According to Mintel research, Gen Alpha’s spending power will reach $5.5 trillion by 2029. Roughly speaking, Gen Alpha encompasses kids born between 2010-2024, making the oldest members around 14-15 years old today. And those who have been paying attention know that Gen Alpha is obsessed with beauty.
The digitally-native generation has grown up surrounded by brands like Bubble and Byoma, which have always catered to younger skin-care users, and they’ve also adopted one-time millennial standbys like Drunk Elephant as their own. And, increasingly, brands are coming to market designed for them. There’s former West Coast Allure editor Kelly Atterton’s Rile; Julie Bowen co-founded JB Skrub, which caters to young boys; and Erly, co-founded by a dermatologist, to name a few.
And now, there’s Sincerely Yours, founded by a 15-year-old mega-influencer and her mega-influencer father, Salish and Jordan Matter. Unlike the aforementioned brands, however, Sincerely Yours will debut in Sephora, on September 6. While many Sephora brands have targeted Gen Z, Sincerely Yours appears to be the retailer’s first clear bid directly for Gen Alpha’s wallets.
Salish, 15, is a high school sophomore. She started appearing on her father’s YouTube channel during Covid, when she was 10. Today, she has 2.9 million YouTube subscribers and 4.5 million Instagram followers. Her father, Jordan, has nearly 32 million YouTube subscribers and 2.3 million Instagram followers. The brand will launch with four products: Kindly Clean Hydrating Cleanser ($22), Hit Fresh Soothing Serum Mist ($24), So Soft Lightweight Moisturizer ($26) and Sunny Side Up Mineral Sunscreen ($28). The products meet Sephora’s criteria for its “clean” badge and were developed in collaboration with dermatologists Dr. Mara Weinstein Velez, MD and Dr. Robin Schaffran, MD, and cosmetic chemist Dr. Longchuan Huang, PhD. Feedback from an advisory board of over 30 teens also played into the brand’s development. The formulas include the brand’s signature “Barrier Friendly Formula,” or BFF, a complex that includes encapsulated, time-released hyaluronic acid, niacinamide and ceramides designed to support the skin barrier.
Along with the Matters, the brand is helmed by CEO Julia Straus, who was formerly CEO of the athleisure brand Sweaty Betty and was the founding CEO of the skin-care brand Tula.
Straus had wanted to return to the skin-care category. When she first connected with the Matters in around 2023, “It felt like every third article was about the younger customer, … [pointing out the] new interest in [beauty] from a younger customer, but that wasn’t necessarily being met with the right product. There were a lot of challenges for both this customer and for parents,” she said. Before committing to the Matters’ idea, Straus gut-checked it with a friend, a practicing dermatologist, confirming she was seeing an increase in visits from younger patients.
For Jordan’s part, he recalled a road trip with Salish where she had forgotten her skin care and the two went shopping for products. “We started talking about the idea that the products that would be good for her skin weren’t particularly fun or cool to use, [in her eyes],” he said. “That was when we started [to think] it would be interesting to develop products that kids would actually want to use, where they’d be more motivated to use products that were good for their skin.”
Simultaneously, he acknowledged that it is typical that “the second somebody gets [a platform], they’re selling something.”
“We adamantly did not want to do that,” he said. “We’ve been waiting for the right opportunity. When this opportunity came, it was the perfect moment for us — she’s already experiencing a lot of the [skin issues, such as sensitivity,] that so many other kids are experiencing.”
When asked how she wanted to make her own brand different from the Bubbles and Byomas of the world, Salish said in an email, “My friends and I love trying new skin care, but … we don’t need anti-aging stuff or a 10-step routine. … We need products we know are safe and tested, but also look elevated and cool, not babyish.”
She also noted that she was not the only teen with input on the resulting brand. In addition to the advisory board, the brand communicated with 60,000 members of Matter’s community through a closed two-way texting platform where they would receive updates regarding the creation of the brand and could respond to the brand, but not one another. These teens, “helped with everything, from the [brand] name to the product ideas to the little messages in the boxes — so it feels like ours,” Salish said, adding, “That’s the difference.”
One thing the brand found was that the teens wanted to be able to shop IRL, Straus said — and, of course, that they love Sephora. (Remember when everyone was mad about that?)
“It was the right time and the right opportunity to be able to meet a demand,” Straus said, referencing the conversation during the brand’s pitch meeting with Sephora. Sephora could not be reached for this story.
The aesthetics that will shape Gen Alpha’s beauty staples are still being defined — we don’t yet know what their Glossier/millennial pink will be. But perhaps the fact that the teens who helped shape this brand chose the name “Sincerely Yours” provides some clues.
“Naming a beauty brand is never easy,” Straus said, noting that the adults in the room had other ideas about what might work. “But Sincerely Yours so quickly rose to the top [among the teens weighing in],” she said. “It was somewhat surprising, given the analog nature of the name, the sincerity of the name, and the sweetness and softness of the name.”
The brand’s colors are also softer than one may expect — some Gen Z-geared packaging has skewed louder and brighter. Sincerely Yours, however, plays with pastels — for example, mint green and butter yellow, or an orchid purple set against a cream base. Lower-case product names make the products look playful and approachable.
“There was a real attraction to something that felt more aligned with some of the brands you see targeting a slightly older customer because it is a bit more considered,” Straus said. “What we kept hearing was that they want to be taken seriously.”
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