Gen Alpha Looks for Its Own Rhode

LOS ANGELES — On the night of Sept. 19, a promising new beauty brand was celebrated with an event that had all the trappings of a classic West Hollywood party. Celebrities, including Beyoncé’s daughter Blue Ivy Carter and Kelly Rowland, made appearances, the DJ spun Doechii and Charli XCX and the champagne flowed.

But the biggest crowds could be found at stations for charm making, hair tinsel, ice cream cones and a non-alcoholic bar handing out bubbling purple mocktails. Yes Day, the Gen Alpha skincare label throwing the event, had just launched. With tweens making up the majority of the night’s crowd, their energy grew in step with their sugar consumption.

Yes Day’s debut may have been the second-buzziest launch of the month, following Sincerely Yours, which attracted 80,000 tweens to the American Dream mall in New Jersey on Sept. 6. And they’re just the latest of many to hit the market this year, looking to win early with a Gen Alpha customer that is 15 at its oldest and already carrying an impressive knowledge of beauty products. While their Gen-Z elders had to wait until their late teens and 20s to see trendy brands specifically for them, Gen Alpha’s persistence in raiding Sephora shelves for years has beauty founders, retailers and investors rushing to cater to their demand in a way that meets parental approval.

“I was on a long plane trip from Dubai to LA, and my uncle was asking me, ‘Do you want to start a fashion line?’” said Yes Day founder Coco Granderson, an enterprising 13-year-old who is running the brand with her mother and co-founder, Danielle Granderson. “I was like, ‘No, I want to do a skincare line.’” While she was more enthusiastic about fashion when she was younger, “skincare was the new big deal,” the younger Granderson said. Legal aspects of the business are handled by her father, Damien Granderson, an entertainment lawyer who frequently graces Hollywood power lists for work with A-list clients like A$AP Rocky, J Balvin, and formerly Cardi B.

“It’s been great to have Coco see what I do on a day-to-day basis for my clients – for her to learn about what intellectual property is, trademarks, what an actual limited liability company is,” said Damien Granderson.

The Gen Alpha or “Gen Zalpha” beauty launch pipeline is speeding up, as Yes Day and Sincerely Yours join a growing contingent of brands that have been added to the market since 2023, including Gryt, Yawn, Btwn and JB Skrub. In 2025 alone, new entrants to the market have included Erly, Pour Tous, Saint Crewe, Fawn and the expansion of baby-care, kids’ and mom brand Evereden’s tween line to fragrance.

“We’re seeing a lot more launches for facial skin care, but also body care,” said Mallory Huron, beauty and wellness director at trend forecaster Future Snoops. “We have to take this demographic seriously now.”

Drunk Elephant Is So 2023

For both millennial and most Gen Z tweens, skincare was previously limited mostly to Clinique’s three-step skincare program or drugstore acne brands like Neutrogena. That changed in the last six years, as challengers like Bubble, Kinship and Starface have emerged.

They didn’t stop tweens from obsessing over all the adult-focused skincare they learned about on social media. Coco Granderson, for example, started following Katie Fang on TikTok at age eight, emulating the influencer’s “smoothies” mixing Drunk Elephant or Glow Recipe products.

But as parents – and even some state legislators – have caught up on skincare trends, they’ve learned to stop kids from buying anti-aging products. Drunk Elephant is no longer a tween favourite.

Granderson’s parents were introduced to cosmetic chemist and Beautystat founder Ron Robinson, who helped formulate Rhode and was impressed by Granderson’s extensive knowledge of skincare. He created a tween-friendly formulation without harsh ingredients and owns a stake in the company.

“I was blown away with Coco’s clear vision, really seeing the marketplace and identifying this white space,” said Robinson. He educated her on age-appropriate ingredients, steering her away from a request for skin-hydrating hyaluronic acid, which is “not for my age,” said Granderson. The brand is hoping to educate customers who get their skincare ingredient knowledge from influencers a decade older than them. A survey of teens and tweens by insights firm Aytm found that 39 percent were interested in using vitamin C, an active ingredient that “they don’t need,” said Robinson.

This interest in age-inappropriate ingredients first sparked a moral panic over the “Sephora kids” phenomenon as they flooded beauty retailers. Sales of Drunk Elephant skyrocketed, but then collapsed this year.

Some Gen Z teen brands are expanding their target age ranges upward rather than downward: Bubble just enlisted Millennial brand ambassador Leighton Meester with more mature products, as the eldest of Gen Z hits 30. Kinship shifted its focus to anti-ageing ingredients like retinol last year and is no longer sold at Ulta Beauty.

But Gen Alpha’s demand for skincare has only gotten stronger. The launch event of Sephora-stocked, Strand Equity-funded Sincerely Yours by YouTuber family Salish Matter and her father Jordan Matter was shut down by police on Sept. 6 at the American Dream mall in New Jersey as the 80,000 attendee count far exceeded even the brand’s top expectations. Videos of the mall’s atrium packed with screaming tweens went viral on TikTok and Instagram.

“Everyone is playing catch-up. It was a surprise and a very big wave,” said Julia Straus, the co-founder and chief executive of Sincerely Yours, and former CEO of Tula. “What we learned is, let’s understand what is driving the interest, and ask the customer specifically.”

Reaching the Tween Customer

As Gen Z-oriented brands like Byoma, Glow Recipe, Touchland and Sol de Janeiro caught on with Gen Alpha, retailers have been rushing to cater to them. After Sephora supplanted Ulta Beauty as the number one beauty retailer in Piper Sandler’s semi-annual “Taking Stock With Teens” survey, Ulta unveiled a wave of Gen Alpha launches over the past year — and recently announced in-store birthday party programming. Body-care brand Daise and nail line Digi debuted in February at Ulta Beauty.

Sephora is getting more aggressive in defending its tween turf. It stocks Sincerely Yours, as well as Ouai founder Jen Atkin’s hair-tool brand Mane, which rebranded for Gen Alpha in August with a logo designed by a 12-year-old. The retailer has more Gen Zalpha offerings on the way. Across the pond, Revolution Beauty’s founders teamed up to launch dupe label Trouble Maker for the mass chain Superdrug.

The question now is whether these new brands will have more staying power as they offer ingredients appropriate for kids’ skin and price points more acceptable to parents’ pocketbooks, in hopes of picking up the business that Drunk Elephant lost. While parents may have the power of the purse, the main customer brands have to impress is also the most fickle, constantly looking toward what older influencers are using.

Launching a brand for such young customers with a bet on the long term is “risky,” said Huron. “They’re so trend-driven, and they’re young; they’re experimenting, as we all do when we’re young. We move from one thing to another thing very quickly.”

Adult-founded brands often enlist extensive tween focus groups to make sure their branding resonates. Others, like Yes Day, let the kids take over the creative vision. When it comes to branding, getting sign-off from the members of the target age group is crucial. For Sincerely Yours, Salish Matter and her friends evaluated the branding, and eventually settled on pastel-coloured packaging that had a youthful, yet sophisticated appeal.

“What they didn’t want and didn’t love was the feeling of being put at the kiddie table,” said Straus. Design touches like loud colours or font choices, she added, can feel “like adults are shouting at them.”

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