The breaking point, as Brooke Jeffy MD describes it, was deceptively simple. Parents and children were coming into her dermatology practice not because of a rash or a chronic condition, but because they were lost in the skincare aisle. "Kids and parents were literally asking me what to use because they were overwhelmed at the store," she recalls. Brands they had trusted for years had expanded into sprawling product lines with no clear guidance on what, if anything, was appropriate for a child.
That confusion reflects something Jeffy believes the skincare industry has been slow to reckon with: the skin is an organ, and what goes on it matters, especially for developing children. Yet the category has largely ignored that fact. In its place, she argues, has come what she calls "the toy-fication of skincare," a wave of products with playful names and colorful packaging that appeal directly to kids while obscuring any meaningful information about safety or age-appropriateness. The appeal is aesthetic, the marketing is effective, and the safety guidance is essentially absent. "The bottom line is they want to move product," she says.
"Certain brands appeal to kids because of silly names or colorful packaging. Yet these brands do not make it clear which products are acceptable for young skin, if any, because the bottom line is they want to move product."
This is the gap that Jeffy set out to close with BTWN, a skincare line built specifically for tweens and sold both directly to consumers and through her concierge dermatology practice. The dual model matters because it changes what personalized care actually looks like across two different contexts. A direct-to-consumer product has to speak clearly to a parent browsing online without any clinical support; a clinic offering allows her to meet families where they are and address specific concerns. The brand, in this sense, is not a side project but an extension of the same clinical thinking she applies in the exam room.
Jeffy is candid that building a consumer brand required skills her medical training did not directly teach. "Almost all of it," she says, when asked how much of the entrepreneurial process was new territory. Still, she draws a clear line from medical practice to product development, pointing to the collaborative habits physicians develop over years of working toward shared clinical goals. Getting a brand from concept to production to market, she argues, is not entirely unlike that process. "I think physicians are natural entrepreneurs due to our ongoing desire to learn and question what we see."
That instinct to question is, in many ways, what drove BTWN into existence. Social media has accelerated tween engagement with adult skincare products faster than the industry has responded with any meaningful guardrails. Jeffy's answer was to stop waiting for the market to self-correct and to build the product she was already being asked to recommend. Whether the broader industry takes notice is a different question, and one her practice, one product line at a time, cannot answer alone.
