No one was laughing in the lobby of the Bowery Hotel but Julie Schott, ex. Ellen beauty director, current acne mogul, and idea machine for consumer packaged goods marketed toward Gen-Z. She was describing the massive retail strategy when her voice suddenly fell silent. “Am I too loud in this room?” she whispered, then scolded herself gently. “We’re in a library.” Schott joked about how you go to Target for toilet paper and then end up leaving with a bunch of stuff you didn’t know you needed. She joked about watching TikTok on airplanes, cigarettes and fecal incontinence.
Given the volatility of putting 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 bomb squad to make it funny. Schott, who left her editorial career to become Gen-Z’s marketing guru, doesn’t make it funny so much as frivolous. She tried to be an influencer once, but found it difficult to express herself in a vulnerable way. “It’s hard for me to be honest,” she told me.
Years of hard work on Instagram have left Schott with the subdued glow of a jet-lagged influencer. Even early in the morning, curled up on a sofa in Martine Rose sweats, her cheekbones jutting out, covered in what little light the lobby lets in. She seems to resonate with a low-key angst, which is one of the many frequencies that Gen-Z tunes into, along with an almost Dadaist sense of humor and a simple comic honesty.
“They are very funny,” she said. “They’re not afraid to say what it is, and they’ll tell you when they hate something.”
Consider when she launched Starface with entrepreneur Brian Bordainick in 2019. Schott’s breakthrough innovation — hydrocolloid patches that are colored and cut like stickers — and their $22 price tag. “They were on TikTok like, ‘Girl, I’m not paying that.’ Schott laughed. “Right!” 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 launched new brands at an astonishing rate of about one per year. There’s Starface and Julie, an emergency contraceptive; In the future, a skin care brand based on the viral trend of super-hydration called “slugging” and Blip, a brand of gums and sticks for smoking cessation.
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 her quirky acne stickers to her TikTok-based skincare line — as a series of commercial emissaries to a poorly mapped market.
A brand, when animated by Schott, sounds like “your friend who follows the same Instagram pages and Twitter accounts as you,” said Alexandra Pauly, HighSnobiety’s beauty editor. Starface’s product, in particular, has an untold effect. “They’re more than just pimples,” Pauly added. “It’s impossible not to feel a certain 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 its launch in 2019, the brand has raised about $18 million in funding and is on track to approach $100 million in revenue this year, Bordainick said. Julie has enjoyed at least one moment, hitting shelves in late 2022, a few months after the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade. Sales doubled in the last six months, while the overall contraceptive market stagnated. But Futurewise and Blip, have yet to achieve nearly the same momentum. And there was Plus, a sustainability-minded body care line that shut down about three years after it was introduced.
Some products are easier to sell than others. But Schott is less a genius at selling things than a generational talent at marketing them. At 35, she’s mid-Millennial and says she feels like most of her group when she’s in a Cody Rigsby Peloton class. Other times, she hosts a younger figure, like when she makes a TikTok-inspired “girls dinner” for Julie (the brand). She’s always on TikTok – scrolling but also looking for her precious stars. Is he at Doja Cat?
“She just has a really strong pulse on youth culture,” said Brian Bordainick, Schott’s business partner. Both include Brand New, a two-person-sized brand launch platform where Bordainick builds the business and Schott builds the brand, something she is unique in doing, according to Bordainick.
“It’s like, ‘holy shit.’ She just nails it every time,” he said.
Eyes on Mr
Schott was born in Illinois, spent a period of childhood in the UK and eventually landed in high school in Westport, Connecticut. She was interned in Teen Vogue and appeared in its pages. (“I’m not only assisting in the closet, but I’ll also be blogging and attending events,” she said as a 20-year-old intern, in 2008. “Keep in the loop!”) Her early years were spent worked under a pantheon of beauty editors like Eva Chen and Jean Godfrey-June. Schott also assisted legendary cat Marnell on XoJane and was immortalized in the memoir How to Kill Your Life as Kylie for Marnell’s Kim.
“We were a little bit like a reality show thrown in a way,” Schott said. Every Xo writer had his “thing,” and Schott’s became a scumbag. Not only was she preoccupied with her own, but the thread became a prism for her to refract her feelings about her image on the website. For writers, it was the era of the personal essay; for beauty writers, it was the era of “I Tried It,” where even basic services like acne-prone skin care were given first-person treatments.
After XoJane, Scott moved on to Elle and was eventually named the publication’s beauty director. It was there that she ran a section where traveling editors would share their booty from abroad, so she came across Korean pimples. No bigger than single sequins, these hydrocolloid patches not only protect pimples from the aggravating elements, but are supposed to draw offending materials, like excess oil, from the area, speeding up the healing journey.
Meanwhile, on Instagram, where Schott spent most of her time, filters were beginning to offer ways to decorate selfie faces; some filters would affect your face in emoji, like digital stickers. If every beauty editor has their own genius product idea, combining a cute sticker with an acne patch would be Schott’s.
Around the mid-2010s, Schott associated with a small group of new media workers with large social followings, such as Elle’s Prescod sisters or Cosmo’s Carly Cardellino or Allure’s Kristie Dash. Instagram’s hyper-relevance empowered some users to bypass their magazine titles, and editors, intentionally or otherwise, began to lean toward acts of influence—posting photos from branded events, following trips not as journalists, but as talent. Schott acknowledges, but doesn’t praise, this time in her life: “It was a fun way to express yourself at that age,” she said, diplomatically.
A Star Is Born
During the year gap between leaving Elle and starting Starface, Schott tried to support herself with influencer work and burned out.
“It was comically bad,” she said. “It just wasn’t sitting down.”
She tried other things. After an Instagram post about continence proved wildly successful, Schott decided to pursue the topic as a beat, inspiring her short but indelible #pooptalk series. That year she also decided to meet people who could bring her acne scars to commercial life. Before long, she met Bordainick.
The first series of Starface patches was, in Schott’s words, “not good.” They came out cleaner than intended and stuck to it a little more than half-heartedly. Some other and more popular acne spots, like those from Korea, were—some might say are—more effective at beating acne. But none of them were and are not Starface. (Neither his formulas nor his patch shapes are patented, but Starface remains, for now, competitively unconcerned, aside from the weird “star patch” gimmicks that pop up on the TikTok Store.) The obvious innovation fueled the brand’s early success, and they sold out when they launched at Target. Since then, the stains have been completely reformulated to ensure maximum efficiency, darkness and gum factor.
“Everything that was on day one is in a completely different format today,” Schott said.
Schott said it was more focused on Starface, at least in the near future: This year the brand is expanding into a new category and will also launch two new color options — one pink for now and one less option color later. Soon, Bordainick will launch Overdrive Defense, a brand that will apply the duo’s signature brand marketing to drug testing strips and opioid overdose medications, according to the brands featured; it’s also his first post-Starface launch without Schott officially by his side.
It only took me two hours after meeting Schott to meet up with a group of outdoor patches; some green stickers formed a constellation on the face of a coffee shop bartender who posed as Gen-Z (IM SO ANXIOUS printed T-shirt, sideburns). He has been a customer since the beginning. “They’ve improved a lot,” he said, noting a more sticky factor.
But he doesn’t like it because they work, strictly speaking; he just thinks they’re cute.
Editor’s note: This article was amended on 3 June 2024. An earlier version misstated Schott’s birthplace.