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Welcome to The Quality Makers, an interview series highlighting pioneers in the direct-to-consumer space. Join us as we get an inside look at the world of digital shopping through the eyes of the individuals shaping it…
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Born and raised New Yorkers, best friends Lillian Tung & Laura Schubert went to middle school and high school together, before continuing on to get both their Bachelors and MBAs together as well. As 12 year olds, they met the day before 7th grade started and became the captains of the gymnastics team.
Very complimentary in terms of their personalities and skill sets, they started talking about Fur about a year or two after graduating. They wanted to create a brand with products that address and tackle overlooked body concerns in an upscale and elevated fashion. With the mission of making pubic hair care and body hair care mainstream, Fur was born.
Tell me about Fur. I'd love to hear about the name as well.
Laura:
I started working on Fur back in 2014, when there were no products for pubic hair care. So we really created the category. But back then, it was very much the era of: bare everything, ‘I don't grow hair below the eyebrows.’ This kept coming up in conversations with my sister and my close friends: what if I want to grow my hair but still be groomed? Why are there no options to care for your pubic hair, no matter how long or short you want to keep it?
I didn't really know why pubic hair wasn't treated the same as the hair that grows on your head, and the only thing I could think of was that it's a taboo. At that time, if you googled pubic hair, the only thing you’d find was information on hair removal. I was thinking about starting my own business at the time, and I felt very passionate about this idea. It was a product I wanted. So I started calling cosmetic chemists and made the formulation for the first Fur oil.
Of course, my best friend Lillian, was at my holiday party in 2014. She was at L'Oréal at the time, my only friend in beauty, and so after giving her a really stiff drink, I handed her a sample in a blue bottle that said ‘cold pressed oil’ on it. I told her, just go home and try this, and she gave me the most skeptical look!
Lillian:
I was skeptical for months, even prior to Laura giving me the sample [laughs]. She was going on and on about it: we need to come up with a way to take care of pubic hair, whether you want your hair to be soft, if you're growing it out, if you're getting in-growns, this is a thing. I was at Maybelline Mascara, and I felt so jaded in terms of how much more of their mind and their wallet people could continue to give to beauty.
I kept telling Laura: you're not going to get people to add another step to their beauty routine. But she just kept going until she had this physical thing in her hand, and I tried it. I’m a product innovation person day in and day out, and I immediately thought: this is a beautiful oil. It does exactly what Laura says it does, and this could have legs.
In 2015, we knew this was something we wanted to do together. We needed a company. We needed a brand. We needed a name. To Laura's earlier point, body hair and pubic hair come from a place of taboo, but we really wanted to come to it from a place of care, elegance and elevation. Everything has to embody those qualities: from the color and the fragrance of the oil, the look of the bottle, to the images that we're putting out there, and, of course, the name and the logo.
Fur just made sense, because it’s neither hair, nor skin, and it's about taking care of our own fur in a way that makes you feel elegant. Since we were creating that category, the vocabulary we chose to use was crucial. We wanted people to talk about their body hair in a way that made them feel empowered.
You started with care and treatment for intimate areas. Have you branched out into other sectors of beauty since then?
Lillian:
We started in the pubic hair space because that's where we felt we could enact the most change. Beauty has been so stagnant and it's really hard to make an impact on people's lives within beauty. The fact that we were able to do that with elevating pubic hair care was a big motivating factor to start the company. But we expanded quite quickly. Our main point of interest was always tackling various, often overlooked body concerns. We’re interested in how Fur can shed light on these issues, and create beautiful products that are going to address these concerns, whether that is a pH Balance Wash ($26), or a KP Scrub ($38), or rethinking Deodorant ($18).
I'm curious about the kind of feedback you've gotten from your community, in terms of how you’ve addressed comfort and care for overlooked beauty concerns.
Lillian:
One of our biggest communities, who saw what Fur was from the moment we launched, is the aesthetician and body waxing community. They often work in the shadows. In the same way that people don’t want to talk about pubic hair, many members of that community felt like people don’t take their profession seriously. For us to come out and speak so openly about body hair choices, and elevating hair removal, if that was what someone wanted, they were the first to say: yes, you can and should take care of your pubic hair. They've been nothing but supportive since the moment we launched. Laura and I talked to many of the aesthetician community in terms of innovation, education, content creation, and they were always our biggest advocates.
Laura:
Our very first customer service inquiry ever was from an aesthetician and female business owner. She wrote in: “Finally, here's an aftercare line that aligns with my high level of service. I'm working so hard every day, and here's a line of beautiful, effective, safe products that I can offer to my clientele to take care of their hair and skin in between sessions with me.” We love being partners to often overlooked women business owners, who offer the very best to their clientele.
Lillian:
We really try to put forward the idea that Fur is for all. We’re lucky enough to get support from a large variety of communities, but for us, it's never about identity. It's really about comfort and freedom in your body and bodily autonomy. We want to be here to support your choices around body hair. As an extension of that, we're always trying to be diverse in the imagery we're putting out and supporting everyone's choices, but we actively want to move away from the idea that body hair is synonymous with a certain community. Everybody has body hair, and everybody has a choice to take care of their body hair however they may want to.
Laura:
Body hair is universal. We all, as humans, grow body hair, and we, at Fur, are there to promote it. Our brand is about giving people a safe space to have conversations and explore topics that might be taboo, things that might feel shameful, and really reframe those ideas within a wider social context.
Tell me about the different products that you offer. If you like, give a shout out to your favorite one!
Laura:
For me, it has to be Fur Oil ($52). It’s the product we launched our brand with and it’s still the best. Very early on in our journey, we were speaking with major retailers, and they said: “We love the brand, we love you, we really want to take this nationwide in our stores, but you need to take ‘Pubic Hair’ off the front of your box.” They thought that would be confusing for their clientele, and we thought about that really carefully. But at the end of the day, we knew we couldn’t do that, because a core part of our mission is to promote body hair positivity and to normalize pubic and body hair. So we didn't do it, and although it delayed that negotiation by over a year, we've never regretted it.
Lillian:
My personal favorite is Ingrown Concentrate Oil ($32). There's just no oil on the market that targets in-growns, and I think it's such a beautiful formulation. I love that it has so many multi-purpose usages. In the summertime, if you get too much sun, it’s great for reducing redness or sunburn. I also love this as my last step in my skincare routine in the winter, because it just seals everything in. It embodies a lot of what we seek to do in our formulations – because our ingredients are of such high quality, and we test them both for dermatological and gynecological use, I’m comfortable using them on my face as well. It’s an essential product that I know I can use in multiple ways. And lastly, I won't say too much, but we are launching something new just in time for the holidays… It's the first of its kind and I think only Fur could do it. You’ll see why when it comes out.
What makes Fur so unique?
Laura:
All of our formulas are custom formulations. Our team works long and hard, sometimes for years, on formulations with many different rounds until we really feel like we're bringing something unique to the market. That’s very key to our identity. I believe all of our innovations to date bring something totally new to the industry, and that approach is something foundational for us.
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