Diary of a 13-Year-Old Tween Beauty CEO

Kaya, 6; Coco, 13; and Celine, 11.
Photo: Danielle Levitt

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Coco Granderson is her mom’s CEO. Each morning, they drive to school along with Coco’s two younger sisters. Kaya, age 6, and Celine, age 11, start at 8:30 a.m. Coco, age 13, starts at 8:50 a.m. In the 20 minutes Coco and her mom are alone, they have a meeting. That meeting usually consists of Coco going through their brand Yes Day’s Instagram and flagging stuff her mom wrote in the comments that a 13-year-old would never say. Yes Day sells skin care — not just soap and moisturizer. Skin care is a hobby. Skin care is what you do if your mom takes away your phone. Skin care is what you do after school and at a sleepover when you used to play with slime. As one 11-year-old Yes Day fan put it, “I thought skin care was, like, face masks and face wash until I really started doing it.” Yes Day smells like Jolly Ranchers and sells age-defying products to people who are still growing up.

The idea solidified after Coco took an after-school fashion class at Unincorporated Life and decided that instead of an apparel brand called Coco Marie, she wanted to do this. Nobody paid attention because she was 11. Then she told a friend’s dad on a plane. That dad happened to have helped his own children launch an ice-cream line and helped Rihanna launch Fenty Beauty. He told Coco, if she was serious, she should think about her ideas for the entire flight and tell him her plan when they touched down.

Not much happened for a year. Coco’s parents were like, “What is skin care?” But the friend’s dad periodically asked Coco about her business, Coco made a mood board that impressed him, and soon enough, another family friend introduced Coco’s parents to Ron Robinson, a cosmetic chemist who had helped Hailey Bieber launch her brand, Rhode, after she went viral for saying her skin-care goals included going to bed each night “looking like a glazed doughnut.”

Just before Christmas, I met Coco and her mom, Danielle, at the Grove mall in Los Angeles, where Yes Day’s pop-up store was stacked high with bright mauve boxes of Inner Beam Hydration Mist and, for no extra cost, you could put a charm on your tube of Lip Sweetie Lip Mask.

Coco is tall, and she has braces and a gap in her teeth and mesmerizing hazel eyes. She wears a uniform to school that is supposed to make people not stick out, but of course it doesn’t. Coco’s face, with her perfect skin, is featured in almost all of Yes Day’s marketing. Between classes, kids call out “Ooooo, Yes Day!” Danielle tells Coco other students are just jealous, and Coco is not sure she’s right.

The Grandersons launched the brand around the time Coco started giving her mom a side hug instead of a real hug when she dropped her off at school. Almost all the best things in motherhood, like all the best things in girlhood, are embarrassing. Just as Coco got teased, Danielle started getting ribbed by her friends when, on a girls’ weekend away in Napa, after nine years as a stay-at-home mother, she said she had a work Zoom with Robinson. Danielle’s friend asked, in the nicest possible way, “Why would he want to work with you?” Danielle said, “Actually, I don’t think he wants to work with me.”

Coco and Danielle have the funny/yelly/squirmy relationship of mothers and 13-year-old daughters. They have both learned a lot about each other as CEO and COO. Coco has learned her mom is bossy across the board, not just when yelling “Coco, hurry up!” Likewise, Danielle has learned Coco is adamant when she is right. This includes nearly everything related to Yes Day. You need to have the right packaging. You need to have a lip gloss so you have something to bring to school, but after seventh grade, you don’t want that lip gloss dangling from your backpack. Your products need to have a strong smell. As much as Coco’s sister Celine wants to be the face of Yes Day, you can’t just have an 11-year-old selling to 13-year-olds. The whole point is to play at growing up.

Coco has also realized there are advantages to sharing the C-suite (the family Tesla) with your mom: “I like working with someone I know really well and who won’t judge me.”

Photo: Danielle Levitt

The Grandersons live in a big beautiful house high up in Beverly Hills. Seventeen months ago, Robinson flew to town and 11 girls between 9 and 12 came over and tried to explain their skin-care needs.

We don’t want to look younger. We don’t want to look 8.

I want good skin for when I get older.

When my skin is glowing, it makes me have a better day.

You’d be worrying about your skin and how it looks if you didn’t do your skin care. But if you do it in the morning and you know it looks good, then it’s good. You can focus on other things. You’re happier throughout the day.

Skin care is my life.

Robinson took all this in. The girls wanted the “glowiest, healthiest” skin: “Radiant glow looks snatched.” And no more Drunk Elephant, which pulled girls in with magic-marker-colored packaging but is formulated to make older people look younger and just made young people break out. So Robinson flew back east to bottle up “dewy, radiant, soft” and make Yes Day’s cleanser “thicker and more dense/creamy so it feels like it’s really doing something.” He already had brands for millennials, Gen X, and boomers, so Yes Day made sense in his portfolio. All the focus-group girls loved the watermelon-lemonade fragrance.

On the sunny Monday morning after New Year’s, the last day of winter break, I sat at the huge oval kitchen table with Coco and Danielle and the rest of the family. Through the back wall of windows, you could see down the canyons, Century City, to the beach — the entire kingdom of L.A. The end of December had been a little shocking because Coco hadn’t realized she had a for-real brand that involved going up to people and asking if they want to buy things, and in response those people mostly ignore you, or act like you’re weird, or want free testers. Coco also hadn’t appreciated the headaches of retail; staff doesn’t show up, and you can’t leave your pop-up unattended or the Grove charges you a fee. So there you are: Your mom drops you off after school, and people you know walk by, and some of them ask, “Why aren’t you in Sephora?” Then you wish your mom were there to say, “First of all, that’s so rude. No. 2, Did you ask them where their brand is?” And, “Just because you’re in Sephora doesn’t mean you’re making money. You have to pay for your endcap — you have to pay for your real estate there.” Danielle describes Yes Day as a “family business.” Some parts are “fun”; others, “kind of a pain in the ass.”

The whole world of tween skin care is confusing. You have brands that look like candy that say they are not for kids and brands for kids that kids don’t want. And with the adult brands, once kids latch on too much, you lose your core audience. The reality of this means Sephora doesn’t have a kids’ section. Everybody wants to be a different age. Coco would like to be 16 because at 16, she would be in high school and she could drive, and also at 16, you can sell to someone who is 14, and she can’t do that now. Eighteen might be complicated because if you have a brand and you’re 18 and you aren’t famous, it’s just like “eh.” Age 19 will be her favorite year. Upon graduating from college, she will retire. Soon after that, she’ll get married and have three kids and either move into the house with the pool she likes down the road from her parents or a house somewhere tropical, like Thailand, or into an apartment in New York with a country house in the Hamptons.

Celine would also like to be 18-ish — though, she noted, she wouldn’t want to buy skin care from an 18-year-old because they would probably be selling her anti-aging stuff. When she’s 18, she wants to go to USC or UCLA and then join the WNBA but not stay in the league too long because she wants to go to law school and take over her father’s law firm before he retires. (Her father is 48 and A$AP Rocky’s attorney.) Thirteen will be good too because, at 13, she can be creative director of Yes Day. She’s going to live in Thailand or in the house with the pool down the road with Coco.

Kaya would like to be 13 or 14. But if she were 13, there might be a lot of drama, and that drama would probably be about somebody thinking a person said something mean and then told the teacher. So maybe she’d like to be 15, though not 16, because sometimes she is nervous “for the next level,” so she’ll be afraid to drive. When she’s older, she wants to be a nanny or an actress or a stay-at-home mom and a dancer with 11 kids. If she were a boy, she’d be sneaking out of the house, but first she’d cover all the cameras. She’s going to have a bath-bomb company called Bubble Butt.

Upstairs, Coco showed me her room. On her shelves are Vetements pumps that say COLETTE (her real name) and two pairs of Isabel Marant suede wedge sneakers her mom gave her for Christmas. Next to her sink is a mini beauty fridge the size of a toaster stocked with face masks and eye patches. She uses all the Yes Day products but has also been using the Sofie Pavitt line. Last year, she used a lot of Rhode; now she just uses its Glazing Milk and Glazing Mist. Her bedtime routine is simple, just four steps: cleanser, moisturizer (Aquaphor if her skin is really dry), Medicube acid face pad, and a serum that she doesn’t really know what it does but her facialist said to just keep using it to smooth out texture and help with redness. Between steps, she uses a microcurrent wand that makes her face muscles twitch and jiggle.

Sitting at her vanity, in front of her white-fuzzy-blanket-covered loft bed, Coco explained her world to me. She got invited to the influencer Princess Amelia’s 17th-birthday party and saw the behind-the-scenes workings of something she already knew: Not everything you see on social media is real. Coco asked some people there if they still had friends outside influencing, like at school, and they said, “I can’t believe you’re still going to school; if I were you, I’d just homeschool.” That didn’t even sound fun to Coco. She does not want to be home all day. She’d feel so left out.

In September, before her Yes Day launch party at Nova Studios in West Hollywood, Coco was scared. She felt good about her outfit. She’d planned like five months ahead — a baby-pink corset top with red flowers, low-rise light-wash jeans, pink Sambas. But she didn’t know who would talk to her at the party or what people would think of Yes Day, and as the hours passed, a reality washed over her: A bunch of influencers who’d said they would come were not showing up. Ms. Tina Knowles, Beyoncé’s mother, was there in a bell-bottom denim-print suit. And Coco’s own mom and dad and sisters and cousins and a dozen friends from school. Also, happily for Coco, Alexis and Aliyah Harris — twin teen models who look great doing TikTok dances and who are just starting out and already really big. They’re all still in touch.

Danielle sat in the corner of Coco’s room, and we scrolled through Yes Day’s social media on Danielle’s phone because Coco does not have Instagram. “This is great. This is terrible. This is good because I posted it,” Coco said. “Why did you write ‘slay girl’?” You cannot use the laughing emoji. Or the crying emoji. Or the party-hat emoji on somebody’s birthday. Or the red-heart emoji. I asked why, then realized this was a stupid question. The reason is adults don’t know.

Next door, Kaya and Celine share a room. They also have a skin-care fridge. Celine showed me the quilted bag the size of a cat that she fills with skin-care products to take to sleepovers at which — “This isn’t, like, a good thing to do,” she told me — she and her friends mix a bunch of moisturizers together to make skin-care smoothies. She then said, “Do you want to hear about my day?” On Saturday, she gets up at 5 a.m. and her dad takes her to basketball lessons and then they usually go to Erewhon and then she goes to basketball practice and then maybe goes to gymnastics with Kaya and then she comes home and showers and then maybe she goes to a friend’s house or her friends come over. Stella, one of her best friends, watches a lot of skin-care YouTube videos and knows which active ingredients do what. It’s sort of like the periodic table of elements she’s learning at school, Stella told me. “Like the exact same ingredients in everything — carbon, oxygen, stuff like that — but with skin care, it’s like hyaluronic acid.”

Kaya just had her first sleepover. She was a little scared so she brought a picture of herself. They made a lip-gloss milkshake.

Adults have opinions about this trend: It’s predatory. It’s anti-feminist. Do we really need to push the leering, late-stage-capitalist male gaze down into elementary school?

My own daughter happened to be traveling. She was 20, a baby adult, in Morocco with a backpack and shoes that didn’t keep her feet dry, sleeping at a hostel in two pairs of pants to stay warm at night. You raise them to be free. Then they leave and you feel like a fool. How far did we want them to go? Thailand? Down the road?

Early that afternoon, Danielle sat with her two older daughters on a Zoom call with Yes Day’s marketing consultants. The women on the line gushed, “We really want to hear what Coco and Celine have to say.” Meanwhile, in the kitchen Kaya and her nanny stuffed pink packing envelopes with mauve boxes of Lip Sweetie. Then Kaya walked into the backyard to do a dance routine. Is she afraid? Kaya wanted to know about my daughter. What do you do when you’re 20 or 21 and you grow up? Kaya had been scared before, she told me. There were fires nearby and one of the roads was closed and she fell asleep in the car and then her dad picked her up. At the beach, if she’s scared, she runs away from the ocean and makes sandcastles and then goes home. When she grows up, the vibe of her house is going to be summery. Unless she has a boy and then it will be fire truck.

The hours rolled by with warmth and boredom. The girls made boba from their Christmas boba kits. Coco sat on a stool at the kitchen island, and the house cleaner and the nanny crowded around her, laughing and unbraiding the extensions from her hair. In the front yard, Celine practiced her jump shot. Kaya walked out and tried to guard her. In a few years, Kaya will be old enough for a rift to develop between her real and idealized selves. For now, she feels perfect in her body. She sat on the ground and pretended two leaves were Celine and Celine’s imaginary boyfriend.

Kaya is also scared of fish, she told me. And she’s scared when she sees Coco in a face mask.

Coco had volleyball practice at 6 p.m. At 4:30 p.m., she walked upstairs to get ready. Danielle tried to get her out the door at 5 p.m. and 5:15 p.m. and finally succeeded at 5:30 p.m. — Coco emerging in short shorts, high socks, kneepads around her ankles, and a rainbow T-shirt. Her skin looked glowy. Danielle had just enough time on the way to mail the Yes Day packages at UPS.

We passed the Glossier flagship, which doesn’t have the pull on Coco that it used to. Skin care had been the coolest thing. Now Waymos are the coolest thing. Danielle won’t let Coco ride in them yet.

When we arrived at the gym, volleyball practice was canceled. No one seemed to mind. Danielle was on her way to Pilates. “Can I go?” Coco asked.

Danielle said “yes.”

Then Coco changed her mind. She had school tomorrow, crazy hair, and wanted a blowout. Danielle looked, no Drybar appointments: “Your hair is so pretty curly! Let’s go home.”

At age 13, you can be the CEO, but if you cede logistical power to your mom, she’s still in control.