New Gender Barrier-Busting Brand Good Weird Invites Beauty Novices To Get Weird With It

With Good Weird, founders Jon Wormser and Stephen Yaseen are welcoming beauty industry outsiders.

The pair started working on the new brand two years ago after Wormser went on a frustratingly fruitless hunt for a solution to a bad breakout. “I went to a retailer and felt like there were endless options, but none really made with me in mind,” he says. “And then I went to another store and felt even more overwhelmed by the amount of options, especially for me, someone that didn’t know a ton about beauty.”

For consumers like Wormser who don’t know a ton about beauty, Good Weird is kicking off with a collection of essential products it describes as “universally simple, multifunctional and effective.” The collection contains $21 Back From Vacay Bronzer, $22 Balmy Weather Moisture Stick and $23 Cold Brew Under Eye.

Yaseen says customers can “use our products in a multipurpose format and be able to build them up or build them down and use Good Weird on its own or be able to use them along with other stuff in your medicine cabinet.”

Going forward, Good Weird expects its assortment to expand with a similar mix of skincare and makeup items. Wormser explains, “We’re taking a different approach in terms of lowering pigment loads, but increasing skincare elements and making products that we felt like were truly genderless in the approach and how they’re built.” Yaseen adds, “It’s kind of like a Venn diagram between function and emotion.”

Model, actor and skateboarder Evan Mock is Good Weird’s creative director. Yaseen refers to the star of HBO Max’s “Gossip Girl” as the brand’s muse. He says, “He embodies what it means to be emphatically yourself and not stick to the status quo and not be afraid to take risks, whether that’s in fashion or with his hair color.”

In his role at Good Weird, Mock will be assisting with campaigns and product development. Wormser says, “Having him involved is going to be huge in the removing the stigma of who can and cannot explore the beauty aisle.”

Good Weird is targeting gen Z and younger millennial consumers. It’s focusing on Instagram and TikTok for consumer outreach and tapping influencers to spread the word. Yaseen says the brand is partnering with “skaters and emerging musicians and fashion influencers and just trying to showcase that Good Weird can be used not only in your every day, but across so many different types of lifestyles and job sets.”

In the short term, a major goal for the brand is to build a strong community where customers can feel safe being their weirdest selves. “Being weird often has a negative connotation, and we wanted to flip that narrative and turn it into a positive term that embraces what makes you unique,” says Wormser. “Just like there’s a stigma around being weird, there’s a stigma around beauty. We hope to give a new perspective on both.”

Wormser was formerly creative brand strategist for music, culture and style magazine The Fader, and Yaseen previously guided growth strategies at customer data platform Segment. He moved on from there to become chief of staff at Chord, an e-commerce platform co-founded by former Glossier CTO Bryan Mahoney where he connected with emerging beauty brands.

Yaseen says, “Jon and I have opposite skill sets, but have one huge commonality and that’s our passion to build a beauty brand for the many people that haven’t been spoken to. Together, we realized that most brands on the market skewed towards a certain demographic or identity and that there was no brand that was created with us in mind.”