• by Les Luchter , Staff Writer, Yesterday

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Evvy, a vaginal healthcare specialist, has launched a men’s product.

That’s not a contradiction, since Evvy’s new Male Partner BV Treatment reduces recurrences of bacterial vaginosis (BV) in women by combating bacteria in their male partners before the latter can pass it on during sex. BV, Evvy notes, has some of the highest recurrence rates in all of medicine -- over 50% within six months, even after using antibiotics.

Evvy’s male treatment, a combination of two prescription antibiotics -- metronidazole, taken orally, and topical clindamycin, applied to the penis -- is backed by research published recently in the New England Journal of Medicine.  

Getting men to use such a product?

Here’s where that old phrase, “behind every man is a woman,” actually comes in handy. 

Because use of a vaginosis treatment by men largely depends on conversations initiated by their women -- who remain Evvy’s predominant audience.

Male Partner BV Treatment is “specifically targeted at the partners of women on our platform who have been diagnosed with BV,” Evvy Cofounder-CMO Laine Bruzek tells Pharma & Health Insider.

So, Evvy strives to empower its BV patients to talk with their sexual partners both about how the latter can spread BV and how the new product can reduce recurrences, Bruzek explains. “We want to make sure that we give them great stigma-free language that they can rely on to have those difficult conversations,” says Bruzek.

That empowerment, she says, is being done through such digital resources as blog posts (“Can men get BV? Understanding the facts”) and free coaching calls available to all women who take Evvy’s flagship at-home vaginal microbiome test.

But Male Partner BV Treatment is a prescription product, so once such conversations have succeeded, men still need to sign up for the product in order to get the script from an Evvy-affiliated clinician.

To alleviate trepidation in the process, Evvy allows its BV patients to buy a Male Partner BV Treatment voucher for their mates, which “makes the conversation in the next step super-easy by letting the female patients incorporate the male partner side into their care program,” explains Bruzek.

Males can also come directly to Evvy to order the treatment, but the man must “attest that he has a partner who’s been diagnosed with BV.” Even if she isn’t an Evvy customer, the woman should also be under treatment for BV, since the scientific tests showing the success of the male antibiotics have been based on dual usage.

Evvy’s promotional outreach for Male Partner BV Treatment includes organic social media, and paid ads on Google and Meta platforms, with humor often being used -- for example:

“

We don’t shy away from laughing about this,” Bruzek says.

Evvy is also using influencers, but so far none who are male. Bruzek says she’d like to find a man brave enough to say, “I actually went through this and helped my female partner.”

Stigma is the biggest challenge in marketing Male Partner BV Treatment, Bruzek notes. “How do you educate men that they may actually be contributing to a recurrent cycle of BV in their female partner without making them feel shame in a way that might make them shut down or resistant to treatment?

“Men can be part of the solution without feeling like they’re part of the problem.”