Soft Spot

Kimberley Ho walked away from her Wall Street career to launch Evereden. Today, her business and customers are maturing together

- By SIMONE MELVIN

Kimberley Ho's dining room table is almost always cluttered. On any given afternoon, the 35-year-old co-founder and CEO of Evereden, the New York-based cosmetics company for kids, risks ruining the white marble surface by testing bright-coloured 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 co-founding 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 women. While the company sells in Sephora across eight countries outside the US, 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 eight years old, according to a consumer trends study done last year by US cosmetics retailer 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.