market, HOWL has carved out a unique niche for itself, becoming a much-needed queer-focused voice in the sexual wellness industry.

This year, the brand reached a major milestone when it took home the coveted Product of the Year prize at the 2026 Sexual Freedom Awards. Following the win, we caught up with founder and CEO Samuel Douek to discuss HOWL's evolution, the importance of queer-centred sexual wellness, and what's next for the award-winning brand.

Samuel, congratulations on Howl winning Product of the Year at the 2026 Sexual Freedom Awards. What does this recognition mean to you and the team, and how does it feel to see HOWL receive such a prestigious honour?

Winning Product of the Year isn't something I'm going to downplay; it genuinely means everything to me and the whole HOWL team. We're a tiny, LGBTQ+-founded brand, part-owned by the nightlife community we were born out of. We're not Durex or Liquid Silk with deep pockets and limitless resources. Every decision we've made has been intentional: we've refused to compromise on formula, using only premium ingredients; we've kept prices as low as we possibly can to make it accessible for our community; we donate 10% of profits to queer charities (currently the Outside Project), and we employ hundreds of queer people across everything we do. We genuinely believe you can build a brand that does good, and to have that recognised formally by the Sexual Freedom Awards means the world.

HOWL first launched in 2019 within the sexual health space. How has the brand evolved over the past seven years, both as a company and as a resource for LGBTQIA+ communities?

HOWL actually started life as a queer-inclusive, sex-positive techno rave. Our first party was at GROW in Tottenham in 2019, and 500 people came through the doors. If it weren't for the pandemic, we had every intention of growing it into a festival. But COVID had very different plans for all of us – overnight, every party stopped. DJs, promoters, venues – nobody knew if they'd ever throw another event.

That's where the lube came from. We wanted to take the energy, passion, and raw sexuality of the dancefloor and bottle it for our community, so we developed two CBD lubes. When the parties finally came back in January 2021, we launched them as merch at our events. What nobody expected was how well it would do; we sold out and ended up in Selfridges. So in 2024, I made the decision to put my film directing career on hiatus and properly commit to a startup founder journey, relaunching HOWL as a sexual wellness consumer brand and LGBTQ+ nightlife company in 2025. It's only been a year and a half since this went from a fun side project to an actual business with a real mission: to revolutionise intimacy for all genders.

Building a brand in sexual wellness, particularly one rooted in LGBTQIA+ communities, can come with unique challenges. What obstacles have you faced while growing HOWL, and how have you navigated them?

You genuinely cannot believe the hurdles stacked against us. Not only did we decide to launch a consumer brand with zero prior business experience, but we chose the adult industry – one of the most heavily regulated sectors, alongside gambling. And then, because I never make things easy for myself, we built our formula around CBD as an active ingredient to help relax muscles and ease discomfort, which added an entirely different layer of regulatory complexity on top.

Since day one, we've been unable to run paid advertising on Meta, Google, or Amazon – channels that most consumer brands are built on. But in a strange way, it forced us to do something more valuable: build a genuinely authentic community. We'd been doing that since 2019 anyway, so we had a following we could speak to organically. On top of that, I've leaned into my directing background to make content with our small, incredibly talented team that people actually want to engage with. We've made it work. And I'm particularly excited right now because we're about to launch our first non-CBD product, which is going to unlock a lot of those doors for the first time.

From affordable sexual wellness products to community events, HOWL has grown into something much broader than a retail brand. What impact do you hope HOWL will have over the next five years, and where do you see the company heading?

As queer people, we're so often told to make ourselves smaller. We can't be too much, can't succeed, can't lift each other up the way our straight counterparts do. We start professional life at a disadvantage, and we're constantly held back. I hope HOWL can be part of a growing movement of LGBTQ+ companies that are genuinely reaching for the stars – and then giving back: creating opportunities, donating to charity, and representing the LGBTQ+ experience in all its complexity and diversity.

Concretely, I see HOWL as a global queer community events brand championing LGBTQ+ music; a media channel driving progressive sex education; and a worldwide consumer brand that actively works to solve real problems around intimacy. But the deeper goal – the one that drives everything – is tearing down shame. Not just for queer people, but for everyone. No matter who you are – your age, race, gender, sexuality – so many of us live lives dictated by societal shame, and we want to abolish that. From our packaging design to the artists we platform to the education we put out, everything we do is about breaking down the taboos that divide us by championing the one thing that unites us: pleasure.

What can customers and fans expect from HOWL for the rest of 2026? Are there any upcoming launches, events, or Pride Month plans you're especially excited about?

There's a lot coming, and honestly, it's our most exciting year yet. The centrepiece is HOWL Pride – our flagship annual event – on Saturday 4th July in Hackney Wick, welcoming over 3,000 people across five venues and ten stages. Expect 85 DJs from across the London and international scene. From there, we'll be at London Fetish Week, supplying Whole Festival in Berlin, and, for the first time ever, we'll have our very own stage at Maiden Voyage, London's most iconic music festival. That one feels like a real milestone.

And then there's the product side, which I'm equally excited about. We're launching HOWLERS; bio-based intimacy melts that stay slick for a full session. Hands-free, bottle-free play unlike anything that exists right now. You'll be able to find them at our summer activations before the main launch in early September. It might sound like a bold claim, but I genuinely think they're going to change the way people have sex.