A poster plastered to a wall in Los Angeles shows a woman flipping two middle fingers at the camera. Her tongue sticks out, and her zebra-print bikini top is discarded on the grass beside her.

It is an advertisement for Overdrive Defense, a new company that is taking an unusually flashy approach to marketing products that aim to make drug use safer. The company sells a screaming-orange box of test strips that can be used to check cocaine, heroin and other drugs for contamination with fentanyl, a deadly synthetic opioid.

“We’re tossing you a lifeline, not some holier-than-thou lecture,” reads Overdrive’s website, which is scattered with images of dirt bikes and DJ booths.

If that’s the kind of messaging that might make the “Just Say No” generation balk, it’s right at home in the colorful world of Brian Bordainick and Julie Schott, a pair of entrepreneurs best known for founding the acne patch company Starface.

Their formula goes something like this: Take a category associated with shame or stigma. Run straight at what makes it controversial. Then market the resulting product as a loud, confrontational conversation starter.

Since introducing Starface in 2019, the two have moved into contraceptive pills (the brand Julie Care), moisturizer (Futurewise) and smoking-cessation products (Blip). Overdrive, founded by Bordainick with Schott as an adviser, is their latest venture.

“They have a knack for taking something that’s not cool and making it cool,” said Yarden Horwitz, a founder of the trend-forecasting company Spate. “When the playbook really seems to work, it’s identifying a trend of something that people might be hesitant to use or buy, and then figuring out a way to make them proud to own it.”

While many of Bordainick and Schott’s efforts have been a hit with consumers — Starface is on track to pull in $90 million in revenue this year — skeptics have wondered how their strategy will translate from pimple stickers into the far more sensitive territory of harm reduction. Recently, Overdrive started selling test kits that it says can determine whether a drink has been spiked with roofies, ketamine or GHB.

Bordainick, 39, and Schott, 36, met in 2018, when Schott, a former writer at the online publication xoJane and beauty director at Elle, was convinced that acne patches were poised for a breakthrough.

It was an era dominated by the pale-pink minimalism of beauty brands like Glossier. Schott imagined a less sterile, more playful alternative — one that treated acne less like a problem to be obscured and more like an opportunity for irreverent accessorization.

She was introduced to Bordainick through his now wife, Rachel Strugatz, a journalist who has written for The New York Times. Bordainick, then the head of innovation at the retail group Hudson’s Bay Co.

Starface has now sold more than 1 billion individual patches, the founders said, and is stocked in CVS and Target, with a planned expansion into Ulta stores next year. The founders felt they were refining a playbook that might work elsewhere.

In September 2022 Bordainick, Schott and Amanda E/J Morrison founded the emergency contraceptive brand Julie Care. On its social media pages, young women complain about their podcast-host boyfriends and bedazzle their morning-after pill boxes.

Between the jokes, Schott said, the posts aim to dispel common misconceptions about emergency contraception: that it’s the same as an abortion (it isn’t) and that it affects fertility in the long run (it doesn’t). But if you say that in a dry PSA, Gen Z won’t listen.

“The real girl today who needs the morning-after pill is going to take a picture of it with, like, the stuff in her bag and post it on Close Friends,” Schott said. “She’s not like, ‘Yeah, I’m empowered today.’ It’s not this earnest moment. That’s not how we process our lives anymore.”

Some critics wondered if Julie’s glossy rebrand of an already effective medication really merited its price: $42, slightly below that of Plan B One-Step, the best-known brand-name version of levonorgestrel, but well above generic options that can cost around $10. (Julie gets its supply from contracted distributors.)

A 2022 report from the American Society for Emergency Contraception noted Julie’s “excessively high pricing,” which was also scrutinized by an article last year in The Cut: “Is it a ‘better morning-after,’ as Julie’s tagline claims, or is it just a better box?”

The company has said that its price also reflects its policy of donating a box for each one purchased; more than 1 million have been donated to reproductive health organizations across the country.

And the founders argue that their marketing-heavy approach pushes items like emergency contraception and nicotine-replacement therapies into the line of sight of younger customers who would not be buying them otherwise. More than half of Julie and Blip buyers are purchasing in their respective categories for the first time, Bordainick said.

“If you want to be someone’s favorite brand, you’re probably going to be someone’s least favorite brand,” he added. “And that’s just a different approach than most people want to take.”

Overdrive may be their most ambitious pivot yet: to take on drug overdoses, which claimed around 100,000 lives last year.

The company sells drink-spike test kits ($15 for a two-pack) and fentanyl test strips ($13 for five strips), and Bordainick said the company eventually intended to sell the overdose-reversal drug naloxone. He declined to say how many fentanyl test strips had been sold, and how much money the company had raised from investors.

Overdrive gets its fentanyl test strips from WHPM, a widely used manufacturer of the strips. It developed its drink-spike test strips with another manufacturer after finding that many on the market were not effective, Bordainick said.

The company commissioned a lab at the University of California, San Francisco, to assess the products’ effectiveness. Both are advertised as 99% accurate when used as directed.

The products are entering a contentious landscape. Fentanyl test strips have gained traction in recent years despite being accused by some of facilitating drug use. (In several states, testing strips are categorized as “drug paraphernalia” and are illegal.) The strips are already being distributed at no cost by some state health departments, nonprofits and needle exchanges, minimally packaged and targeted toward those most vulnerable to the opioid epidemic, a group that increasingly includes Black Americans.

Overdrive’s leadership believes a different style of messaging will help get the strips into the hands of recreational drug users like concertgoers and college students. The challenge, Bordainick said, would be to glam up safety without also glamorizing drug use.

The company hopes to destigmatize its safety tools the way that commercial marketing tactics helped to make condoms feel more acceptable to consumers in the 1980s and 1990s, during the peak of the HIV/AIDS crisis.

The company has elicited mixed feelings among those who have spent years working in harm reduction. The fentanyl test strips are also pricier than those sold by other brands, which are available for around $7 instead of $13 for the same number of strips.

Darryl Phillips, executive director of the ASAP Foundation, which helps distribute free fentanyl test strips in New York City bars and restaurants, said he thought Overdrive’s marketing was smart, although its strips were “a little overpriced.” “You’re paying to have a nice, sleek, cool-looking orange box,” he said.

Bordainick has no delusions that Overdrive will resolve the sprawling opioid epidemic. The company donates 1% of its net revenue to four harm-reduction organizations: End Overdose, Students for Sensible Drug Policy, the National Harm Reduction Coalition and Pennsylvania Harm Reduction Network.