Gabe Saporta, who fronts the dance-pop band Cobra Starship and heads indie record label TAG Music, recalls one of the coolest guys in New York’s music scene getting roasted mercilessly more than a decade ago after posting a selfie with severely chapped lips.
Comments mocked him for not owning ChapStick, and he brushed it off, responding, “Creams, lotions, chapsticks — all that shit’s for pussies.” To Saporta, that reaction was both absurd and inspiring.
“It just showed me this mistaken belief system a lot of guys have that doing anything to take care of yourself is somehow not masculine,” he says. “So, I really wanted to change that perception.”
With that mission, Saporta launched Brotege last year with Good Boy Protection, a multifunctional moisturizer with retinol and SPF 15 reflecting the brand’s simple, low-maintenance approach to skincare. The product features a logo of a dog fetching a skeleton arm, reinforcing Brotege’s rebellious, irreverent aesthetic.
Now, the brand is expanding into lip balm, a category that’s exploded with beauty consumers and could serve as an accessible gateway into skincare for men. According to market research firm Circana, lip products formed the fastest-growing makeup segment in both prestige and mass channels in 2025.
The expansion comes as men are engaging with beauty more visibly, whether through colognes or extreme “looksmaxxing” practices, raising hopes that a long-coveted growth market for brands may finally be materializing. Speaking at Women’s Wear Daily’s Beauty CEO Summit earlier this month, Herrish Patel, president of Unilever USA and North America personal care, predicted men’s grooming could double in size over the next decade.
Saporta owned the domain name for brotege.com, pronounced like “protege” with a “b,” for more than 15 years before deciding what kind of business to build around it. “My vision of Brotege is that it’s gonna be staples that guys need in a format that they’re going to be stoked on,” says the 46-year-old.
Targeting men between the ages of 25 and 50, Brotege is launching the lip balms as a limited run sold exclusively on its e-commerce website. Manufactured entirely in the United States, the balms are priced at $10 for a single .15-oz. tube and $25 for a three-pack. Priced at $24.99, Good Boy Protection sells on the brand’s site and Amazon.
Each balm is named after an outlaw: Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, Mikhail Kalashnikov and John Dillinger. The oversized pink, green and yellow tubes are fitted with brass bases modified from real shotgun shells.
The flavors nod to the characters’ cultural associations, pairing El Chapo with tequila sunrise berry, Kalashnikov with Moscow mule mint and Dillinger with vanilla bourbon. The balms vary in formulation, with some incorporating SPF 15 and others relying on natural waxes and plant-derived oils.
Brotege certainly isn’t the only brand getting bros into balms. Space Camp, the organic line launched exclusively at Target in 2024 by TikTok creator Nicolas Sturniolo, offers its jumbo-size balms in a panoply of flavors like birthday cake, salted caramel and zesty beverages linked to Kool-Aid and Olipop. Its lip balm competitors at big-box retail include Jack Black, Dr. Squatch, Duke Cannon, Vaseline and Aquaphor.
“My vision of Brotege is that it’s gonna be staples that guys need in a format that they’re going to be stoked on.”
Looking beyond lip balm, Saporta plans to extend Brotege’s product portfolio over the next year with the same irreverent attitude, proclivity for cheeky names and under-$40 price tag. It’s a good thing that he has a solid relationship with his contract manufacturer, Spa de Soleil in Burbank, Calif., who’s “held my hand through a lot of the development process,” he says.
Shock Therapy, a caffeine- and menthol-infused face wash, is among products in the works. Saporta says, “The goal of it is to kick your butt in the morning, especially to cure a hangover when you feel like you just can’t get that tired feeling off your face.”
Crash Pads toner pads are another item in the pipeline. They’re textured on one side to remove oil and dirt and deposited with peptides on the other side to moisturize. In addition, there’s a heavier-duty face cream packed with collagen and retinol for overnight skin recovery called Night Train. A forthcoming peptide-infused eye serum named Evil Eye is likely to be Brotege’s most expensive product on a per-ounce basis.
For customers who’ve requested higher protection than the SPF 15 in the brand’s original moisturizer, Brotege is responding with an SPF 30 version of Good Boy Protection. Moving into wellness, it’s concocted a nootropic-style, caffeinated gum dubbed Fiend. Supplements are another potential category.
Saporta says, “I think about what are the products that I need and I use on a regular basis, and I want to make those available for guys.”
As a startup entrepreneur, he’s picking up tips from Liquid Death’s disruption of the bottled-water industry and from his wife Erin Fetherston’s experience in designing fashion and interiors. And he’s been checking out conferences covering e-commerce, artificial intelligence, cosmetic chemistry and other topics.
For instance, he’s learned “just how important it is to pay attention to your cost of goods,” he says. “You have to find the balance. Maybe you’re not going to use the latest high-tech ingredients, but you’re still going to deliver something with good quality.”
Saporta is also navigating the crossover from music to skincare. So far, the breakout hockey romance “Off Campus” using Cobra Starship’s 2009 hit “Good Girls Go Bad” hasn’t boosted Brotege sales. “The demo for Cobra Starship was more skewed female,” reasons Saporta. “With Brotege, I’m trying to help guys.”
Brotege has been connecting with potential male customers by bringing tubes of the face cream to music festivals, underwriting ticket giveaways to the Vans Warped Tour, holding a photo shoot at an MMA gym and filming social media videos with Fall Out Boy bassist Pete Wentz and Dude Wipes CEO Sean Riley.
The brand managed to lock in 424 people for its Founders Club, where fans who support it early can get a lifetime discount along with special Zoom calls and swag sent every quarter. Plus, some 2,000 people have signed up for the $19.99 monthly subscription, although Saporta would’ve loved that number to be closer to 10,000.
To get the product into more hands, Brotege is distributing eco-friendly paper-based samples. Launching on TikTok Shop in June should provide another revenue channel. The lip balm in particular could translate well in TikTok videos.
Saporta says, “You want to flood the zone with a lot of content from different people because you don’t know who’s going to need to use your product.”
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