When Salon CBR founder Phoebe was unexpectedly faced with changing the name of her young Canberra business, she had one important consideration: whatever came next still needed to feel welcoming. The result is The Bordella, a playful feminisation of the Italian word bordello, and a name Phoebe hopes captures a business that is sex-positive without being intimidating.
I was really trying to find something that was sex-related, pleasure-related without being off-putting to people,” she says.
The rebrand follows a cease-and-desist letter from another Canberra business concerned about similarities between their names. Rather than dwell on the dispute, Phoebe decided to move forward with a new identity, summed up on the business website with the phrase “make love, not litigation”.
While the name is changing, the purpose behind the business is not. For Phoebe, the idea began more than a decade ago with questions about the way women’s pleasure is talked about, or often isn’t talked about at all.
No one talks about, and no one seems to care what women want in bed.” she says.
What began as an idea for a different kind of adult store has since grown into something much broader. “It’s now more than just a sex shop,” Phoebe says. Alongside products, The Bordella hosts events designed to give women opportunities to connect, try something new and have conversations they may not feel comfortable having elsewhere.
There are craft activities, body-positive events and social gatherings, as well as groups centred around particular life experiences. The Divorced Women’s Club grew partly from Phoebe’s own experience of separation and recognising how isolating it could be when the people closest to her had not been through the same thing.
The gatherings have no set agenda. Some women arrive ready to talk, while others simply listen until they feel comfortable sharing. It all feeds into her broader aim of creating the kind of community where conversations that might otherwise feel difficult become a little easier.
I’m really trying to achieve a space that has the same atmosphere as the women’s bathroom in a nightclub,” she says.
It’s an unusual comparison, but one that captures what Phoebe means: strangers offering compliments, women looking out for each other and an assumption that the person beside you is on your side.
That culture is also deliberately inclusive. Phoebe says the business includes trans women in its definition of women and welcomes queer and non-binary people. She describes the community as being “for anybody who knows what it’s like to move through the world as a woman.”
Although The Bordella is still relatively new, Phoebe says some of the most meaningful signs that it is working have come after events have finished. She has heard from women who have developed a different relationship with their bodies after attending body-positive activities, and from others whose conversations at events prompted them to communicate differently with long-term partners.
One woman who had experienced social isolation and anxiety since COVID told Phoebe that, after being encouraged by a friend to attend an event, it was the most she had enjoyed being in a room full of people she didn’t know since before the pandemic. Those messages mean more to Phoebe than the physical space she has created.
You don’t have to know anyone”, she says. “You can come to something that you don’t know anyone with because I’ll be here. I’ll be your plus one.”
With more events planned, including a Canberra girls’ weekend and a women-only nightclub night, Phoebe says the business is still finding its feet and experimenting with what the community wants.
And despite the circumstances that prompted it, customers have responded enthusiastically to the new name, with some telling her they prefer The Bordella to the original.
For Phoebe, it seems fitting that a space built around an idea she struggled to find elsewhere now has a name that didn’t exist either.
It’s made-up and a new name because the concept itself is made up and new,” she says. “We don’t have this. This is new.”
