DIARY OF A 13-YEAR-OLD SKIN-CARE FOUNDER

Fancy beauty products are now an elementary-school obsession. COCO GRANDERSON knows what girls are looking for.

- ELIZABETH WEIL

COCO GRANDERSON IS HER MOM'S CEO.

Each morning, they drive to school along with Coco's two younger sisters. Kaya, age 6, and Celine, age 11, start at 8:30 a.m. Coco, age 13, starts at 8:50 a.m. In the 20 minutes Coco and her mom are alone, they have a meeting. That meeting usually consists of Coco going through their brand Yes Day's Instagram and flagging stuff her mom wrote in the comments that a 13-year-old would never say. Yes Day sells skin care-not just soap and moisturizer. Skin care is a hobby.

Skin care is what you do if your mom takes away your phone. Skin care is what you do after school and at a sleepover when you used to play with slime. As one 11-year-old Yes Day fan put it, "I thought skin care was, like, face masks and face wash until I really started doing it." Yes Day smells like Jolly Ranchers and sells age-defying products to people who are still growing up.

The idea solidified after Coco took an after-school fashion class at Unincorporated Life and decided that instead of an apparel brand called Coco Marie, she wanted to do this. Nobody paid attention because she was 11. Then she told a friend's dad on a plane. That dad happened to have helped his own children launch an ice-cream line and helped Rihanna launch Fenty Beauty. He told Coco, if she was serious, she should think about her ideas for the entire flight and tell him her plan when they touched down.

Not much happened for a year. Coco's parents were like, “What is skin care?” But the friend's dad periodically asked Coco about her business, Coco made a mood board that impressed him, and soon enough, another family friend introduced Coco's parents to Ron Robinson, a cosmetic chemist who had helped Hailey Bieber launch her brand, Rhode, after she went viral for saying her skincare goals included going to bed each night “looking like a glazed doughnut.”