On the heels of its December 2024 partnership with Olympian rugby player Ilona Maher, Unilever-owned skin care brand Paula’s Choice has tapped a second athlete as a brand partner. Azzi Fudd, its latest partner, is the 22-year-old guard for the University of Connecticut Huskies — the team won this year’s college championships. Fudd is widely regarded as one of next year’s most anticipated WNBA drafts.
Maher, who was featured in a photoshoot promoting the January 2025 launch of Paula’s Choice Pro-Collagen Peptide Plumping Moisturizer, was the 30-year-old brand’s first-ever brand ambassador. For her part, Fudd will promote the brand’s latest launch, the pre-soaked pad version of its longtime hero product, the 2% BHA Liquid Exfoliant.
The brand deemed the Maher partnership a success. The Peptide Plumping Moisturizer has become one of the brand’s most successful SKUs, said Tina Pozzi, Paula’s Choice CMO, noting that it has exceeded its sales forecasting to date. Content featuring Ilona had 75% more engagement than Paula’s Choice’s other content, on average, and the brand’s total moisturizer sales are up 21% in North America compared to last year, she said.
Pozzi noted that the brand found a link between its science-backed products and female athletes in the fact that both are “high performance.” The partnerships, she said, “celebrate exceptionalism and positivity,” adding, “We see the community of female fans around [these athletes] and the power these athletes have, and we’re here to support both the athletes and the communities they’re involved in.”
Paula’s Choice joins brands including Hero Cosmetics, Urban Decay, Neutrogena, K18 and Olay, to name a few, that have, in recent years, tapped female athletes as ambassadors.
Fudd’s contract, which is a year-long, kicked off on Wednesday with posts on Instagram. Paula’s Choice will also sponsor her camp program, Hooping for a Cure, where she personally coaches young basketball players ranging in age from second graders through high schoolers.
Fudd is currently completing her master’s degree in business after having graduated from UConn’s undergraduate school. She has previously worked with the hair color brand Madison Reed, and has 474,000 Instagram followers and over 495,000 TikTok followers.
“I’m very new to beauty, skin care, all of that stuff, but a lot of my friends use [Paula’s Choice] and so I’d tried some of their stuff. So when they reached out, I was super excited,” she said.
Fudd said she often consults the Yuka app before making purchases and noted that Paula’s Choice products receive high ratings. “They have really amazing products,” she said. “[It’s a brand I feel good to] put my name next to — something that I can be proud of and not embarrassed by, and that I use and want to use,” she said.
In the case of partnering with both Maher and Fudd, authenticity was the most important factor, Pozzi said. “We have so much trust with our community,” she said. “We thought very intentionally [about how important] it was to maintain that as we looked at these partnerships. And our fans were really excited that we were taking a step in the direction [of teaming with athletes] and speaking outside of product and really engaging within the community. These weren’t one-off partnerships.”
Maher’s contract remains in effect. Paula’s Choice is one of the sponsors for the Rugby World Cup, which will take place in the U.K. this year and will be supporting Ilona as she competes with the U.S. national team. Ilona will also be featured on the brand’s new in-store visual merchandising at Sephora through the end of the year, Pozzi said.
Fudd, meanwhile, brings the brand to an even younger audience. “We believe the college audience is really important for Paula’s Choice. We have a younger audience — people struggling with acne, who are passionate fans of our 2% BHA,” Pozzi said.
But, she added, “What’s so impactful about women’s sports right now is that [the fan base] is multi-generational. There are families attending the UConn games — [Fudd’s] fan base definitely extends outside of college.” Paula Choice’s shopper is, likewise, multi-generational, inclusive of fans who have been with the brand since its early days when original founder Paula Begoun was publishing books on skin care, she said.
In addition to being featured in posts on Fudd’s Instagram and the activation at her camp, the partnership will be shared on Sephora’s Instagram, and out-of-home promotion is in the works for later in the year. In addition, Paula’s Choice is finalizing plans for sampling the new BHA pads across college campuses.
“We’re thinking about ways to activate this in an authentic way. How do we bring to life the intersection of high performance and Paula’s Choice in sports? So we’re looking into game-day activations, and we know the pads are a great vehicle to do that and really, genuinely engage this community of fans.”
