No Salary, No Shame: How Katie Sturino Built Megababe Into a Body-Care Empire

Every industry likes a garage-founding myth. Katie Sturino's happens to be true, thoroughly documented, and still unfolding. In 2017, she was working out the formula for an anti-chafing stick with two people she trusted completely — no investors, no beauty-industry résumé between them, no plan beyond solving a problem she'd personally lived with. Nearly a decade later, that stick — and the brand built around it — sits on shelves at nearly every major retailer in America. Megababe is proof that naming a body concern plainly, instead of talking around it, can build an empire.

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Sturino didn't hire her way into a founding team — she asked. "I asked my sister and my best friend from camp if they wanted to start this company with me," she has said. "Even though neither of them had beauty experience, they both believed in my idea." Her sister, Jenny Sturino, took on the business side; her longtime friend Kate McPherson rounded out the trio. The first batch sold out fast: "We started this brand in my parents' garage," she has said, "and we sold out of all products one month after launch." What's rarer is how they financed it. "We never raised money or took out a loan from a bank," Sturino has said of Megababe's early years — a genuinely unusual path in a beauty industry built on venture funding. She has also gone without a salary from the company since it launched, running instead on income from the platform and following she'd already spent years building.

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Megababe's entire catalog runs on the same dare: say the taboo thing plainly, then solve it well. Thigh Rescue, the anti-friction stick that started it all, remains the brand's signature. Bust Dust, a talc-free powder, handles boob sweat. Le Tush takes on body acne in a place most skincare routines pretend doesn't need one. And Butt Stuff — billed as the first maximum-strength hemorrhoid cream made by women — came from the most unglamorous market research imaginable. "We launched Butt Stuff largely based on the fact that my sister and my other business partner had horrific hemorrhoids after they had babies," Sturino has explained. Every product, she's said, follows one directive: "to address an unmet need in the market with a solution that not only works, but you aren't embarrassed to have out on your counter."

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That garage-made stick now sits on shelves at Target and Ulta Beauty, ships through Amazon, and lines CVS pharmacy shelves nationwide. A 2024 expansion into roughly 4,000 Walmart stores doubled the brand's retail footprint, and Megababe crossed the Atlantic the same year with a launch at Boots in the UK. Sturino has described the Walmart move as the fulfillment of a long-standing goal: putting Megababe within easy reach of nearly every home in the country. According to a March 2024 Fortune profile, the company was running on a team of only nine at the time — grown to eleven by mid-2025, per a later CNBC interview with Sturino — and had reportedly been profitable since shortly after launch, growing at least 33 percent a year, with a 40 percent jump in 2023 alone.

Sturino's reach extends well beyond the product aisle. In 2021, she published Body Talk, an illustrated workbook built to loosen the grip of body-image obsession and redirect that energy somewhere useful. In June 2025, she followed it with her fiction debut, Sunny Side Up, published by Celadon Books — a novel about a recently divorced thirty-five-year-old launching an inclusive luxury swimwear line, which went on to become an instant USA Today bestseller. She has appeared on TODAY, Good Morning America, and in The New York Times, and her speaker bio also credits her as one of Adweek's Women Trailblazers with further coverage in The Wall Street Journal, New York Magazine, and Vogue. Through all of it, the throughline stays the same — the one this outlet traced back through centuries of history in "Why 'Body Positivity' Was Always the Wrong Word": Megababe was never framed as fixing a flawed body — it was built to make products worthy of the body that was already there.