Introducing Antevorta, Sara Jane Ho’s feminine care brand inspired by traditional Chinese medicine: ‘Your vagina’s not supposed to smell like spring flowers’ says the Mind Your Manners Netflix star

“The same year I met my husband, I found my work wife,” Sara says of her now co-founder Annie Ho, a successful businesswoman in her own right with years of experience working at some of fashion’s biggest brands. After a decade of continued collaborations brought them closer together, the duo recently launched Antevorta Laboratories, a feminine care brand using herbs and ingredients found in TCM in a line of intimate care products.

While Sara previously worked with Annie’s VIP clients in mainland China on etiquette coaching, it wasn’t until Annie sought Sara’s advice for herself that the idea behind Antevorta Laboratories was born.

At the same time Annie was thinking about a career reset, Sara’s Netflix show was about to drop, and both women were reflecting on what would come next.

“When I think about my career in the last 10 years, everything I’ve done is across two realms: one is bridging East and West, and the other is helping women move through the world more confidently,” says Sara. It was a natural next step, then, to pursue building a brand which fused her penchant for cross-cultural exchange with her passion for female empowerment.

Annie adds that the power of a female-led brand boils down to the intrinsic bond and partnership that only women can share with one another. “The level of trust needs to be very, very in sync, and chemistry needs to be instinctual, as well.”

As Sara explains, Antevorta is the name of the goddess of the future in Roman mythology, an indicator of the founders’ ambitions, “because it shows that every woman is in charge of her future”. The name is meant to sound ambiguous – its Mandarin translation includes the Chinese characters for peace, fertility and uniqueness. “There are Japanese and Korean skincare brands, but there isn’t a Chinese beauty brand that resonates with women in New York, London, Paris … We didn’t feel like because we’re a Chinese brand, we need a [Chinese-sounding] name.”

Antevorta’s packaging and marketing are also testament to their founders’ experience in cultural fluency and efforts to “demystify” a field often misunderstood in Western countries. Annie describes how the brand succeeds in making TCM appear “premium” and “consumer-accessible”, with sleek packaging, bright pink boxes and straightforward instructions that belie their ingredients – far from how unappealing herbs might look inside your traditional Chinese medicinal store.

“It begins from the whole experience,” Sara says of Antevorta’s approach to both TCM and feminine care, which also sometimes suffers from an unattractive reputation. “A lot of existing feminine care [brands] have an outdated perspective on what femininity is. Their packaging is covered with daisies, roses – your vagina’s not supposed to smell like spring flowers.”

“Often women are so embarrassed to be seen with feminine care products,” she continues. “You’re trying to hide your tampon or pad as you scurry to the bathroom. Our individual wipes, they’re so elevated and elegant, and also our sprays: it’s not something you’d be embarrassed to have in your hand. If anything, it makes you feel elevated and more attractive using it.”

Complete with a cleansing gel, those wipes and sprays are aimed at addressing all the dryness, itching and irritation on the vulva which women hesitate to talk openly about, using herbal recipes and remedies which have been passed down for centuries. “There’s so many other words, like ‘intimate area’, ‘down there’, ‘fanny’, that the older generation prefers,” Sara concludes. “But the younger generation just wants you to call a spade a spade.”

Sara and Annie want their customers to feel how they felt when they first started the brand – fully confident in being comfortable with who they are as women, without regard to what might be happening ‘down there’. “When I took on Antevorta I decided to shed some of the masks I had to wear throughout the past 15 years to operate in fashion,” says Annie. “For once, I was able to do something I really believe in, and it made me feel so good.”

It’s not unlike how Sara has coached her clients to embrace their full selves, adding, “It was only after my Netflix show came out, cemented my status globally, where I just felt so secure in myself … Before I used to feel I had to be this or that. Now I’m realising it’s okay to contradict myself sometimes – when we choose this or that, it cuts us off from who we are and everything we can be.”

That’s where Antevorta thrives – in that space between what is expected of us and who we actually are. “Feminine care is emerging, but it’s very fragmented. There’s no clear market leader right now,” says Sara. “We don’t compare ourselves against the drugstore guys. We actually [consider] ourselves more beauty even though we’re [about] health – we’re straddling the two.”

Admittedly, a cultural gap between East and West still exists when it comes to conversations about feminine care, though both Annie and Sara emphasise that the knowledge gap actually benefits the brand in unexpected ways. Whether in a high-context, collectivist culture as in much of Asia – where mutual understanding is often achieved by reading between the lines, as Sara describes in her book – or a low-context one like you might find in an individualistic society such as the United States, women everywhere share similar struggles and societal expectations about their bodies.

“Even within [the] US, there are certain communities on the West or East Coast that might be more open to talk about their rights as women, abortion, all that, but some of the states are also very conservative,” says Annie. Meanwhile in China, even as women have gradually achieved greater financial success and independence, “they know they need to treat themselves better, but there’s also this strong tie within the family, the traditional way of doing things, that’s still holding them back.”

Annie cites an Antevorta branding exercise which resulted in their tagline, ‘Be free to care’, as an example of how differently Eastern and Western audiences might perceive what ‘care’ means – especially when it comes to their own bodies. “My first question was, ‘Why do we need freedom to care?’ When I look at Asian culture, you’re expected to care.”

Ultimately, Antevorta is more than just another femcare brand – it’s a lifestyle brand that aims to not only destigmatise feminine care, but revolutionise it. While the founders are proud that their products have resonated especially well with Asian-Americans and other internationally-based Chinese, they add that other demographics are also increasingly receptive.

Thanks to growing mistrust of Big Pharma and Western medical institutions among Americans, as well as global audiences embracing a more holistic approach to preventive healthcare, Sara says the time is now for TCM to shine on the international stage. “For a young brand – we’ve only been around six months now – we actually have a pretty high return customer rate. The products speak for themselves.”

“The reason why we chose an intimate line to start with,” Annie concludes, is to give women the “courage and proactiveness” to own up to their hidden struggles and do something about them. “The way that your body feels is reflected in your confidence.”