How an ‘accident’ helped Mighty Patch’s creators achieve success on Amazon

You’ve seen Mighty Patch before.

The tiny, clear discs are increasingly gracing the faces of Gen Z and millennials when a pimple pops, and more than a billion of the brand’s signature hydrocolloid patches have been sold to date. The Hero Cosmetics brand recently teamed up with content creator Alix Earle.

Founder and CEO Ju Rhyu said Fortune came up with the idea for the brand while living as an expat in South Korea while working for Samsung in 2012. At the time, there were only two types of hydrocolloid patches in K-Beauty: medical grade and cosmetic grade. The entrepreneur wanted to fill that gap and bring pimple patches to the U.S., seeing an opportunity in the $3.9 billion K-Beauty industry.

In 2017, at age 37, Rhyu launched her own brand with co-founders Dwight Lee and Andrew Lee, leveraging their corporate experience and $50,000 they raised together.

After agreeing that Mighty Patch had to be cash-flow positive and profitable, the trio set out to find a manufacturer. Rhyu compiled a list of potential business partners and told Female Startup Club that she found the companies on boxes of acne patches at a local drugstore.

Of the 10 manufacturers Rhyu contacted via cold email, only two responded. She said the final choice was “luck,” and Hero Cosmetics is still working with him, who knows. Rhyu says the manufacturer produces “the best quality patches in Korea.”

The Big Start

Armed with a partner and a mission to disrupt the patch market, Hero received an initial order for 10,000 units.

In 2017, Hero began selling Mighty Patch, including on e-commerce giant Amazon. However, the company was initially unable to list the product on Amazon Prime, which can increase orders by 25% because members get free shipping and other benefits.

The breakthrough came after some trial and error.

“The pricing was basically a coincidence because we were selling on Amazon,” Rhyu said. “There were already players who were offering much lower prices, around $5. And they were actually willing to put our products at $9.99. But the funny thing is, we couldn’t get Amazon Prime. And we were kind of playing around with different things to see how we could unlock Prime. And one way we did that was to raise our price (to) $12.99.”

Rhyu decided to stick with the new price after selling out in just 90 days. And in 2022, she led a $630 million acquisition with Church & Dwight.

Entering the Cosmetics Industry

While pimple patches have only recently become a beauty staple among Americans, they have been available in South Korea since the early 2010s.

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When Hero Cosmetics first launched in the U.S., Rhyu said there were only a few competitors on Amazon. Now, the beauty industry is flooded with all kinds of pimple patches. Brands like Starface have introduced bright colors and cloud and star shapes to the beauty aisle, while Neutrogena and CosRX have created their own clear hydrocolloid disks.

However, Rhyu says Hero’s decision to keep its patches discreet allows it to reach a wider range of customers.

Rhyu attributes Hero’s success to their special formula: “When they use ours and not the competition, I think they can tell the difference in the product.” He adds that Hero’s experience in the acne patch category inspired a lot of trust and is one of the reasons they remain number one to this day.

“We want to be very inclusive and cater to everyone from 14-year-olds to 50-year-olds,” she says, adding that bright shapes and colours may be fun for younger generations, “but they won’t work for everyone.”

Rhyu says her success isn’t about the company’s revenue, but about changing the narrative around acne.

She credits social media as a key factor in Hero Cosmetics’ popularity, highlighting the virality of the “peeling off” phenomenon, where content creators peel off the Mighty Patch and reveal the “dirt” underneath.

“This type of content is becoming very popular, and that popularity helps with education,” he says. “Social media, of course, has been key to our company’s success.”

She says she feels “proud” when customers wear the product in public because Hero aims to make acne “more acceptable.”

“I love seeing people wear them to the office or just out and about,” she says. “To me, it means we’ve done our part, that we’ve really broken the taboo around acne and made it okay.”

This story was originally published on Fortune.com