An Anti-Wellness Skincare Brand, 4AM Makes Products For Party People

In lieu of polite influencer brunches, skincare brand 4AM throws raucous parties.

When it soft-launched in July 2021, it did so with mailers in collaboration with tequila brand Patron. One of the first of its many parties was in partnership with Kendall Jenner’s 818 Tequila. “As a brand, we really want to have fun, and it’s not just about telling you, OK, go out and have fun, but showing you and doing that with our events,” explains co-founder Sabrina Sade.

As consumers are besieged by wellness, 4AM aims to go in the opposite direction. Sade refers to it as an anti-wellness skincare brand. She and her 4AM co-founder Jade Beguelin are tired of the notion that consumers have to be perfect wellness specimens, dedicating their lives to drinking green juices, sweating at hot yoga and hiking trails. Beguelin says, “We’d much prefer having a glass of wine with you and cheersing to the night.”

Sade and Beguelin’s pursuit of pleasure is reflected in 4AM’s products. Sade says they were created to “mitigate lifestyle problems.” The brand’s assortment contains $69 antioxidant-rich barrier fortifier Rise Serum, $69 vitamin B-infused skin booster Rest Serum and $16 medical-grade silicone Overtime Undereye Masks. Designed to be placed on top of serum or cream for 10 to 20 minutes, the reusable masks can last for more than a year.

“We have an active ingredient in both our Rise and our Rest serum that gets rid of the effects of alcohol on our skin, we have an ingredient that gets rid of the effects of air pollution on your skin, we have an ingredient that gets rid of the effects of sugar and brown foods on your skin,” says Sade. “We wanted to support natural skin healing and natural skin functioning and a lot of that can get thrown off by lifestyle factors and environmental factors, which is what creates this subclinical level of skin problems like little bumps, acne, blackheads, dullness, maybe some saggy skin.”

The products are made with customers in their 20s and 30s in mind, those who’ve aged out of acne skincare, but aren’t quite ready for anti-aging. Sade is 25 years old and Beguelin is 26 years old. Sade says, “We really want to create an all-in-one solution for this demographic that is now, I don’t want to call it lazy, but has other things going on in their life than just their beauty routines, but still make something that feels like it’s effective and luxury. You don’t have to sacrifice quality and you don’t have to sacrifice your lifestyle in order to have a good skincare routine.”

Ninety percent of 4AM’s serum sales comes from a $96 bundle of Rise Serum and Rest Serum. The serums are intended to work in tandem. Overtime Undereye Masks launched after the serums. Sade, who’s currently enrolled in medical school at Georgetown University, where she and Beguelin met, wasn’t interested in 4AM selling a simple eye cream. She says the masks enable serums and creams to be 16 to 20 tomes more effective than they would be on their own due to deeper penetration of the serums and creams. The selfie-friendly masks featuring the words “early mornings late nights” scrolled across them have proven to be good for user-generated content and marketing purposes.

Along with skincare products, 4AM offers apparel and accessory merchandise like baseball caps with 4AM’s logo alongside an illustration of a woman holding a martini and a sweatshirt with the motto, “I’m on the list.” The pieces aren’t responsible for a large chunk of 4AM’s sales. Sade thinks of merch as a strategy to bring 4AM’s community together. She says, “It’s a fun signifier of what the brand stands for and the cheekiness and the ideologies of, OK, we can go out and have fun, and we’re going to push that and wear that on our chest, literally.”

For the past three months, 4AM’s sales have increased by about 146%. According to Beguelin, TikTok drives 88% of its customers. The brand has 14,000 followers and 447,000 likes on the social media platform. The founders also drive users from their personal social media accounts to their brand’s website. On TikTok, Sade has nearly 9,000 followers and 1 million likes, and Beguelin has over 125,000 followers and 4.4 million likes. Posts about their founder story tend to perform the best.

The pair credit new wholesale partnerships with Urban Outfitters’ e-commerce site and Revolve for 4AM’s social media presence. 4AM’s long-term goal is to be in leading beauty specialty retailers such as Sephora. The brand is participating in clean beauty brand Tower28’s Clean Beauty School this year. Beguelin and Sade look forward to bouncing ideas off of the program’s mentors rather than merely themselves.

4AM has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from angel investors, startup founders and friends and family members. Beguelin and Sade go back and forth on whether they should raise again for the brand. At the moment, they have no fundraising plans and have decided to tap out organic growth prior to chasing capital. 

“We really want to get the brand to a place where it’s so enticing for investors to get into the round,” says Sade. “I feel like a lot of people give up a lot of equity really quickly off the bat because they feel like that’s just how it’s been done before, and it’s the only way that it needs to be done, but I think with things like TikTok and the power of the community that we’ve built already, we’ve been seeing really massive growth without having to put much paid spend into acquiring customers. We don’t need to pay people to listen to us, they want to listen to us because they’re excited, and they feel refreshed by the brand.”