Launch Date: December 2023
Geography: Portland, Oregon
Founder: Chad O'Connell, CEO + Founder
Executive Team: Christin Casebeer, COO
2026 Full Year Projected Revenue: $5M - $8M
Primary Category: Personal Care
Other Categories:
Funding: Angel Investment
Primary Distribution Channel: DTC
Other Distribution Channels:
2026 Projected Offline Distribution Points: 200
Asset is the result when a lifetime of anal irritation meets a career in creative direction.
I struggled with chronic perianal irritation my entire life, and when no products worked, I left my full-time advertising career—where I spent years making other people's brands famous—to build my own, Asset, the first modern butt wellness company.
The brand started from a simple observation: Everyone has a butt, almost everyone experiences anal irritation at some point in their life, and there are essentially no brands dedicated to this common problem. The existing solutions to discomfort were reactive and temporary, treating symptoms but not improving the overall health of perianal skin in the long term, or simply wrong for this unique part of the body. None of it felt modern, thoughtful, or built for the actual daily needs of active lifestyles.
Asset launched with Hole Serum and has expanded into a broader daily butt care system across perianal skin health, hygiene, and comfort. In our first two years, we generated $5.4 million in revenue, built a high-repeat DTC business, and earned cultural validation from press and awards. It is an overlooked personal care category that multiple demographics have been waiting for.
Insights: Chad O’Connell, Founder + CEO
Why now and why you?
Personal care has moved from one-size-fits-all body products into more specialized, zone-specific categories—but no brand has targeted this particular area with this degree of care. Butt care (and more so perianal care) is still very underdeveloped, despite being universal, functional, and emotionally loaded.
The category is developing with cheek masks and scrubs, but no one’s doing what Asset is—from the proprietary, steroid-free formulas built from the ground up with our in-house chemist to the cultural resonance that’s earned press and awards. My background is in advertising and brand-building, so I understand how to turn an awkward, avoided subject into something people can understand, laugh about, trust, and adopt. But this is also personal. I spent years dealing with the exact problems we are solving, and then spent years developing formulas and a brand that could make the category feel premium, credible, and human.
What fuels your competitive advantage?
Our competitive advantage is the combination of product specificity, good taste, and artful execution.
We develop products with the guidance of an experienced chemist, OB/GYN, and a board-certified dermatologist. Butt care is not just “bodycare in a funny place.” The skin is more delicate, the use cases are more specific, and the consumer psychology is more complicated.
Most companies either approach this space clinically, which can feel embarrassing and reactive, or comedically, presenting the product as a novelty. Asset presents a fully realized brand, using polished design to normalize the presence of butt care in one’s beauty cabinet and culturally fluent storytelling to build a full world around these products. We aren’t stuffy—we’re talking butts, after all—but we understand the power of balancing disarming language with bold wit. Asset leads this category as the only brand world that people actually want to participate in.
Operationally, we have built a lean, vertically integrated engine across product development, creative, DTC, fulfillment, and customer learning. That allows us to move quickly, test aggressively, and turn real customer feedback into better products with stronger messaging.
What’s your proudest accomplishment to date?
I am most proud that we turned a subject most people avoid into a real, repeatable consumer behavior. We built a business with meaningful revenue, strong gross margins, repeat purchase behavior, subscriptions, press validation, and customers who write deeply personal reviews about finally feeling comfortable, confident, or less alone.
The commercial traction matters, but the bigger accomplishment is proving the category is real. People do not just buy Asset once because the name is funny. They come back because the products solve a real problem and because the brand gives them space to learn and talk about something they always felt embarrassed about.
What is the one thing you wish someone had told you?
I wish someone had told me that building a taboo category means you are not solving one problem. You are solving five at once. You have to build the product. You have to educate the customer. You have to earn trust. You have to navigate compliance and platform rules. And you have to create enough emotional safety for people to even admit they resonate with this problem.
That makes everything harder: copywriting, advertising, packaging, customer support, fundraising, retail conversations, and product development. But it also forces us to build a strong, enduring strategy early on.
What would you tell your past self before starting this journey?
Nothing. Every misstep taught me what I needed to learn and led me to where I am today. Plus, if you’ve ever seen a time-travel movie, you know it’s a bad idea to intervene with the past.
But what I will say is: trust yourself. Ask the dumb question until you understand exactly what you need to know. Build the company in a way that makes sense to you, but balance that by constantly learning how other people do it and surrounding yourself with people smarter than you.
Listen to what they say, but don’t assume they’re right. Hold yourself accountable by writing down goals and tasks, then prioritizing them ruthlessly. Take calculated risks, but understand the risk entirely and have contingencies.
When you’re the founder and CEO, you need to have a strong grasp of every aspect of the business. You have a lot to learn, but don’t get overwhelmed. Write it down, prioritize, and show up every day. It’s as hard and as simple as that.
What does success look like in the next 3-5 years?
Success means Asset becomes the category-defining butt wellness platform.
Culturally, success means butt care becomes a normal part of bodycare for everyone. Not a punchline. Not an embarrassing aisle. Not something people only think about when something goes wrong.
Strategically, success means Asset is recognized as the company that saw the category first, built the best products, earned consumer trust, and created the brand language everyone else has to respond to.
And personally, success means having a family, an awesome backyard, and the ability to fund an epic vacation for my extended family.
Oh, and I never got to make a Super Bowl commercial during my years in advertising, so I’m going to need one of those for Asset as well.
What's one industry trend that is overhyped, and what's being overlooked?
To be honest, I don’t spend much time looking at trends, so I couldn't tell you what is being overhyped or overlooked. Plus, by the time something is called a trend, it’s already too late. But I will say I think we’ll see a massive wave of peptide products, from consumables to topicals to injectables. It’s been building for years and is now in the zeitgeist … and like all big things, there will be super legit innovative and effective products as well as total garbage trend-chaser ones.
How do you think the industry needs to evolve?
The industry needs to get real about the remaining stigmas. Despite targeted care emerging for less-cute issues like pubic hair grooming and thigh chafing, butt issues are still very taboo in the broader beauty industry conversation and heavily censored on marketing platforms like Meta. Even today, in a time of Brazilian Butt Lifts (BBLs) and bootylicious cultural moments, we face constant censorship challenges. Lingerie brands get away with more nudity than we do on social media. We were in the running for a spot on the next season of Shark Tank, but at the last minute, we got cut due to it being a “family show.” And we aren’t even a sexual wellness brand.
(I hope) the next generation of important brands will help people feel less ashamed, less confused, and better equipped to care for parts of themselves that have been ignored. But that will require better product standards, more precise claims, more inclusive education, and a willingness among retailers, investors, marketing platforms, and the media itself to take “uncomfortable” categories as seriously as we do.
If you could wave a magic wand, what one wish would you make for your business?
If I could wave a magic wand, I’d find the right strategic partner to help us scale what is already working. We’ve proven the product, the category, the margins, the repeat behavior, and the cultural resonance with a tiny, talented team. The opportunity now is much bigger than just launching more products. It’s about building the team, systems, and distribution to turn butt care into a real personal care category.
So my wish would be the right kind of rocket fuel: a strategic partner who understands the size of the opportunity and can help us scale quickly, intelligently, and without losing what makes Asset special.