A decade ago, there was barely a pubic haircare or body haircare category to speak of. Today, it’s a fixture on the shelves of America’s largest beauty retailers, and Fur, the brand that arguably built it, just landed in Target. Co-founders Laura Schubert and Lillian Tung, best friends since they were 12, launched Fur DTC in 2016, after Schubert, then a management consultant, went searching for a product to care for her body hair through waxing and came up empty.
“I didn’t find any products on the market to help care for my hair and skin no matter what I wanted to do with my body hair,” Schubert told BeautyMatter. She spent months cold-calling formulators. “I called 50 chemists until I found a really good chemist,” she said, before handing a lab sample to Tung, then a marketer at L’Oréal working on Maybelline’s Mascara. Tung’s first reaction? Skepticism. “That sounds like a terrible idea,” she recalled telling Schubert. She tried the oil anyway and became a convert.
Ten years, a celebrity-driven sellout moment, a Shark Tank appearance, and a staggered march through Ulta Beauty, Amazon, TikTok Shop, and now Target later, Fur remains self-funded and founder-controlled, a rarity in a category most indie beauty brands don’t survive a first five years in, let alone a decade.
Fur’s central business challenge from day one wasn’t just selling a product; it was justifying a category. “The challenge and opportunity with Fur was, as the body hair category creator, we had to market Fur’s products,” Tung said. “But at the same time, we had to spend our marketing time, effort, and money also marketing and educating around what body haircare even is,” she continued.
That dual mandate shaped early spending: Bootstrapped dollars went to exactly two places—a credentialed chemist to ensure product quality and outreach to beauty editors and tastemakers to validate the category publicly. The founders also quickly leaned into professional channels like aestheticians, waxers, and sugarers, rather than marketing to consumers. “We’ve grown with the professional community the whole time,” Schubert said. The brand’s professional following has grown to more than 20,000 accounts.
Both founders argue the taboo of discussing pubic hair has measurably receded. “There’s definitely a lot less taboo,” Schubert said. “There’s been this rise of the bodycare category ... people have ingrown hairs, people have body hair. That became the mainstream conversation, replacing shock value.” Tung added that today’s marketing lift is less about proving body hair is a legitimate topic and more about “education that bodycare means more than just body skincare [it also means body haircare].”
Fur’s retail expansion is the clearest evidence that rejecting the growth-at-all-costs model has paid off. The brand launched DTC-only in 2016, added its professional channel, then entered Ulta Beauty as a test in 2019 before scaling to a full national rollout in 2022. The retailer introduced a 350-store wellness section in 2019, naming Fur one of its flagship brands alongside Megababe Beauty and Yuni. “Since launching in Ulta Beauty, we have grown that channel +548%,” Schubert said.
Tung described the door-count progression as intentional risk management, not retailer default. “When they brought us in for wellness, they told us it was an experiment; 300 doors was a lot for us. It was a ton of inventory, working capital that was going to be tied up. So that was a strategic move we did, and then it went from 300 to 800 doors and then 800 to full doors.”
The same discipline applies to sequencing across retailers. “If you look at our timeline, we never launched into any of these big channels in the same year,” Tung said. “Last year was the TikTok Shop year, 2019 to 2022 would be Ulta Beauty; now is Target’s year.” Fur has been in all Ulta Beauty doors since 2022, sells a curated SKU set on Amazon, and is now entering Target’s Beauty Studio concept—a rollout of roughly 600 doors, smaller and more curated than Target’s full footprint. “We’re going to be getting in front of more people that hadn't thought about ingrown hair solutions before,” Tung said.
Internationally, the brand has stayed conservative. It sells through Ulta Beauty Mexico and Ulta Beauty Middle East but has no near-term plan for a broader push. “The US is our biggest market. We’re in no rush to expand internationally because, again, that’s another market you have to educate,” Schubert said, citing packaging and regulatory complexity for a lean team. Manufacturing is mostly US-based, “though we have suppliers all over the world and have navigated recent tariff volatility,” Schubert said.
Fur has stayed founder-owned throughout. “Of course, it’s always been a choice to remain independent, but we’ve always been pretty disciplined,” Schubert said. “If you’re going to raise money, what are you going to use the money for? Who is your new business partner? [Tung and I] are still best friends, we’re still business partners 10 years later. Not everyone can say that.”
Tung noted the brand has fielded investor interest tied to visible moments. For example, the Emma Watson endorsement, Shark Tank, Ulta Beauty, and now Target, but has weighed those options against loss of control. Both founders framed capital discipline as inseparable from SKU discipline. “It’s in the people on your team, in the partners, and your SKU count, which we’ve always kept pretty tight. We’ve never been into growth at all costs,” Schubert said. “I do think in 10 years the market has come around to that.”
The founders credit a lean operations team, not headcount, for the brand’s ability to run a P&L across a growing number of retail doors while staying “fast to trends,” as Schubert put it, in a category she and Tung are still, ten years on, working to prove is mainstream.