NEW YORK Church & Dwight certainly isn’t the first company to report on research establishing a link between a healthy sex life and overall good health. But it is one of the few companies, along with Johnson & Johnson, with a venerable reputation as a knowledgeable and responsible consumer packaged goods company that’s operating in this space. And with the Trojan brand, the company fields one of the handful of products (KY, Durex and LifeStyles to name a few) with brand-name recognition and trust among consumers shopping this category.

So what does all this mean? It further justifies intimacy health has a legitimate destination center in America’s drug stores. It means that in most states, Mom can actually make a discreet purchase without having to travel to a perhaps more risque section of town to visit a specialty shop. And finally, it means that pharmacies can take advantage of the opportunity to field intimacy and health-related products without fear of consumer backlash, especially if the vast majority actually start looking for those products at their drug store.

As further evidence as to how much this category has evolved in mass retail in the past several years, Lelo, Inc. presented last week at NACDS Marketplace. Lelo is a specialty manufacturer that focuses primarily on premium personal massagers (the packaging had a department-store beauty-product look and feel) with pricepoints as high as $179.