Tessa Cohen and Sara Sebastjanska built Benjie, a line of bandages made without forever chemicals, on a bootstrapped budget—and sold out every product within a week of launching. There was no ad spend behind it. Instead, the two founders showed up where people needed a bandage most: the bathrooms at Coachella, armed with tear-off posters, handmade PR boxes, and the nerve to pitch strangers and celebrities on the spot.
Both worked together in ecommerce and performance marketing before betting on each other. Here, Tessa and Sara break down the guerrilla-marketing playbook that turned a resourceful launch into a sold-out one—the copy, the cold approaches, the boxes they paint by hand, and why they don’t count on going viral twice.
On the wedding-day blisters that started it all:
Tessa: [My wedding was] two and a half years ago, and like most brides, I thought I had the most comfortable shoes. They killed me by the end of the night. I needed bandages, and my options were so bleak—it was either very sterile or childish. I went the sterile route, and in all my wedding photos you can see them. It’s awful.
If I’d started the night with one bandage on, I would’ve been good. By the end I had like seven, because the blister just kept getting bigger. That got us thinking: Why has this market not been touched?
Sara: We love fashion, we love accessories, and there was nothing out there to show your form of self-expression. Right now a bandage feels like a functional item—something you don’t think about until you need it. We were like, Let’s change that conversation. Let’s make personal care feel more personal, and make it fun, exciting, and better for everyone.
On discovering not all bandages are good for you:
Tessa: We saw a study by Mamavation that looked into what chemicals were in bandages, and that was our first indication that nobody was doing this on purpose. People were just solving the problem of needing a bandage for a cut. But these things have direct access to your bloodstream. They shouldn’t have forever chemicals that are bad for your body and bad for the environment. That’s when we started pulling it apart and reimagining it.
Sara: Once we got into it, we realized we’re a Class 1 medical device, which we had no idea about going in. It became a much bigger project than we thought. But this is such an untouched industry that we kept hearing, “You can probably get away with it, it’s not a big deal, it’s just a bandage.” We didn’t want to take that for the answer. We wanted to set the standard.
On refusing to doubt the idea:
Sara: We never had a dark night of the soul. We just knew we had such a great idea, and we were like, If we don’t take this leap, someone else will. When we pitched it to friends, they weren’t always the most understanding of it—but we believed in it so much that we didn’t take no for an answer.
Tessa: We manifest together. We actually sat down and wrote out goals that honestly felt ridiculous to say out loud, like wanting a specific person to post about us. A lot of them came true in the first month. Mine was getting our packaging on Dieline—design is so big for me, and I’d been on that platform for years looking for inspiration, so when they published us it was the best feeling in the world.
Sara: Mine was a retailer that’s always been on my dream list. I’m such a CPG gal. We wrote it down thinking “one day,” and now we’re launching with Pop Up Grocer in New York. That’s a flex.
Tessa: We never say if. We always say when. We talk about what Benjie’s going to look like in 5 to 10 years. We’re never doubting ourselves or our product.
On crashing Coachella when you can’t afford to be there:
Sara: We want to meet our customers where they are, organically. And when you think about where someone needs a bandage most, it’s Coachella—no-brainer. We were competing against huge brands with huge activations, but we knew a bandage was something people were actually going to need.
It was just the two of us, plus our two unpaid interns and our significant others, so we didn’t have the manpower to be everywhere. The plan was to cover as much ground as we could with what we made ourselves, get to as many bathrooms as possible, and get in front of people right when they’d need us most.
On writing copy meant to stop people in their tracks:
Sara: Our goal was always to capture attention. We made posters that said, “Stop raw dogging your shoes.” They were tear-off sheets, and we pinned actual Benjies into them. We also made little cards that said, “Your feet are crying. We can hear them,” with bandages pinned in.
Tessa: “Raw dogging your shoes” is a really shocking statement, and it brings a lot of curiosity. We knew we’d make it useful one way or another—if people didn’t resonate with it in person, we’d use it as a hook in our videos. But we knew it needed to be captured on camera.
On walking up to strangers—and celebrities:
Tessa: It’s not our favorite thing in the world. Anytime we saw someone on the ground or looking for something, we’d walk up and hand them a bandage: “You’re wearing boots, they look amazing, but they might be uncomfortable. Do you want a bandage?” A lot of them were like, “Oh my God, where have you been all my life?” We walked up to Leah Kateb. We got rejected by one of the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.
Sara: Trevor Wallace was walking by, and Tessa just screamed out the window, “We love you so much, we want you to have a Benjie.” We captured all of it. As founders, we just have to put ourselves out there and do anything to make the business grow.
Tessa: We hype each other up. We practice real quick, but you have to do it before your brain starts thinking about it—just go for it. The worst thing anybody can say is no. It happened, and we didn’t take it personally. We’re still here.
On making every PR box by hand:
Sara: All these influencers get so many PR boxes, and they cost so much money. We’re bootstrapped, so we asked, how can we make it unique? We make every single box from scratch. We take our Amazon boxes and boxes from our friends, we paint them, we customize them. It’s time-consuming—one box can take most of a day, sometimes multiple days—but it feels different, and it made sense for us because sustainability is a big part of Benjie. We’re not just buying more boxes.
Tessa: We personalize each one—an inside joke they say with their audience, their name. My Bethenny Frankel box took days. Suddenly an influencer who gets PR all the time gets a box with their own inside joke on it, and they want to share it: “Oh my God, guys, look how funny this is.” Then we have access to their audience, and it’s a completely organic moment. We sent one box to one influencer and it pushed our product to sell out.
It’s not a scalable thing, and we’re aware of that. But it’s not a transactional relationship. We send these because we genuinely love these people—we grew up following them. It comes off way more genuine, because it is.
On why virality can’t be the whole plan:
Sara: Virality is just not a long-term plan. It helped us get out there right away when we launched, and we’re so grateful for that. But coming from a performance marketing background, we know you can’t grow a business by constantly relying on it. Everything we’ve done so far has been purely organic, but we’re always thinking about how we sustainably grow from here—what’s the next thing, how do we stand out.
Tessa: You have to be flexible and react. When the whole Summer House thing happened, we asked, How do we get into that conversation in an organic way—which bandage would we give each person? Then we look at who’s big and going on tour, whether we can be at their concert and do something unique around it. It’s about finding cultural moments to be part of.
Sara: And to any founder listening: your video might go viral and the next one might not, and that’s OK. That’s just the algorithm—you can’t control it. So keep going, stay consistent, and always be out there.
Hear Tessa and Sara’s full conversation on Shopify Masters for more on becoming coworkers before co-founders, the FDA gauntlet of building a Class 1 medical device, and the branding process Tessa says shaved years off her lifespan.
