Evereden wants to be Gen Alpha’s Bonne Bell

Like clockwork, when my daughter turned 9, she started to show interest in nail polish, lip balm, and haircare. “Mommy, I think I need shampoo for my specific hair type,” she told me.

I knew the day would come when my daughter would be lured in by beauty products, but I still found myself unprepared to respond. I feel a responsibility to help her navigate what will be a lifelong relationship with the beauty industrial complex. This means helping her decide what products are safe and appropriate to use. More importantly, though, it means helping her see beauty as a tool of self-care, rather than an external standard she must achieve.

This is becoming an increasingly complex task for today’s parents. For one thing, the beauty industry is bigger than ever, with new products and brands popping up daily. Many contain active ingredients that aren’t appropriate for young skin, but that hasn’t stopped tweens from flocking to Sephora to buy them. All of these brands—from Sol de Janeiro to Drunk Elephant—are marketed to adults, with models who are much older than the brand’s youngest customers.

The good news is that there’s a new wave of startups emerging that cater specifically to younger consumers, including Starface and Bubble. One of the most successful brands in this category is Evereden, which began as a baby brand in 2018 but has grown alongside its customers by creating skincare products for kids and now tweens. It’s currently making its biggest play for the tween set by launching fragrances designed to compete directly with the Sol de Janeiro mists that are highly coveted by middle schoolers.

In many ways, Evereden is filling an important gap in the market for age-appropriate beauty products for young girls. It’s a void left behind by Bonne Bell, the iconic cosmetics brand that catered to generations of American tweens but shuttered a decade ago after years of declining sales. Evereden’s approach offers a glimpse into what today’s tweens care about, and what it takes to win them over.

Growing With The Customer

Parents who slathered Evereden’s creams on their preschoolers in 2018 are now living with preteens. Evereden is prepared for them. Two years ago, it launched a $22 lip oil that comes with a charm attached that feels like an upscale version of Lip Smackers. (Everden’s formula is certified by the Environmental Working Group to be free of toxic chemicals; meanwhile, EWG says Lip Smackers contains ingredients that could cause allergies, reproductive toxicity, and cancer.)

This week, Evereden is launching a $69 three-piece set of fragrance mists that come in fun, colorful bottles. And when I tested them, they seemed to capture the bright, sugary essence of girlhood.

This isn’t an accident. While many adult perfumes are complex and subtle, tweens tend to have simpler sensibilities. That’s what Evereden found when it did a focus group with 200 tweens and teens, asking them to choose among 70 scents. The final fragrances are fresh, floral, and sweet.

Over the past five years, the fragrance industry has exploded, and tweens have contributed to this growth. Sol de Janeiro became Sephora’s best-selling brand partly because of the success of its fragrance mists, which are extremely popular among middle schoolers. But Evereden cofounder and CEO Kimberley Ho points out that many of the fragrances that tweens are buying from Sephora aren’t designed for kids. Sol de Janeiro’s advertising, for example, features voluptuous women in bikinis on Brazilian beaches.

“Mists were the most requested product last year,” Ho says. “Many parents told me they weren’t comfortable with their child using Sol de Janeiro. The brand’s campaigns are sexual, because they’re meant for adults.”

Ho was careful to market Evereden’s new mists in an age-appropriate way. The boxed set comes with a quiz—reminiscent of something you might find in retro magazines like Girls’ Life or Tiger Beat—that helps you decide which mist to wear on a given day. Are you feeling girly? Darling, with its undertones of strawberry and rose, is for you. Are you feeling a little sassy and independent? Supernova, with its pear and bamboo notes, is the right pick.

“We use the same model for all the fragrances, because the message is that we are all multidimensional,” Ho says. “Tweens are at an age when they are trying to figure out who they are. We’re trying to say that you can be many things at once.”

The Rise and Fall of Bonne Bell

In many ways, Evereden is using the playbook of Bonne Bell, which defined tween beauty for generations of Americans. The brand was founded in 1937, at a time when the concept of the “teenager” was first emerging in U.S. culture. The company realized it had an opportunity to tailor products to girls who were curious about their mother’s makeup and skincare, but weren’t ready to take on an adult beauty regimen.

The brand launched a range of teen-focused drugstore products that girls could afford to buy with their babysitting money. It was famous for its three-step acne-fighting regimen called Ten-O-Six. In 1973, it launched Lip Smackers, lip balms that came in flavors like cherry and Tootsie Roll. Two years after that, Bonne Bell launched perfumes.

The branding of these products was distinct from beauty products targeted at adults; Bonne Bell featured younger models with more natural makeup in scenarios that were more about having fun than being sexy. As a result, many parents felt comfortable with their daughters filling their vanity with these products.

In the 2000s, Bonne Bell began a slow decline. Competitors like Wet n Wild and L’Oréal started going after the tween and teen market with similar products. And retailers like Bath & Body Works tapped into the tween market by creating fun, limited-edition body sprays and washes that middle schoolers loved to collect.

But this was also the dawn of e-commerce and social media, which led to an explosion of new beauty brands in the marketplace. Many tweens were drawn to these other brands, which resulted in Bonne Bell losing market share. In 2015, the company announced it was shuttering its operations. Lip Smackers products have reemerged under a new owner but have nowhere near the same market share they once had.

Bonne Bell for Gen Alpha

While the market is now overflowing with beauty brands, there are very few that focus exclusively on the tween consumer. This makes business sense. Brands stand to generate far more revenue by reaching a wider demographic—particularly if tweens are among them.

But Ho believes it’s worth creating tween-specific products. For one thing, thanks to the clean beauty movement, many parents are very conscious about what they are putting on their children’s bodies. As their toddlers turn into tweens, they want to be careful about potential toxins or hormone disruptors in beauty products.

From the start, Evereden has been focused on clean formulations that are also effective. Ho brought on three chief scientific officers who are professors of dermatology at Harvard and Stanford. Together, they’ve developed products free of 2,000 ingredients known to cause harm. The new fragrance mists are made without any preservatives such as butylated hydroxytoluene, which is commonly used in perfumes in the U.S. but has been banned in other countries because it is carcinogenic.

And parents aren’t the only ones who are eager for age-appropriate products. Based on her focus groups, Ho has concluded that most tweens aren’t interested in plunging fully into the world of adulthood and the beauty rituals that go along with it. They’re just curious and want to dip their toe in the water. Until now, there haven’t been many options for them to explore, so they’ve embraced brands meant for older consumers.

I see this in my own daughter. She’s intrigued by my perfume and makeup. But she also seems to understand that girlhood is precious and worth holding on to. When Evereden’s perfume mists arrived, she took the quiz with all the seriousness of a school math test. She decided to wear the Supernova scent, because she was feeling spunky. But who knows which one she’ll choose tomorrow?