• by Les Luchter , March 3, 2025

Let’s talk about the high price of eggs these days!

No, not the eggs now selling for more than $9 a dozen in New York City.

Rather, the “fertilized, not scrambled” kind, as touted on an attention-grabbing billboard which went up mid-February in New York City’s Soho neighborhood.

A 42-foot-tall photo of Stefen D'Angelica, best known for his stint on Discovery Channel’s “Naked and Afraid of Love” dating show spinoff, graces the billboard. D'Angelica, clad only in boxer shorts, holds an egg carton over his crotch. Under that, the board reads, “Fertilized, not scrambled.  @getlushi.”

That gets viewers to the social media pages of Lushi, a “fertility concierge platform” for egg freezing and IVF.

Jessica Schaefer, Lushi’s founder-CEO, tells Marketing Daily that the billboard’s purpose is to create awareness of the platform, which launched three months ago and offers fertility wellness planning and remote monitoring nationwide – as well as in-home fertility injections in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston and Austin. The service has a staff of 30 medical professionals.

Subscriptions start at $$69.99 monthly, with injection-complete packages running up to $5,000.

Schaefer says Lushi was developed due to the otherwise “convoluted” process for egg freezing and IVF: “You go to a fertility clinic. You leave with about 10 different kinds of medications that you need to mix up and self-administer. A lot women mess up the process. They need to do multiple egg freezing and cycles or IVF cycles.

“It’s an expensive process, women are messing it up, and the medical industry is, quite frankly, benefiting from your mistakes as a patient.”

On the other hand, “there’s been this narrative that women can’t afford to freeze their eggs,” she says. “I think it’s absolutely ridiculous,” she explains, noting that the focus should be on “what people are spending money on.”

What’s more, Schaefer says, there isn’t even “a whole lot of guidance for when you should be freezing your eggs.”

The average age that women should do it, Schaefer says, is 36, but the highest quality of eggs occurs between 26 and 32. 

Someone ordering eggs for brunch at Felix, right below the billboard, or at one of the other trendy restaurants around West Broadway and Grand Streets in Soho, is likely to be in that age range, so that’s where Lushi has placed its provocative ad.

“The rise in the cost of eggs and shortage all over Manhattan really ties in with what women experience,” Schaefer says “You’re born with all the eggs that you’ll ever have, and there’s a steep decline after 37. The longer you wait to freeze your eggs, the more expensive it will be for you to have a successful outcome in the form of a live birth.”

D'Angelica is “pretty well known in the city as a very eligible bachelor,” Schaefer points out, and the billboard has resulted in significant boosts to both Lushi’s website and social media, with “very high” engagement. What’s more, “we’ve got a lot of interest from guys,” who she says are asking, “Are you going to expand to sperm?”  “We’ll see,” she answers.

Schaefer, who used to run a PR firm (Bevel PR, acquired by Avenue Z two years ago) helped develop the creative in-house. While saying the Lushi work is more fun than it was with the fintech clients she used to serve, she does see a similarity: “Before there was Robinhood and Coinbase and all those platforms,” she worked “to bring to life that anyone can become an investor. Like with fertility, money was always a taboo topic. We’re trying to normalize the conversation so that people don’t end up not being able to have kids if they want to.”

The current billboard, which Schaefer brags is right across the street from ads for such brands as Chanel and Prada and visible to diners in upscale restaurant Il Mulino Prime, will stay up for a month, after which Lushi plans to replace it with a nearby horizontal board.

The new board will remove some of the mystery by adding a QR code, which will allow women to download a Lushi app launching concurrently, Schaefer says.

Video activations are also going live on Instagram and TikTok, with a paid media campaign launching on those two platforms as well.

Future plans call for advertising to expand into Los Angeles and for the opening of “injection bar” locations, which Schaefer says will be “fully operational clinics” in New York and Los Angeles.