A poster plastered to a wall in Los Angeles shows a woman flipping two middle fingers at the camera. Her tongue sticks out, and her zebra-print bikini top is discarded on the grass beside her.
It is an advertisement for Overdrive Defense, a new company that is taking an unusually flashy approach to marketing products that aim to make drug use safer. The company sells a screaming-orange box of test strips that can be used to check cocaine, heroin and other drugs for contamination with fentanyl, a deadly synthetic opioid.
“We’re tossing you a lifeline, not some holier-than-thou lecture,” reads Overdrive’s website, which is scattered with images of dirt bikes and D.J. booths.
If that’s the kind of messaging that might make the “Just Say No” generation balk, it’s right at home in the colorful world of Brian Bordainick and Julie Schott, a pair of entrepreneurs best known for founding the acne patch company Starface.
Their formula goes something like this: Take a category associated with shame or stigma. Run straight at what makes it controversial. Then market the resulting product as a loud, confrontational conversation starter.
Since introducing Starface in 2019, the two have moved into contraceptive pills (the brand Julie Care), moisturizer (Futurewise) and smoking-cessation products (Blip). Overdrive, founded by Mr. Bordainick with Ms. Schott as an adviser, is their latest venture.
“They have a knack for taking something that’s not cool and making it cool,” said Yarden Horwitz, a founder of the trend-forecasting company Spate. “When the playbook really seems to work, it’s identifying a trend of something that people might be hesitant to use or buy, and then figuring out a way to make them proud to own it.”
While many of Mr. Bordainick and Ms. Schott’s efforts have been a hit with consumers — Starface is on track to pull in $90 million in revenue this year — skeptics have wondered how their strategy will translate from pimple stickers into the far more sensitive territory of harm reduction. This week, Overdrive started selling test kits that it says can determine whether a drink has been spiked with roofies, ketamine or GHB.
After finding success in thorny categories like acne and emergency contraception, Mr. Bordainick and Ms. Schott are taking their biggest risk yet. How far will two of the savviest rebranders in today’s market be willing to take their playbook?
‘A Different Approach’
Mr. Bordainick, 39, and Ms. Schott, 36, are no longer teenagers or 20-somethings. But they spend a lot of time thinking about them.
“We are fascinated by the teenage experience, and that coming-of-age time in a person’s life,” Ms. Schott said in an interview this month at the Ludlow Hotel in Manhattan. “Each of these things affect people of all ages, but they might start at that age, or they might start even younger: your first experience with acne, your first experience with sex, with smoking, with addiction.”
The two met in 2018, when Ms. Schott, a former writer at the online publication xoJane and beauty director at Elle, was convinced that acne patches were poised for a breakthrough.
It was an era dominated by the pale-pink minimalism of beauty brands like Glossier. Ms. Schott imagined a less sterile, more playful alternative — one that treated acne less like a problem to be obscured and more like an opportunity for irreverent accessorization.
She was introduced to Mr. Bordainick through his now wife, Rachel Strugatz, a journalist who has written for The New York Times. Mr. Bordainick, then the head of innovation at the retail group Hudson’s Bay Company, had previously founded a start-up supper club and had led an effort to build a school football stadium in a New Orleans neighborhood devastated by Hurricane Katrina. (The start-up, Dinner Lab, collapsed in 2016, and he departed from the stadium project, which had not yet completed its goal.)
Neither had ever released a physical product before, and potential investors were wary. “It was a lot of quick meetings,” Mr. Bordainick recalled. “Very fast ‘noes,’ and a lot of them.”
They developed Starface’s chatty presence on social media, earning a reputation for speaking Gen Z’s language through maximalist visual cues and mostly lowercase-font marketing that made light of common insecurities. Justin Bieber wore the patches, as did Portia, the painfully Gen Z character on HBO’s “The White Lotus.”
Starface has now sold more than a billion individual patches, the founders said, and is stocked in CVS and Target, with a planned expansion into Ulta stores next year. The founders felt they were refining a playbook that might work elsewhere.
In September 2022 Mr. Bordainick, Ms. Schott and Amanda E/J Morrison founded the emergency contraceptive brand Julie Care. On its social media pages, young women complain about their podcast-host boyfriends and bedazzle their morning-after pill boxes.
“This brand is the best modern day marketing,” reads one comment on a skit on Julie’s Instagram page. “Love this,” reads another. “Let’s normalize not being impregnated by a doofus lol.”
Between the jokes, Ms. Schott said, the posts aim to dispel common misconceptions about emergency contraception: that it’s the same as an abortion (it isn’t) and that it affects fertility in the long run (it doesn’t). But if you say that in a dry P.S.A., Gen Z won’t listen.
“The real girl today who needs the morning-after pill is going to take a picture of it with, like, the stuff in her bag and post it on Close Friends,” Ms. Schott said. “She’s not like, ‘Yeah, I’m empowered today.’ It’s not this earnest moment. That’s not how we process our lives anymore.”
Some critics wondered if Julie’s glossy rebrand of an already effective medication really merited its price: $42, slightly below that of Plan B One‑Step, the best-known brand-name version of levonorgestrel, but well above generic options that can cost around $10. (Julie gets its supply from contracted distributors.)
A 2022 report from the American Society for Emergency Contraception noted Julie’s “excessively high pricing,” which was also scrutinized by an article last year in The Cut: “Is it a ‘better morning-after,’ as Julie’s tagline claims, or is it just a better box?”
The company has said that its price also reflects its policy of donating a box for each one purchased; over one million have been donated to reproductive health organizations across the country.
And the founders argue that their marketing-heavy approach pushes items like emergency contraception and nicotine-replacement therapies into the line of sight of younger customers who would not be buying them otherwise. More than half of Julie and Blip buyers are purchasing in their respective categories for the first time, Mr. Bordainick said.
“If you want to be someone’s favorite brand, you’re probably going to be someone’s least favorite brand,” he added. “And that’s just a different approach than most people want to take.”
‘Thrill and Danger’ (and Money)
Mr. Bordainick and Ms. Schott have at times run up against the limits of their playbook. The duo’s second brand, an eco-friendly body wash company called Plus, shut down last year.
Still, they have continued to attract backers who believe in the merits of the Gen Z rebrand. Kimmy Scotti, a founder of the venture capital fund Neon, invested $5 million in Julie and $2 million in Overdrive. Mr. Bordainick and Ms. Schott are not content to rest on the success of Starface, she said, and relish using “their brains and skill sets to attack something else.”
Overdrive may be their most ambitious pivot yet: to take on drug overdoses, which claimed around 100,000 lives last year.
The company sells drink-spike test kits ($15 for a two-pack) and fentanyl test strips ($13 for five strips), and Mr. Bordainick said the company eventually intended to sell the overdose-reversal drug naloxone. He declined to say how many fentanyl test strips had been sold so far, and how much money the company had raised from investors.
Overdrive gets its fentanyl test strips from WHPM, a widely used manufacturer of the strips. It developed its drink-spike test strips with another manufacturer after finding that many on the market were not effective, Mr. Bordainick said.
The company commissioned a lab at the University of California, San Francisco, to assess the products’ effectiveness. Both are advertised as 99 percent accurate when used as directed.
The products are entering a contentious landscape. Fentanyl test strips have gained traction in recent years despite being accused by some of facilitating drug use. (In several states, testing strips are categorized as “drug paraphernalia” and are illegal.) The strips are already being distributed at no cost by some state health departments, nonprofits and needle exchanges, minimally packaged and targeted toward those most vulnerable to the opioid epidemic, a group that increasingly includes Black Americans.
Overdrive’s leadership believes a different style of messaging will help get the strips into the hands of recreational drug users like concertgoers and college students. The challenge, Mr. Bordainick said, would be to glam up safety without also glamorizing drug use.
“Look, there is a demographic of the world that experiments with drugs, uses them occasionally, are a part of groups that use them somewhat regularly,” Mr. Bordainick said. “Those people are also dying.”
Ms. Scotti added that the existing distribution channels were not reaching everyone who could benefit from harm-reduction products: “You’re not getting, like, wealthy college kids at private universities at needle exchanges.”
The company hopes to destigmatize its safety tools the way that commercial marketing tactics helped to make condoms feel more acceptable to consumers in the 1980s and 1990s, during the peak of the H.I.V./AIDS crisis.
Overdrive’s fentanyl test strips come in a carton designed to look like a revamped box of cigarettes, containing orange spoons with a tiny “rock on” hand symbol at the tip of their handles. The company’s social media presence is full of skateboards, A.T.V.s and tales of extreme partying — a noticeable pivot from the pastel, cutesier visual identities of previous products.
“We were trying to look at other areas where thrill and danger intersect,” said Ryan Weaver, the company’s executive producer. “We want to come into this with an ethos and a vibe that feels more akin to an energy-drink brand than it does a medical brand.”
Its instructional videos for both products are filmed at bars, with disco balls and graffiti in the background. The fentanyl test strips are used by taking a tiny scoop of a drug in powdered form and mixing it with an enclosed package of water, then dipping in a paper strip that resembles a Covid test. The drink-testing kits come with a dropper that is used to dribble a diluted sample of a drink into a test card.
The company has elicited mixed feelings among those who have spent years working in harm reduction.
Corey Davis, director of the Harm Reduction Legal Project at the Network for Public Health Law, wants to give the company the benefit of the doubt. But he was unsure about some of its imagery, starting with a photograph of a grimy bathroom littered with needles that was on the company’s landing page.
“The graphic that’s front and center on their website, I think, is pretty stigmatizing and terrible,” he said. “I think a lot of harm-reduction people see that and are kind of like,” forget these guys, he added, using stronger language. (The image has since been removed.)
The fentanyl test strips are also pricier than those sold by other brands, which are available for around $7 instead of $13 for the same number of strips.
Darryl Phillips, executive director of the ASAP Foundation, which helps distribute free fentanyl test strips in New York City bars and restaurants, said he thought Overdrive’s marketing was smart, although its strips were “a little overpriced.” “You’re paying to have a nice, sleek, cool-looking orange box,” he said.
Mr. Bordainick has no delusions that Overdrive will resolve the sprawling opioid epidemic. The company donates 1 percent of its net revenue to four harm-reduction organizations: End Overdose, Students for Sensible Drug Policy, the National Harm Reduction Coalition and Pennsylvania Harm Reduction Network.
However polarizing, he believes Overdrive’s approach will save lives. And he sees the company as another place to test, on new and craggy ground, the thesis that he and Ms. Schott have now spent half a decade refining.
“Can we get people to think differently about things that suck if we are really able to emotionally resonate with them?” Mr. Bordainick said. “Look, we’ve misstepped — not everything is perfect — but I think it comes from that core place.”
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