She & HER · Foundation
Volume One · June 2026
Foundation Volume One June MMXXVI

What She & HER is

A working document for the people building branding, social, and product UX in service of this project — what we are, and what we want people to think when they meet us.

Desirée Mayon · CEO & Founder, She & HER · For eevulv & Opportune
View as
Contents
  1. IWhat we areP. One
  2. IIWhere this comes fromP. Two
  3. IIIThe thesisP. Three
  4. IVWhere we're goingP. Four
  5. VWhat we want people to thinkP. Five
  6. VIWhat we are notP. Six
  7. VIIHow we soundP. Seven
  8. VIIIVisual cuesP. Eight
  9. IXTest a draftP. Nine
I
Chapter One

What we are.

She & HER is a sapphic dating app, redefined.

We're built on a thesis that dating isn't a matching problem — it's a teaching problem. Most apps drop two strangers in a room and call it a feature. We start earlier. With community. Then with self. Then, and only then, with someone.

The scope sentence — legally vetted, use verbatim "A community built for and centering the sapphic community." That's the canonical "who is this for" line, drawn from our Privacy Notice. Use it verbatim or close-paraphrase whenever copy needs a defensible one-liner. We do not — and legally cannot — define womanhood; sapphic identity is the door, and membership lives in our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines, not in gendered gatekeeping.
A note for partners reading this without queer context Sapphic = wlw = women who love women — used as a community frame that holds queer women, trans women, and nonbinary people in sapphic community. We use sapphic alone in-community and gloss it on first mention everywhere else.
ID verification — how to frame it, legally-vetted We verify that users are real people, not bots — not that they're a particular gender. From our Privacy Notice (drafted with counsel): "we generally do not extract or retain the sex or gender marker shown on an identification document, and we do not retain document images longer than reasonably necessary." When copy explains verification, lead with realness + safety. Never "we verify you're a woman."
find your human.

That tagline is the anchor. Everything we build either earns it or shouldn't ship.

II
Chapter Two

Where this comes from.

Sapphic community isn't new. It's ancestral.

The internet has acted, for a long time, like queer-women community started with whatever app was loudest that quarter. It didn't. We're not building the first space — we're honoring the lineage, building forward, and protecting what we make so it doesn't get optimized into something else.

I'm Desirée Mayon. Sapphic. Black. From Sunnyside in Houston. I've spent fifteen-plus years in machine learning and data science at Google, Microsoft Xbox, Cambridge, Etsy, and Nordstrom. The technical depth matters — not as a credential, but as infrastructure. It's how we can build the pedagogy at all.

The bench Mike Castner (CTO, formerly Google) leads engineering. Khizr leads Flutter. Bhaskar leads backend. Sevanne Calle runs product. Ayesha Atif holds operations. Jeanette Henry leads grants and philanthropic partnerships. The team is small and senior. The bench is intentional.
III
Chapter Three

The thesis.

Every dating app you've ever used follows the same sequence: a stranger arrives in your feed, you pick from them, you go on a date, you maybe build a relationship. That sequence is the product. It's also why most of them feel the same.

someone / maybe a date / maybe a relationship
— the optimization industry wants you fluent in.
Tap any step Each step in the standard order has a hidden assumption — tap to read the assumption.
community / self / someone
— what we mean when we say find your human.
Tap any step Each step in our order earns the next. Tap to read why each one is load-bearing.

That sequence is the product. We delay romantic matching on purpose. Before two people in our system can meet each other romantically, they've already met the community. They've already met more of themselves — through how we teach reciprocity, needs, and reading desire.

This is what we mean by teaching dating. The matching is the easy part — every app does it. The teaching is the moat.

The boundary we hold We teach the pattern. We do not publicize the parameters. Architecture, principles, and the order of the sequence — yes, teach openly. Signal values, weights, curriculum mappings — internal only. The thesis is positioning; the parameters are moat.
IV
Chapter Four

Where we're going.

Here's the next eighteen months, in shape. Each of these is a real commitment with real partners. Tap any item to expand.

V
Chapter Five

What we want people to think.

When someone encounters the brand for the first time, this is what should land. Treat these as design north stars — when a draft makes someone feel one of these, it's working. Tap any to expand.

i
This is for me — even if I don't have the language for it yet.
A sapphic woman who hasn't said the word out loud should feel like she walked into a warm room.
+
ii
This is serious craft.
Real engineers, real designers, a CEO who's shipped at scale — not a side project, not a Tinder skin.
+
iii
This isn't transactional.
An invitation into a practice, not a match-by-stats system.
+
iv
Someone is actually thinking about my safety.
Not because we list features — because the tone signals we've thought about what happens at the edges.
+
v
This is queer-led and queer-served.
No one should ever have to wonder if a straight founder is cosplaying our community for a market.
+
VI
Chapter Six

What we are not.

When you're designing or writing for us and a sentence drifts into one of these — push it back. Tap any card to see a wrong / right example.

I.
Not "women-only."
Tap for examples
I.
WRONGThe first women-only dating app for queer women.
RIGHTA community built for and centering the sapphic community.
Tap to close
II.
Not a hookup app.
Tap for examples
II.
WRONGMeet someone tonight.
RIGHTPractice the part of dating that's actually hard.
Tap to close
III.
Not a fix-loneliness app.
Tap for examples
III.
WRONGFind the love you've been missing.
RIGHTFind your community. Then yourself. Then someone.
Tap to close
IV.
Not a Tinder for queer women.
Tap for examples
IV.
WRONGSwipe right on your next chapter.
RIGHTSlow the start so the middle has somewhere to grow.
Tap to close
V.
Not a "finally-this-exists" app.
Tap for examples
V.
WRONGFinally, an app made for us.
RIGHTBuilt in the lineage. For where we're going next.
Tap to close
VI.
Not founder-cosplay.
Tap for examples
VI.
WRONGMeet the team behind She & HER. (group shot, men centered)
RIGHTFounded and led by sapphic CEO Desirée Mayon.
Tap to close
VII
Chapter Seven

How we sound.

Warm, not corporate. Confident, not defensive. We don't have to over-explain why we exist.

Voice Anchors

Register
Lowercase-okay in close-contact copy (DMs, texts). Title case in proposals and press.
Sapphic
"Sapphic / wlw / women who love women" together on first mention for non-queer audiences. Sapphic alone in-community.
Love
When we talk about love, we mean community → self → someone, in that order. Romantic-only framing reduces us.
Founder
Always "CEO and founder of She & HER" — never just "founder," never "I run a startup."

The Brand Name — Type It Wrong, Watch It Correct

Brand Name Corrector Try any variant
Correct form She & HER
✓ The rule — Capital S · lowercase he · ampersand · all-caps HER. Style the typography around the wordmark; never restyle the letters.
VIII
Chapter Eight

Visual cues.

eevulv leads visual direction. This is a pointer, not a prescription. Tap a swatch to copy it in your preferred format.

Cream#F2ECE4
Burgundy#6B2737
Rose#A47165
Blush#C97D7D
Gold#B88A5A

Typography

In use Bodoni Moda and Cormorant Garamond for editorial display and body. Plus Jakarta Sans or Inter for UI labels and meta. Georgia for email, for compatibility.

What We Are Not, Visually

We are not dark mode. We are not neon-queer aesthetic. We are not Tinder-vibrant. We are warm, editorial, anchored.

IX
Chapter Nine · A working tool

Test a draft.

Paste any tagline, headline, social caption, or paragraph below. We'll flag what trips the brand rules — and suggest a fix. Use this whenever a draft is sitting and you're not sure.

On-Brand Check Paste · Check · Edit · Repeat
What this catches The checker scans for the most common drift: women-only framing, lineage-erasure language (finally / first ever / never had), wrong brand-name styling, Tinder-vocabulary (swipe / match / hookup), founder-title shortcuts, and completion-language. It's a first pass, not a substitute for taste. When in doubt, send the draft over.

This is what we're building. The work you're doing in service of it — branding, social, UX — translates this into surfaces people touch. When something feels off-brand, come back here.

If a draft sits on one of these and isn't sure, I want a conversation, not a guess.

— Desirée
Desirée Yvonne Mayon · CEO & Founder, She & HER, Inc.
desiree@sheandher.io
Foundation · Volume One · MMXXVI
Copied