TikTok-Favorite Fazit Moves To The Next Phase Of Its Distribution Strategy With Urban Outfitters Launch

Fazit, the skincare patch brand addressing numerous phases of people’s skin, is executing the next phase of its distribution plan.

After premiering in September 2022 on its own website and Amazon, Fazit has landed at Urban Outfitters, its first retailer partner where it’s available at 10 marquee locations with its bestseller Ingrown Hair Bikini Patch. The debut at the lifestyle retailer is expected to be a prelude to the brand, which racked up more than 200 million TikTok views without advertising, making a larger retail play likely in 2025.

“Urban is an exact fit. It’s exactly who we wanted as our first retailer. It’s the gen Z customer who is our customer. That’s where they’re shopping, and Urban has done a great job of changing with the times,” says Aliett Buttelman, who founded Fazit with Nina LaBruna. “When I was shopping there, it was a hipster store, and now it’s the cool ‘Saltburn’ kids shopping there, and their beauty assortment is really cool.”

As an initial move into retail, Buttelman and LaBruna believe Urban Outfitters’ relatively modest purchase orders—it’s not unusual for the retailer to initiate a relationship with a brand with hundreds of units rather than thousands—made sense. However, Fazit has been in discussions with retailers such as Target, CVS, Walgreens and Ulta Beauty, according to Buttelman and LaBruna. They’re holding back on its arrival at major chains until they feel it’s prepared from a financial and awareness perspective.

Still, Buttelman and LaBruna have crafted the brand for mass-market retail shelves. They set its prices for individual products at $15.99 to $19.99—it currently has around 10—to support wholesale distribution while leaving enough margin to generate a “healthy profit for ourselves, too,” says LaBruna. She also points out Fazit’s packaging splashed with bright shades of pink, orange, yellow, blue and green was designed to be shelf ready.

“A year or two ago, everything we saw coming out of beauty was in this very minimalist, premium looking packaging. It was minimal colors, it was a sans-serif font,” says LaBruna. “We wanted to be on a shelf and be just so obnoxious standing out that you couldn’t possibly miss this new brand, and you had to learn more about Fazit.”

“Urban is an exact fit. It’s exactly who we wanted as our first retailer.”

In 2023, Fazit crossed into profitability, and it’s on track to hit $3 million in sales this year. Prior to Urban Outfitters, Fazit’s sales were split roughly evenly between Amazon and its direct-to-consumer channel. Buttelman and LaBruna expected Fazit’s site to account for a greater portion of its sales at the outset, but they’ve discovered its customers gravitate to Amazon for reviews, especially important for a brand they haven’t bought before, fast shipping and Prime membership perks.

Fazit has sold out twice on Amazon. On TikTok Shop, it sold out three times last year in July alone. “TikTok is a great place to grow organically, and TikTok Shop has been wonderful. It’s a little tumultuous, and depending on our virality, our TikTok Shop will explode that month,” says LaBruna. “We’re trying to create a place on TikTok where it’s more sustainable. We do have a pretty good community at this point, but we’re just working on nurturing that community and continuing to grow it.”

Several months in advance of its launch, Fazit commenced TikTok content. Today, the brand has four in-house creators producing content. It generally uploads two TikTok posts per day plus one to its Instagram feed and three to five on Instagram Stories, one on YouTube and five on Pinterest. Posts showing its patches in action (gunk coming out of pimples, for instance) and encouraging skin positivity tend to be robust performers for Fazit. The brand began dabbling in TikTok ads in the spring of last year and three months ago on Meta with what it describes as a minimal budget.

Early on, Fazit would comment on TikTok if someone’s acne was being slammed on the platform or there were discussions about acne its skin positivity mission could be relevant for. Its first two products were Nose Pore Patch and Zit Zapper, items that are easily demonstrable in visual mediums.

“Just because you have acne doesn’t mean you don’t take care of yourself,” says LaBruna. “We can make this a space where we talk about the struggles of acne, blemishes and other skin concerns. That’s where our community started on TikTok. It’s the combination of gunk as well as comments and inclusivity.”

Fazit is sticking to patches as it increases its product range, and they’re being developed for various functions and body parts. It’s considering bigger patches for cystic acne scars, and patches for rosacea, eczema and keratosis pilaris. Soon the brand will release a stardust glitter freckle patch that deposits faux freckles in gold and silver.

“We want to go beyond being a CPG brand. We want to get involved in the mental health space.”

The glitter freckle product illustrates Fazit’s product development approach of putting its own twist on a viral trend. Buttelman says, “We look at who our customer is, and she’s someone who’s like Alix Earle. She’s young, she’s fun. She wants a quick fix. She loves beauty, but she wants an accessible price point, and this girl loves self-expression. We’ve noticed our acne customer loves makeup. So, we felt it was a really seamless next step to introduce makeup patches.”

Fazit has raised $175,000 in funding, primarily from friends and family. Last year, it participated in Capital Innovators’ accelerator program. Diving into the brand’s fundraising, Buttelman recounts, “I would be at dinners and talk about what we were doing, and people would brainstorm with me. At one dinner, I was talking about our messaging, and a guy was like, ‘You and Nina should be on the subway in an ad saying, “Rip it bitch.”’ The whole table started talking about it, and then I got an email the next day saying, ‘Let me be a part of this.’”

Buttelman and LaBruna met in the late 2010s when LaBruna was in college. Back then, LaBruna was formulating clean beauty products with her physician mother from her dorm room. She established the brand LaBruna Skincare in 2022. A former model, Buttelman ran a brand consultancy called Alouet, and LaBruna Skincare was its client. Together, LaBruna and Buttelman guided the brand into retailers such as Nordstrom and Anthropologie. LaBruna Skincare remains in business, but Fazit has become La Bruna and Buttelman’s main focus.

“What we learned with Fazit is to get into a space that’s hot and booming, but offering something that’s different,” says LaBruna. “Having a great product is fantastic and can make you successful—we consider LaBruna to be successful—but to get to the next level you have to think more about differentiation.”

Buttelman chimes in, “We’ve seen all these [patch] competitors expand into moisturizers and creams for acne customers, but we realized the customer loved the patch. It’s effective and works overnight. I think there’s a really big market with dermal patches, and no one’s really tapped into it.”

Besides expanding into a wider array of patches, LaBruna teases, “We want to go beyond being a CPG brand. We want to get involved in the mental health space more. We’ve talked about bringing on therapists and offering counseling for people who need it, maybe getting involved with schools on bullying. We don’t have an exact picture of how that all looks, but we want to have a strong message and purpose.”