You may know Gabe Saporta as the lead singer of the NYC-based electropop band Cobra Starship. They churned out several catchy tunes in the early 2000s, most notably the platinum smash hit “Good Girls Go Bad” featuring Leighton Meester. These days Saporta is focused on helping bros everywhere stay well-groomed and hydrated with his own line of skin care for men. He first launched Brotege in 2024 with the Good Boy Protection Daily Moisturizer, a multi-tasking face cream that tackles anti-aging with retinol and a minimal level of SPF. The latest addition to Saporta’s curation of bad boy self-care, Shotgun Lip Balm, pays homage to mythic antiheroes El Chapo, John Dillinger, and Mikhail Kalashnikov.
I had the chance sit down and talk with Gabe Saporta about the his line of men’s skin care.
Q&A with Gabe Saporta, Founder of Brotege
1. What made you decide to jump into skincare after much success with your band Cobra Starship?
At some point I came across this alarming statistic that about 40% of guys don’t even own a single facial product. And my thesis became: there are probably millions of guys who would take better care of their skin if somebody just made it simple, made it feel like a product they would want to use, and didn’t talk to them like they were required to become skincare experts.
Honestly, I get the resistance. There’s something about skincare that feels ridiculous to your 16-year-old self. It’s like acknowledging that you’re not a kid anymore and you have to adult . . . and that sucks.
I definitely can give mad scientist vibes at times. There’s always a million different ideas simmering somewhere in that strange brain of mine, and BROTEGE was one I’d been kicking around for many years. I actually registered Brotege.com in 2008, before I had any idea what it would eventually become.
But the vision really crystallized after a stupid post from a friend of mine – Let’s call him “Sam.” Sam was the singer of a critically acclaimed New York band. One of the coolest dudes in the city; knew the door guys at every club, always had beautiful girls around him.
One day he posted a selfie. (This was before Instagram filters, mind you), and his lips were catastrophically chapped – looked awful. Naturally, our friends destroyed him in the comments.
Albeit, I wasn’t a “skincare guy” either. I had one moisturizer I bought at my corner bodega in New York because I learned pretty quickly that freezing winter wind will rip your face off if you don’t put something on it. As my friends and I got into our 30s, I just committed to doing that one thing every day. And honestly, it made a huge difference.
Then one day, out of nowhere, they discontinued it. I started hunting for deadstock on eBay. Then I started trying other products, and I hated almost all of them. They were expensive, greasy, heavy, overly scented. I eventually realized the product I’d been using had retinol in it, which was probably part of why it had worked so well for me.
And I thought back to Sam. So I basically said: screw it. Let me make the thing I actually want to use – and make it for all the other dudes who feel the same way.
2. What does your skincare Brotege offer men in the competitive beauty and healthcare market that others do not?
I think one of the biggest differences is that we’re approaching this almost backwards from the way a lot of skincare companies do. Most skincare brands start with products. They focus on ingredients, formulas, clinical language, whatever the latest active is, and then they build a brand around that.
I come from music, so my instinct is almost the opposite. You start by understanding who you are, who you’re talking to, and what that person actually connects with. Then you design the product around them.
Obviously the products still have to be great. They have to be effective, functional, well-formulated, all of that. But our customer is probably not the guy who wants to spend an hour researching the difference between five different actives.
He doesn’t necessarily care what every ingredient is called or understand exactly what it does. He just wants to know three things: Does this stuff work? Do I like the way it feels? And do I like what this brand is saying to me? So we obsess over those things.
The feel was a huge one. Most guys hate heavy, greasy creams and don’t want to feel like there’s something sitting on their face all day. We reworked the formula a bunch of times to make it absorb as quickly as possible. No fragrance, no heavy oils. You put it on and forget about it.
Then there’s simplicity. We know most guys aren’t going to do a five-step routine. They want the path of least resistance. So we launched with one product. An all-in-one that will cover the basics if it’s all you do: hydration, sunscreen and retinol in one. Because realistically, a lot of guys are not going to apply three separate things every morning.
Then there’s the brand itself. I think this is probably where we’re most different. A lot of men’s skincare still feels like women’s skincare repackaged for men. Maybe the bottle is black instead of white, but the language and the psychology behind it are basically the same.
We’re talking to a guy who may actually be resistant to skincare in the first place. So we don’t pretend that resistance isn’t there. We acknowledge it. We make fun of it. We speak to him like a human being rather than trying to turn him into a skincare expert.
We take the products very seriously. We just don’t think the customer needs to become a skincare sommelier.
3. It’s an anti-aging cream as well? Please tell me more.
Yeah. One of the first things that gets a guy to finally pay attention to skincare is looking in the mirror and noticing lines that weren’t there before.
Retinol was important to me because not only did it help me personally, but it’s also one of the most researched ingredients in skincare for improving the appearance of fine lines, wrinkles and overall skin texture. But the challenge was figuring out how to build an anti-aging regimen into something our customer would actually use consistently.
The guy we’re designing for is probably not going to have a multi-step program with different products at different times of the day. In fact, a lot of our customers are guys who already started down that road and gave up because it became too demanding. So our job is to simplify it.
Our original moisturizer combines retinol, hydration and SPF into one product. Getting the right levels of all those things to coexist while maintaining efficacy and stability, but still making something that absorbs quickly and feels good on your face? It took a lot of work.
Would a multi-step regimen, with each ingredient isolated into its own product, potentially be more effective? Sure. A skincare obsessive may want a dedicated retinol at night, a separate moisturizer, a higher SPF during the day, and optimize every individual step. That’s totally fine. We’re just designing for a different person.
Our philosophy is that the most effective product is the one you’ll actually stick with. The world’s greatest regimen ain’t it if it’s just sitting in your medicine cabinet.
4. What ingredients go into the making of Brotege?
The formula is built around retinol for the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles, SPF 15 for daily sun protection, and a smooth, weightless moisturizing base packed with vitamins E and B5.
We chose SPF 15 very intentionally. Generally, as you push SPF higher, you’re also adding more sunscreen actives, which can make a formula feel heavier and greasier. This isn’t meant to be a beach or sport sunscreen. We wanted the right level of everyday protection without sacrificing the quick absorption and barely-there feel that was so important to us.
If you’re spending serious time in the sun, definitely grab a dedicated higher-SPF sunscreen.
5. How important was it for you to make the product cruelty-free and vegan?
I was vegan at one point, but I’m not currently – so I’m in no position to tell anyone how to live their life. But I still think that when it’s possible to do what you can, you should.
Having vegan and cruelty-free products is really important to a lot of the people that we reach, and to many people on our team. Shout out Katsura on our team – not only is she vegan but she personally spearheaded the ability for us to get Leaping Bunny certified.
By the way – I had no idea how difficult that actually was. You have to go back through the supply chain and get documentation from the suppliers behind all the different ingredients to make sure that no part of the production process involved animal testing. It was a pain in the ass, and I’m sure we became extremely annoying to our manufacturers. But I’m glad we made the effort.
I grew up in the punk and hardcore scene, where veganism and animal rights were a huge part of the culture. One of my favorite bands growing up, Gorilla Biscuits, had a song about it called “Cats and Dogs.” In the song he says, “I do what I can,” while also acknowledging that not everyone can do it.
I think that’s similar to my approach as well. I don’t want to be preachy, I just want to increase awareness. If everyone tries a little bit to be more conscious about the products they buy, I think little by little we can make the world a little better.
6. Will you be making moisturizer down the line for women as well?
Probably not, at least not as a separate women’s line. There are already an enormous number of skincare products made for women. The person we’re trying to help is the guy who feels like the skincare industry is not speaking to him.
A lot of the feedback we got from guys was that skincare still feels feminine to them, or that “men’s skincare” often feels like somebody took a women’s product, put it in a black bottle and tried to make it masculine. So I think trying to be everything to everybody would risk neutering the thing that makes BROTEGE work in the first place.
That said, people ask us all the time if BROTEGE is strictly for men, and our reply is simple: BRO IS A STATE OF MIND.
The products obviously work just as well for women. Our marketing is geared toward guys because their education and appetite for personal hygiene is so alarmingly low that we felt morally obligated to help them. We suspected some women would try BROTEGE too, and originally hoped they’d subscribe on behalf of their deadbeat lesser halves. But frankly, we’ve been surprised by how many of them just dumped their boyfriends and stole their BROTEGE.
7. Where can guys buy your product?
We know the name of the game in skincare is retail. But as a new brand, right now we’re focused on having a direct relationship with our customers, so we’re strictly DTC for the time being.
Having that direct connection with our early customers has been enormously informative, and honestly really satisfying on a personal level. You get to see who’s actually responding to the brand, hear what’s working for them, and meet some of the people you’re having an impact on.
8. You just unveiled your lip balm line too. Can you tell me why you chose to create a lip balm line too?
It ties straight back to the origin story. The whole brand really started because of my friend “Sam” and his refusal to wear ChapStick.
At the same time, I have personally spent most of my adult life losing my tubes. And every time it disappeared I’d say, “Dude, where’s my Chapo?” in my best Dude, Where’s My Car? impression.
So when we started thinking about lip balm, I knew I didn’t just want to make another little tube that would vanish into a couch cushion. I wanted to make something substantial enough that a guy would actually keep track of it, but still small enough to fit in your pocket.
A 20-gauge shotgun shell ended up being the perfect platform. And once we had the El Chapo name, the whole thing kind of wrote itself: Naturally, one outlaw wasn’t enough. So we built out a whole little lineup: El Chapo, Kalashnikov and Dillinger, each with its own flavor and personality.
For me, that’s kind of the BROTEGE approach in miniature. Solve a real problem, but make the object itself unique enough that you actually want to use it.
9. Any last thoughts on skincare regimen? How important is it to moisturize?
Most guys don’t like the idea of a regimen and fight against it. So we try to think of it as less of a regimen and more like slapping yourself in the face with something that’s good for you.
One of the best (and easiest) things you can do for your face is slap moisturizer on it daily. I always use this metaphor: Your face is like a leather glove, if you don’t keep it moisturized it’ll dry out, crack, and never come back. You can buy another glove, but you only get one face. Don’t let it go to waste.
