DoorDash needed to expand its Valentine’s Day audience to reach more than just couples. The easy route brands take for Valentine’s Day is talking to all the people celebrating their relationships. But not DoorDash.

Love has shifted in culture. From the TV show Parks & Recreation starting Galentine’s Day celebrations and the emergence of Singles Awareness Day, to platonically marrying your best friend, being in an ethically non-monogamous relationship, or focusing on loving yourself, modern love has a new look. And so do consumers.

So, to go beyond couples and traditional romance, where do you look to? Singles.

It just so happens that in 2022, 42% of DoorDash users identified as single. They deserved to celebrate Valentine’s Day too. But their Valentine’s Day wouldn’t be a day of romantic expression to someone else.

Turns out that more women than ever, 1 in 4, are spending Valentine’s Day alone during a time when women, especially near Valentine’s Day, are bombarded with content online that calls out and others singlehood.

Single shaming, a behavior that turns being single into a stigma. 74% of the single shaming conversation volume comes from women with 77% of these posts having a negative sentiment.

How could DoorDash combat this shaming?

A common phrase is that “the only love you need is your own self-love” which has more than one meaning–the love you have for yourself, and providing sexual pleasure for yourself. Self-pleasuring is a behavior that could exist for any audience, but especially singles.

DoorDash would take self-love literally, tapping into the 72% of US adults who believe self-pleasuring is a form of “therapy”.

This would start a weirdly taboo conversation: female self-pleasure. Because 69% of women in the U.S. feel uncomfortable talking about their self-pleasure.

Sexual pleasure is no stranger on social, with sex toys gaining more buzz in recent years. TikTok was filled with videos about one toy in particular that broke the Internet in 2022. The Rose ™, a clitoral sex toy that just so happened to be shaped like a rose, is the most purchased Valentine’s Day flower, and has millions of views–-#rosetoyreviews with 11.4m, #inyarose with 40.3m views, and #rosetoy with 226.9m.

Almost a month before Valentine’s Day, Miley Cyrus dropped the self-love, single people championing anthem of 2023, “Flowers”. Miley’s iconic and powerful line “I can buy myself flowers” created DoorDash’s space to play.

So, DoorDash created the Self-Love Bouquet with 11 traditional red roses and one The Rose™ vibrator, designed like a red rose, available at DashMarts in Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Miami, Houston, and Detroit.

And to get everyone talking about the Self-Love Bouquet, DoorDash partnered with influencers within the self-love and self-pleasuring space and turned singlehood into something to celebrate for Valentine’s Day.