D.C. skin care company lands partnership with athletic prep juggernaut IMG Academy

Story Highlights 

• Gina Coburn's D.C.-based Rally Skin inked a multiyear partnership with IMG Academy in Bradenton, Florida.
• Coburn bootstrapped Rally with a six-figure investment after identifying a gap in teen skin care.
• The company anticipates 2026 sales will be five times higher than 2023 revenue.

On any given holiday weekend over the past few years, you could find Gina Coburn lugging skin care products to sports tournaments around town.

From Georgetown Preparatory School to St. Albans, Our Lady of Good Counsel High School and a volleyball tournament at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, “I would show up,” she said, with her line of Rally skin care products in tow.

There were teams of lacrosse players testing out the toner between games.

“We have shown up at school events; we have been on the sidelines of all sorts of sports tournaments, lacrosse, volleyball, crew, regattas,” Coburn said.

That hard work has begun to pay off. This month, her D.C.-based company Rally Skin inked a multiyear partnership with the prestigious boarding school and training facility IMG Academy in Bradenton, Florida. Boarding and summer camp students will receive Rally products in their welcome kit and one of the school’s on-site stores will sell the products — Coburn’s first in-person retail presence.

How it started: After attending Harvard Business School, Coburn worked in finance and consulting, but the self-professed “product junkie” made a big pivot in 2019. With the help of the Boston Consulting Group she spent a year researching trends in the beauty industry to develop an idea for a wellness product, and identified a gap in the market for teens and young adults.

The existing offerings for teens were basically polar opposites. On the one hand, you had a focus on beauty and “spa-like” complicated routines. Then you had products that were “focused on smell, and talking in a sort of negative way about boys and their routines,” she said. Coburn didn’t much like that either, as a parent of two then-teenage boys and a young girl.

Working with an ingredient specialist she met at a beauty conference in early 2020, Coburn then spent 18 months surveying hundreds of high school and college students on what they wanted from their skin care and ultimately developing the product line and branding.

She put the products on the market in 2022, hoping to create more positive and gender-neutral offerings that would promote “a positive self-care and a way to do daily wellness and have a certain amount of control over their own skin health.” Coburn bootstrapped the company with a six-figure investment, she said.

Coburn calls Rally “a performance focused brand for the younger generation that’s really focused on meeting the demands of their active and athletic lifestyle.” Her core market is high school and college-aged athletes, but plenty of adults use her products too, she said.

The sole proprietor works with outside contractors, including a contract manufacturer that makes the cleanser, moisturizer and toner in Newark, New Jersey, and a packaging warehouse in Maryland.

“I’m not actively seeking outside capital now,” she said, “but would thoughtfully consider financial or strategic investors if growth opportunities arise that would benefit from it.”

The challenge today: Scaling a skin care brand is difficult, and Coburn is focused on broadening marketing efforts to grow demand. This year, Coburn anticipates sales will be five times what they were in 2023 — though she declined to share revenue numbers.

“A lot of the marketing has been driven off of something that is not necessarily scalable — me showing up with a small team and selling in person,” she said.

She hopes to build up a few select brand ambassadors who can leverage their social media followings to promote Rally. And she anticipates the IMG partnership will help get the product into the hands of more students who will hopefully sing its praises to others.

What’s next: Executing on the IMG Academy partnership will be Coburn’s priority for the rest of 2026. The opportunity gives her access to IMG’s more than 1,500 students plus its campers and puts her on a coveted list of just a couple dozen partners that includes Gatorade, Under Armour and Dunlop.

Rally is currently developing its retail display for the IMG campus shop and strategizing how to build community around the students who will be getting its products in their welcome bags. Coburn is also planning focus groups to get product feedback.

Though the financial terms of the partnership are confidential, Coburn believes similar ventures could be one of a handful of channels that will supercharge Rally’s growth as it moves from selling primarily on its website and Amazon to further wholesale opportunities.

And she’s tinkering on eventually expanding the products beyond the key three Rally has now. 

“We get a lot of opinions about what the next best product should be,” Coburn said. 

But she’s going to take her time with it. “Our competitive advantage,” she said, “is really focused on the student athletes and being really clear and focused on their needs.”