Cover Malaysian-born Kimberley Ho of Evereden shares her journey of starting a skincare company that’s now among the top premium family care brands in US and China
Malaysian-born Kimberley Ho of Evereden shares her journey of starting a skincare company that’s now among the top premium family care brands in US and China
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How did a twenty-something Malaysian grad start a skincare company that’s now among the top premium family skincare brands in the US and China? Kimberley Ho of Evereden shares her journey
When Kimberley Ho says she is invested in skincare, she’s not kidding around.
Years ago, as a 27-year-old Goldman Sachs investment banking analyst, she took a chance on a business idea that she believed in and left Wall Street to launch a family-centric skincare brand called Evereden in 2018. The goal was to create plant-based but effective skincare products that could benefit not just children but users of all ages, from infants in Pampers and breakout-prone teens to nursing mothers and men who favour fuss-free skincare.
The problem was that neither she nor her co-founder and husband, Hui Huang Lee, were doctors. “We both came from a finance background, and neither of us had any know-how in dermatology, eczema, children’s skin issues, and so on,” says Ho, who is based in New York. “We were lucky to bring on Stanford Medical School’s head of paediatrics dermatology, Dr Joyce Teng, as our chief scientific officer. What she brings to the table is decades of her skincare research on children’s eczema. She’s really the brains behind each of our formulations, and she approves every single ingredient that goes into our products.”
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Above Former Goldman Sachs analyst Kimberley Ho started Evereden when she was just 27 years old
Former Goldman Sachs analyst Kimberley Ho started Evereden when she was just 27 years old
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From breakouts and eczema, Ho herself experienced sensitive skin issues when using certain brands in her younger days. After years as a skincare entrepreneur, she realised that many ‘clean’ family skincare brands on the market still use natural ingredients that are technically safe but still cause irritation to certain users.
“It took me starting a skincare business with dermatologists and doctors to understand what ingredients to avoid,” laughs the Malaysian-born Stanford grad who was featured on the Forbes 30 under 30 US list in 2019. “One of our taglines at Evereden is ‘Safe is great, but not good enough’. The US bans 11 skincare ingredients, but the EU bans around 1,328. At Evereden, we work together with our Moms in Medicine panel of medical experts to come up with a list of 2,000 ingredients that we ban from all our products—things like fragrances, preservatives and dyes that aren’t great for sensitive skin sufferers.”
Around the time that Ho left her banking career to found Evereden, she realised that friends back home in Asia kept asking her to bring back organic baby skincare products from the US, given her work as a former investor in the personal care space. While she wasn’t a dermatologist, her finance background did make her a stickler for details, and she made it a point to learn and familiarise herself with the manufacturing processes, formulas and ingredients of many baby and family skincare brands.
Realising an untapped demand for family skincare that was both plant-based and science-backed, she assembled the team that now leads Evereden. Since founding, the brand has successfully raised nearly RM500 million in funding to date and is available in 20 countries, making it as the no. 1 premium family skincare brand in the US and China, two of the largest and most difficult markets to penetrate.
See also: Should mothers be worried about the skincare-obsessed teen?
Above Evereden's baby cream products are suitable for the whole family
Evereden's baby cream products are suitable for the whole family
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“For the past five or six years, my husband and I have worked around the clock.” Ho says. “As a 22-year-old kid fresh out of university, I was working 100 hour work weeks nonstop. Of all the banks you could work for, Goldman Sachs was notorious for its intense work culture. I would be awoken at midnight with a phone call from my boss saying that the margins in my PowerPoint document were off by two centimetres. Things like that would warrant a midnight phone call to get up, fix it and email it back. But in a way, that sort of work ethic was invaluable for me as a young person starting out.”
“It made us want to be the best and taught us about never taking no for an answer,” Ho adds. She mentions that building a brand in two very different markets like China and the US was an enormous challenge when Evereden started out, but one that was worthwhile tackling for the success that the young brand enjoys today.
In the early stages of starting her own business, Ho was cautioned to play it safe by well-meaning onlookers. She was told to build the brand in one market first and only think about expanding it internationally after five years.
Others opined that her lack of experience in building a business would stymie her chances. She was also advised to get a job at a major beauty company like L’Oreal or Estee Lauder to learn about the business first.
With a self-effacing grin, Ho admits that she’s never been good at taking instructions. “As an entrepreneur, I think often you have to go against the grain,” she remarks. “Perhaps I benefited from both of my parents being entrepreneurs as well. My mum was 27 years old when she was pregnant with me, and she started her own business. I think that entrepreneurial DNA has always been in me.”
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Describing herself as a ‘start-up baby’, Ho was determined to make it work, despite many sleepless nights of waking up suddenly with nausea from the anxiety of forgetting something. “There are so many other ways to earn a living, but I think starting a business is something that takes a lot of heart and guts,” says Ho, having sealed a partnership with Sephora to carry Evereden products exclusively in Southeast Asia, including her homeland of Malaysia. “I’m just excited for my mum to be able to go into a store and buy a product and show her friends, maybe that’s the real reason I did all of this,” she laughs.
“Also, so many of my childhood friends are now parents, and so for them to also be able to pop into a Sephora and buy an Evereden product for their families, it just warms my heart,” she adds.
Above Evereden is known for its child-friendly packaging and children’s haircare line
Evereden is known for its child-friendly packaging and children’s haircare line
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A big-picture thinker from the start, Ho’s ambition is for Evereden to become this generation’s Johnson & Johnson, establishing itself as the world’s number one family skincare brand.
“If you ask any entrepreneur, starting a business is not a get-rich-quick scheme by far. It’s a labour of love. When I first started at 27 years old, I didn't know anything. And when you’ve never done anything before, everything gives you anxiety.”
“Today, I can tell you exactly how we chose the pumps in all these products and how many colours we went through just to get this exact Pantone shade. It is truly such a labour of love, and for my friends and family back home in Malaysia to be able to touch and experience that labour of love for the past six years is something I’m so proud of.”
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Previously contributing to Esquire Malaysia, Expat Lifestyle and Newsweek, Tania oversees digital stories across Tatler’s key content pillars, also leading the Front & Female platform exploring issues and topics affecting women today.
