No one was smiling in the lobby of the Bowery Hotel except Julie Schott, the first Elle beauty director, current pimple mogul, and idea machine for consumer packaged goods marketed to Gen-Z. She was describing the mass retail strategy when her voice suddenly stopped. “Am I too loud in this room?” she whispered, then gently chided herself. “We are in a library.” Schott joked about how you go to Target for toilet paper and end up leaving with a bunch of stuff you didn’t know you needed. She joked about watching TikTok on planes, cigarettes and fecal incontinence.
Given the ephemerality of placing comedy 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 career in editing to become Gen-Z’s marketing guru, makes it not so much funny as not serious. She once tried to be an influencer, but found it difficult to be vulnerable. “I have a hard time being serious,” she told me.
Years of hard work on Instagram have given Schott the detached glow of a jet-lagged influencer. Even early in the morning, draped over a couch in Martine Rose sweats, her cheekbones stick out, obscured in the little light the lobby lets in. She seems to be shaking with a slight fear, which is one of the many frequencies she is attuned to. Gen-Z, along with an almost Dadaist sense of humor and a clear comedic honesty.
“They’re very funny,” she said. “They’re not afraid to say it like it is, and they’ll tell you if they hate something.”
Consider the launch of Starface with entrepreneur Brian Bordainick in 2019. Schott’s blockbuster innovation – hydrocolloid patches colored and cut like stickers – cost $22. “They said on TikTok, ‘Girl, I’m not paying for that. ‘” Schott laughed. “Honestly!” Now they cost $14.99 and are available online, as well as in Target and CVS. In other words, almost everywhere.
Since then, Schott and Bordainick have been launching new brands at an astonishing pace of about one per year. There’s Starface and Julie, an emergency contraceptive; Futurewise, a skincare brand based on the viral super-hydration trend called ‘slugging’, and Blip, a brand of smoking cessation gums and sticks.
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 the whimsical acne stickers to TikTok’s trend-driven skincare line—as a series of commercial envoys for a little-mapped market.
A brand animated by Schott sounds like “your friend who follows the same Instagram pages and Twitter accounts as you,” says Alexandra Pauly, HighSnobiety’s beauty editor. Starface’s product in particular has an unspeakable effect. “They’re more than just pimples,” Pauly added. “It’s impossible not to feel when you put a little pink star or Hello Kitty on your face.”
Starface is still the mothership around which the others revolve. Since launching 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. At least Julie has had some momentum, hitting shelves in late 2022, a few months after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Sales have doubled in the past six months, while the general contraceptive market has lagged. But Futurewise and Blip have yet to achieve nearly the same buzz. And there was Plus, a sustainability-oriented body care line that closed down about three years after its introduction.
Some products are easier to sell than others. But Schott is less a genius at selling things than she 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 a Cody Rigsby Peloton class. At other times, she cuts a younger figure, like when she creates “girls’ dinner”-inspired TikToks for Julie (the brand). She is always on TikTok – scrolling, but also looking for her precious stars. Is that Doja Cat’s?
“She just has a really strong influence on youth culture,” said Brian Bordainick, Schott’s business partner. The two form Brand New, a two-person brand launch platform where Bordainick builds the company and Schott builds the brand, something Bordainick says she is particularly good at.
“It’s like, ‘Holy shit.’ She nails it every time,” he said.
Eyes on Z
Schott was born in Illinois, spent a childhood in Britain and eventually ended up attending high school in Westport, Connecticut. She interned at Teen Vogue and was featured in its pages. (“Not only will I assist in the closet, but I will also be blogging and attending events,” she said in 2008 as a 20-year-old intern. “Keeping you posted!”) Her early years were spent working under a pantheon from beauty editors like Eva Chen and Jean Godfrey-June. Schott also assisted the legendary Cat Marnell on XoJane, and was immortalized in the memoir How to Murder Your Life as the Kylie to Marnell’s Kim.
“In a way, we were kind of like a reality show,” Schott said. Every Xo writer had their “thing,” and Schott’s was acne. Not only was she concerned with her own subject, but the subject became a prism for her to reflect her feelings about her image on the web page. For writers, it was the age of the personal essay; for beauty writers, it was the era of “I Tried It,” when even basic services like maintenance of acne-prone skin received first-person treatments.
After XoJane, Scott went to Elle and was eventually named the publication’s beauty director. There she ran a section where traveling editors shared their loot from abroad, which is how she came across Korean pimples. No larger than a few sequins, these hydrocolloid patches not only protect pimples from aggravating elements but also draw offending material, such as excess oil, from the area, speeding up the healing process.
Meanwhile, on Instagram, where Schott spent most of her time, filters began offering ways to decorate the faces of selfies; some filters would apply emojis to your face, 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 idea.
In the mid-2010s, Schott came into contact with a group of new media workers with large social followings, like Elle’s Prescod sisters or Cosmo’s Carly Cardellino or Allure’s Kristie Dash. Instagram’s hyper-relevance pushed some users beyond their magazine titles, and editors, whether intentionally or not, began engaging in acts of influence: posting photos of brand events, attending trips not as journalists but as talent. Schott accepts this time in her life, but doesn’t glorify it: “It was a nice way to express myself at that age,” she said diplomatically.
A star is born
During a gap year between leaving Elle and starting Starface, Schott tried to support herself with influencer jobs and became burned out.
“It was comically bad,” she said. “It just didn’t land.”
She tried other things. After an Instagram post about continence proved unusually successful, Schott decided to use the topic as a beauty beat, inspiring her short but indelible #pooptalk series. That year she also decided to organize meetings with people who could bring her pimple patches into commercial life. It wasn’t long before she met Bordainick.
Starface’s first batch of patches was, in Schott’s words, “not good.” They came out cleaner than intended, and adhered to nothing more than half-heartedly. A few other and better known pimple patches, like the one from Korea, were – some would say are – more effective at actually suppressing acne. But none of them were or are Starface. (Neither the formulas nor the patch shapes are patented, but Starface remains competitively untouched so far, save for the odd “star patch” dupes popping up on TikTok Shop.) Sheer novelty fueled the brand’s early success, and they were sold out when they launched at Target. Since then, the patches have been completely reformulated to ensure maximum efficacy, coverage and gummy factor.
“Everything it 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 foreseeable future: This year the brand is expanding into a new category and will also launch two new color options: a pink patch for now and a less colorful option later. Soon, Bordainick will launch Overdrive Defense, a brand that will apply the duo’s signature brand marketing to drug test strips and opioid overdose medications, according to registered trademarks; it’s also his first post-Starface launch without Schott formally alongside him.
It took me just two hours after my meeting with Schott to come across a cluster of spots in the wild; a few green stickers formed a constellation on the face of a café barista presenting as Gen-Z (T-shirt printed with IM SO ANXIOUS, hair cut in a mullet). He has been a customer since launch. “They’ve improved a lot,” he said, noting a stickier stick factor.
But he doesn’t like them because, strictly speaking, they work; he just loves them.
Editor’s note: This article was amended on June 3, 2024. An earlier version misstated Schott’s birthplace.