Ogee’s upgraded Sculpted Face Sticks launched timed to Sephora retail partnership
Photo courtesy of Ogee
Sephora is welcoming an organic beauty trailblazer to its prestige roster. Ogee, known for its sophisticated, minimalist approach to beauty, will be available on Sephora.com beginning June 22, with select stores to follow in October. Entering its new chapter in conjunction with its 10-year anniversary, the nine-figure brand isn’t ready to retire the term “clean beauty”—it’s simply refining it.
“We’re bringing a higher standard not just to the organicness and cleanness, but also to the efficacy and luxury,” Ogee co-founder Abbott Stark explained during a one-on-one Zoom call.
Stark, who previously developed skincare for a private-label manufacturer, says retail partners respond with a “resounding yes” when asked if consumers still look for clean beauty products.
“But now it’s evolved,” he says. “People are coming in with these apps. They’re using the phone, they scan the barcode, and that’s saving them from having to become a cosmetic chemist themselves. It’s giving this opinion on which products are actually truly clean. My sales pitch to store associates is that if a customer comes in looking for clean beauty—or they’re scanning barcodes with an app—they should take them straight to Ogee. We’re going to be the most defensible brand in the store when it comes to clean, natural and organic. That’s because we’re truly organic-certified, and truly natural.”
The Strongest Clean Beauty Claims
Ogee is NSF certified, meaning its products undergo rigorous testing to meet strict organic standards.
“I was one of the first three labs in the country to get certified to this organic personal care standard,” Stark says. “I found that none of the brands were using this. It’s very challenging, it’s more expensive, and it requires having an independent third party come in and look at all the products. So that was how we started and how we’ve created this really unique position in the market that I think people have recognized as being very special.”
Even more than simply being “clean,” Stark—who has been consistently passionate about the powers of jojoba oil—wanted formulas that were equally effective.
“There are products that maybe are truly natural, but then you get into it and you find that they don’t really have the efficacy,” he says. “They might be at a lower price point, they might be in a lower tier of distribution. My job before was going around and finding the best products, and using those as inspiration pieces to evolve what the next generation of beauty products would be. I would get so excited.”
Now, as the brand embarks on its Sephora journey, Stark wants to educate the everyday beauty consumer, while connecting with the evolved clean beauty guru.
“I’ve found products that I thought were clean,” he says. “The visual cues were there. It might be a wrap, an organic-shaped package round, or have a stone or piece of wood, and the paper was this matte finish that just felt very natural with natural artwork. Then you’d turn it over, and there’d be these ingredients I personally don’t consider to be clean, like a microplastic bead that they’ve just melted down into the formula, or a silicone, or an artificial fragrance, harsh preservative, chemical filler. There are things that have evolved to be conceptually allowed in clean beauty, but at Ogee, we do not do that.”
Ogee’s Marketing Strategy Heading Into Sephora 
Model shows a full face using only Ogee Sculpted Face Sticks
Photo courtesy of Ogee
Up to this point, Stark has seen success with word of mouth and social media virality. He anticipates the Sephora partnership will only amplify what’s already worked for the brand.
“We’ve had a lot of organic UGC content,” he says. “We actually take that content, and we promote it as an ad, but it actually starts with a real person truly using the product in their own way, or asking to get it. It’s not a paid promotion. So then we support that content digitally. That’s how we’ve really expanded and grown.”
More strategically, Stark says, “We implemented a tactic that we call ‘let creative do the talking,’ meaning we’ve tried to democratically and organically work with as many different types of diverse creators as possible, so as many users as possible could see themselves reflected in Ogee social media posts. We found that giving creators the opportunity to create genuine content delivers the most authentic impression of our products, and that tends to resonate with the audiences on social media—which ultimately drives the most traffic and sales.”
According to Launchmetrics, an AI-powered data and insights company, coverage of the brand’s balmy, multi-use Sculpted Face Sticks ($42) generated $739K in media impact value (MIV) from Q1 2025 through Q1 2026. Near half the amount was influencer-driven, with mature skin creator Camille Cowher (218,000 YouTube subscribers) generating $160,000 for 13 Ogee placements. Her Aging Is a Rollercoaster video was the top placement overall, generating $61,600 in MIV.
Leaning into the success of the blendable, skincare-infused sticks, the brand just relaunched the collection as it gears up for greater traction. Consumers now have access to more pigmented versions of the blush, bronzer and highlighters with upgraded, color-coded packaging.
“All of those micro-influencers creating content has lead to a phenomenon we call the ‘spider-web-effect,’ ” the founder explains. “This is when the Ogee buzz bubbles-up to mega influencers who organically discover the brand. In turn, those mega influencers post to their social media accounts. That usually comes as a complete surprise to us and just goes to show how powerful the UGC content can be.”
Due to huge retail variables, Stark says there isn’t enough information to make revenue projections for 2026. However, he shares that Ogee has seen a three-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 65% from 2022 to 2025.
Much of that growth is due to a devoted direct-to-consumer customer.
“Part of our plan in working with the Sephora team is to leverage our existing customer base from our digital sales channels,” Stark says. “We want to drive them into Sephora to experience the products firsthand, because maybe people have seen it and are a bit familiar, but we still see in a lot of data that most people want to buy products from a new brand for the first time, in-store.”
Reflecting on the decade-long road to Sephora, Stark feels like the timing couldn’t be more perfect.
“We couldn’t have done it back then, but now we have people calling on Sephora together and fulfilling the marketing needs, then we have the educational needs, the digital assets and so forth. That’s more people working with Sephora now than we had in the company when we put this dream together just starting. It’s surreal on so many levels and it’s really just through this huge following of people in our user community and our amazing team.”
This article was originally published on Forbes.com