Kimberley Ho’s dining room table is almost always cluttered. On any given afternoon, the 35-year-old cofounder and CEO of Evereden, the New York-based cosmetics company for kids, risks ruining the white marble surface by testing bright-colored lipsticks in the shape of crayons and other beauty products aimed at Generation Alpha, or people born after 2010.

“We now have a laboratory with chemists, and research and development specialists,” says Ho, a member of the Forbes 30 Under 30 class of 2019, “but I have never been willing to leave that part of the job—being product-obsessed is in our DNA.”

Since cofounding Evereden in 2018 with her husband, Goldman Sachs alum Huang Lee, the brand now brings in $100 million in annual sales after finding a market for family-friendly skin and haircare products for babies and preteens. Many of her earliest customers were young mothers searching for safe products for their sensitive skin infants. Having raised some $40 million in venture capital funding between 2018 and 2021, Evereden, like its client base, has matured, expanding to include face serums, conditioners and perfumes engineered and marketed specifically to kids, preteens and pregnant mothers. While the company sells in Sephora across eight countries outside the United States, including Canada, Australia and the Philippines, most of its revenue comes from direct-to-consumer sales online.

“Billions of investment dollars have gone to women's beauty, cosmetics and skincare, but none of that innovation and investment really went into family skincare,” Ho says. “That mismatch just didn't make sense for me.”

Because of social media, Gen Alpha first interacts with a beauty product at 8 years old, according to a consumer trends study done last year by Ulta Beauty. That’s a marked difference from younger Millennials and members of Generation Z, who on average first engaged with this industry at 15 and 12 years old, respectively.

“Clearly these young consumers are interested in skincare and are exposed to the internet…they probably need some help picking the right product,” says Dan Su, an analyst at Morningstar. “Otherwise, they would be going to products that are designed for adult skin that may not really serve their needs.”

“The most interesting thing [about Evereden] is the tween space,” Su continues, “which is catching the attention of the companies and investors and the beauty space.”

Born and raised in Malaysia’s bustling capital city Kuala Lumpar, Ho grew up with two entrepreneur parents, who founded a printing company. “I was a literal startup baby in my mother's womb as she was hauling boxes because she couldn't afford to hire anybody,” she says.

As a teenager, she became obsessed with getting into an Ivy League school—later pivoting to apply early to Stanford based primarily on campus photos of sunny California on the university’s website. “That was my first time in America, when I landed in SFO to attend Stanford,” she recalls.

With clear, glassy skin and a quick smile, Ho presents as an Elle Woods-type, someone who has never considered anything to be impossible. During her first semester as an economics major at Stanford, she witnessed her peers trying to get in good with Goldman Sachs representatives at recruiting events. A few years later, in 2013, she became an investment banker at the elite Manhattan firm for a few years after college, later moving to the asset management firm Oaktree.

At Oaktree, Ho first started seeing troubling patterns in several big beauty brands she worked with, ranging from billion-dollar lawsuits concerning undisclosed health risks, to an influx of indistinguishable direct-to-consumer brands, to smaller quality issues consistently swept under the rug.

“It was a lack of care and the integrity of some of these products that made me uncomfortable as a consumer, a beauty lover and someone who grew up with very sensitive skin,” Ho recalls. “The light bulb moment came to me when my friends back home in Malaysia were starting families, and they would beg me to bring home these big American brands that were so-called ‘clean and safe.’ But because I was an investor behind the scenes in many of these brands, I knew that they were not as honest as they claim to be.”

Having seen a giant hole in premium skincare products, she decided to leave Oaktree in 2017 to launch a high-end family cosmetics brand that became Evereden. Ho emailed her proposal to 50 dermatologists at top medical institutions to help her formulate her products. Dr. Joyce Teng, head of Stanford Medical School's pediatric dermatology department, invited her to pitch her company in person. Ho’s concept immediately resonated with Teng, who shared the story of her youngest daughter’s struggles with severe eczema. Teng soon came on board as the company’s Chief Science Officer and was later joined by two other mothers who worked as doctors at Harvard Medical School. Cosmetics do not require FDA approval before going on the market, but sunscreen and over-the-counter eczema products do. Evereden receives FDA approval for these select items, and its team of doctors allows the company to make claims of being safe and “clinically tested” for all other products across the board.

Evereden launched in 2018 with one line of baby skincare products following a seed fundraising round led by Sidekick Partners, a Texas-based venture capital firm. In 2019, the company expanded into skincare for mothers, which included oils made to mitigate stretch marks. After surpassing $1 million in revenue in its first few years of business, the company started to add kids’ skin- and haircare into the business.

“We expanded mostly because our customers were growing up and were saying, ‘Hey, my baby's no longer an infant,” Ho says. “In fact, they have an older sibling. Do you have products for children?’”

The brand’s presence in several niche subcategories is paramount to its growth, especially on Amazon. Within a few months of being on the market, the company’s haircare products grew to No. 1 in Amazon’s kids’ hair category—a sector that had been relatively unexplored at the online retail giant. Products for preteens quickly became Evereden’s fastest-growing segment.

Evereden raised money twice in 2021. The company’s Series C round brought in $32 million and was led by Menlo Park-based GSR Ventures. Much of the funds raised in the Series C went toward building the company’s own formulation lab and team of dedicated chemists.

“This not typical in the skincare or beauty industry,” Ho says. “Typically, only the L’Oréals, Unilevers and P&Gs of the world have their own formulation labs.”

Most emerging cosmetics brands—including Hailey Bieber’s Rhode Beauty, which recently sold for $1 billion to Elf Beauty—use third-party chemists and labs that charge a fixed rate for formulation while simultaneously doing the same for dozens of other competing businesses.

The industry standard to develop a new product with one of these outsourced companies is usually about 18 months. “With our lab, our product development life cycle is three to six months,” Ho says. “So, we’re launching products three to four times faster than any one of our competitors.”

Evereden began launching around 10 products a year starting 2021. Over the next four years, the company added enough products to address every need across its age categories, including hair, skin, body, fragrance and cosmetic products—effectively becoming a one-stop personal care shop for families. Since 2021, Amazon consistently delivered about half of Evereden’s annual sales.

Ho was also naturally conscious of the brand’s presence internationally, given that she originally dreamed up her company after her friends in Malaysia asked her to send clean and safe American products for their newborns. While Evereden is in retail locations abroad, nearly all total sales still come from online purchases. The company had a net profit last year after reaching $100 million in sales.

Within the last few years, Evereden’s growth has coincided with marked increases in preteens flooding retailers and social media to test, buy and show off comically extensive skincare routines. Sephora’s 2023 annual report stated that the number of its customers aged 9 to 12 doubled over the last five years, and the global children’s cosmetic market was worth an estimated $1.6 billion in 2024.

“We are a multi-category, multi-generational brand, which I think is unique on the market,” Ho says. “No single SKU makes up more than 20% of our total sales. And we have hero products in each of our categories.”

While Evereden has reaped the benefits from the rise of so-called “Sephora kids,” the brand’s recent growth is not directly related to TikTok-influenced children. For one, Evereden isn’t in major U.S. retailers such as Sephora or Ulta yet—although Ho hopes to secure a big retail partnership this year.

Evereden’s growth has also coincided with the rise of young kids developing an interest in high-end skincare brands such as Drunk Elephant and Laneige. Those brands often notably contain anti-aging components or exfoliating chemicals that dermatologists have said can cause considerable damage to young skin.

Evereden is priced premium, especially next to a $5 bottle of Johnson’s Baby Lotion, but the brand is relatively inexpensive compared to these adult brands piquing kids’ interests. A 50 ml jar of Drunk Elephant’s moisturizing cream costs $69, whereas a comparable cream from Evereden is less than half that at $28.

Drunk Elephant reported sales of $120 million when it was acquired by Shiseido in 2019, but that figure dropped 65% in year-over-year sales in 2024, due in part to the losing its older consumer base as the brand soared with kids and tweens.

“I haven't really seen any specific brand gaining traction,” Morningstar’s Su admits. “I think it is reasonable to think that some of the large brands in the personal care and beauty space would be doing research and coming up with products. But it's just that it's very specific.”

Su says that Evereden may face challenges since there might not be sufficient consumer data to help them with product development. She also notes that companies across the board are being given the chance to identify and understand young consumers based on their social media use.

“Every generation grows up faster than the previous one,” Ho says. “Gen Alpha have grown up on social media, and they all have cell phones from eight years old.”

On Evereden’s TikTok account, there’s a pinned video with half a million views that begins with two children—around six years old—dabbing one of Evereden’s cream products on their faces, cosplaying as miniature versions of adult influencers who have made millions doing the same on their own accounts. It’s somewhat uncanny seeing such small children expertly pose in front of the camera, but most of comments on the video address something along the lines of “Can you please send me your products?”