No one was laughing in the lobby of the Bowery Hotel except for Julie Schott, ex Ella beauty director, current pimple patch mogul, and imaginative consumer packaged goods machine marketed toward Gen-Z. She was describing a crowdsale strategy when her voice suddenly trailed off. “Am I too loud in this room?” she whispered and then silently scolded herself. “We’re in the library. Schott joked about how you go to Target for toilet paper and then leave with a bunch of stuff you didn’t even know you needed. She joked about watching TikTok on airplanes, cigarettes and fecal incontinence.
Given the fickleness of placing comedy anywhere near our faces and bodies, the beauty industry is not known for its sense of humor and usually requires the care of a bomber squadron to make it funny. Schott, who left an editorial career to become a Gen-Z marketing guru, doesn’t make it funny as much as it does. She once tried to be an influencer but found it hard to be vulnerable. “I have trouble being serious,” she told me.
Years of hard work on Instagram have left Schott with the aloof sheen of a jet-lagged influencer. Even early in the morning, draped over the couch in Martine Rose’s sweats, her cheekbones jut out, obscured by what little light the hall lets in. She seems to be reeling from low-grade anxiety, one of the many frequencies that tunes her out. Gen-Z along with an almost Dadaist sense of humor and simple comedic honesty.
“They’re a lot of fun,” she said. “They’re not afraid to say what it is, and they’ll tell you when they hate something.
Think back to when she launched Starface with entrepreneur Brian Bordainick in 2019. Schott’s sensational innovation—hydrocolloid patches that are colored and cut like stickers—and they cost $22. “They were on TikTok like, ‘Girl, I’m not paying for this.’ Schott laughed. “Fair!” They are now $14.99 and available online as well as at Target and CVS. In other words, almost everywhere.
Since then, Schott and Bordainick have been launching new brands at the astonishing rate of about one per year. There’s Starface and Julie, emergency contraception; An up-and-coming skincare brand based on the viral super-hydration trend called “slugging” and Blip, a smoking cessation gum and stick brand.
If Emily Weiss whispered makeup to millennials, Schott knows what Gen-Z wants. In this light, it’s possible to read her and Bordainick’s portfolio—from his whimsical acne stickers to his trending TikTok skincare line—as a series of commercial emissaries in an underexplored market.
The brand, when animated by Schott, sounds like “your friend who follows the same Instagram pages and Twitter accounts as you,” said Alexandra Pauly, beauty editor of HighSnobiety. The Starface product in particular has an unspeakable effect. “They’re more than just pimples,” Pauly added. “It’s impossible not to feel some kind of way when you put a little pink star or Hello Kitty on your face.”
Starface is still the mothership around which the others orbit. Since launching in 2019, the brand has raised about $18 million in funding and is on track to approach $100 million in sales this year, Bordainick said. At least Julie enjoyed some momentum, hitting shelves in late 2022, a few months after the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade. Sales have doubled over the past six months, while the general contraceptive market has lagged behind. But Futurewise and Blip have yet to achieve nearly the same buzz. And there was Plus, a body care line focused on sustainability that ended about three years after its introduction.
Some products are easier to sell than others. But Schott is less a genius at selling things than he is a generational talent at marketing them. At 35, she’s mid-millennial and says she feels like most of her cohort when she’s in the Cody Rigsby Peloton class. Other times, she cuts a younger figure, like when she’s making a TikToks-inspired “girl dinner” for Julie (tag). He’s always on TikTok – scrolling but also looking for his rare stars. Is it on Doja Cat?
“He just has a really strong pulse on youth culture,” said Brian Bordainick, Schott’s business partner. The two include Brand New, a two-person startup platform where Bordainick builds the business and Schott builds the brand, something Bordainick says she’s uniquely good at.
“It’s like, ‘Shit.’ He just nails it every time,” he said.
Eyes on Z
Schott was born in Illinois, spent his childhood in Great Britain, and eventually landed in high school in Westport, Connecticut. She interned at Teen Vogue and was featured on its pages. (“I’m not just helping out in the closet, I’m also going to blog and attend events,” she said as a 20-year-old intern in 2008. “Keep you updated!”) Her early years were spent working under a pantheon of beauty editors like Eva Chen and Jean Godfrey-June. Schott also assisted the legendary Cat Marnell at XoJane and was immortalized in the memoir How to Murder Your Life as Kylie to Marnell’s Kim.
“We were kind of like the cast of a reality show, in a way,” Schott said. Every Xo writer had their “thing” and Schott became acne. Not only was she preoccupied with her own, but the subject became a prism for her to bring her feelings about her image to the website. For writers, this was the era of the personal essay; for beauty writers, it was the “I Tried It” era, when even basic services like acne-prone skin care got the first-person treatment.
After XoJane, Scott went to Elle and was eventually named the publication’s beauty director. It was there that she chaired a section where traveling editors shared their booty from abroad, and that’s how she came across Korean pimples. No bigger than individual sequins, these hydrocolloid patches not only protect pimples from aggravation, but are said to draw harmful material like excess oil from the area, speeding up the healing process.
Meanwhile, on Instagram, where Schott spent most of her time, filters began to provide ways to embellish selfie faces; some filters would cover your face with emoticons like digital stickers. If every beauty editor has their own idea of a genius product, combining a cute sticker with an acne patch would be Schott’s.
Around the middle of 2010, Schott joined the brat group of new media workers with a big social background, like the Prescod sisters Elle or Carly Cardellino of Cosmo or Kristie Dash of Allure. The excessive relevance of Instagram allowed some users to transcend the titles of their magazines, and editors, whether intentionally or otherwise, began to rely on acts of influence – posting photos from branded events, participating in trips not as journalists, but as talent. Schott embraces, but doesn’t celebrate, this time in her life: “It was a fun way of self-expression at that age,” she says diplomatically.
A star is born
During the gap between leaving Elle and starting Starface, Schott tried to support herself by working as an influencer and burned out.
“It was comically bad,” she said. “It just didn’t land.
She tried other things. After an Instagram post about continence proved wildly successful, Schott decided to take on the subject as beauty, inspiring her short but indelible #pooptalk series. That year she also decided to meet people who could translate her pimples into a commercial life. It didn’t take long before she met Bordainick.
The first batch of Starface fixes was, in Schott’s words, “not good”. They came out cleaner than intended and held on a little more than halfway. A few other and better known pimple patches like the ones from Korea have been – some might say are – more effective at actually suppressing acne. But none of them were and are not Starface. (Neither its formulas nor patch shapes are patented, but Starface remains unrivaled as of now, aside from the odd “star patch” that appears on the TikTok Shop.) The sheer novelty fueled the brand’s early success, and they sold out when they launched at Target. Since then, the patches have been completely reformulated to ensure maximum effectiveness, opacity and gummy factor.
“Everything that was on day one is in a completely different format today,” Schott said.
Schott said she was most focused on Starface, at least for the near term: This year, the brand is expanding into a new category and will also introduce two new colorways — one pink for now and a less colorful one later. Soon, Bordainick will launch Overdrive Defense, a brand that will apply the duo’s trademark marketing to drug test strips and opioid overdose medications, according to filed trademarks; it’s also his first post-Starface start without Schott formally alongside him.
After meeting Schott, it only took me two hours to come across a group of spots in the wild; several green stickers formed a constellation on the face of a cafe barista who presented himself as Gen-Z (IM SO ANXIOUS T-shirt, hair cut into a mullet). He has been a customer since launch. “They’ve gotten better,” he said, noting the stickier factor.
But he doesn’t like them because they work, strictly speaking; he just thinks they’re gorgeous.
Editor’s note: This article was amended on 3 June 2024. An earlier version misstated Schott’s birthplace.