An immigrant from Guatemala, Bianca Castellanos got a fulfillment job in 1978 at Aida Grey Institute De Beaute, a skincare studio on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills that extended to over 100 franchises worldwide presided over by Grey, one of three women the Los Angeles Times described in 1990 as doyennes of dermis making sure celebrities and socialites put their best (famous) faces forward. Aida Thibiant and Georgette Klinger were the other two.
Before Grey died in 1994, Castellanos ascended to management in the company, giving her family a modicum of access to the pricy skincare she spent her days and often nights toiling on. But Castellanos’ daughter, Veronica Pedersen, never forgot what it was like to be around luxury skincare she coveted and couldn’t afford.
In 2009, when she and her husband Alex had $400 combined in their bank account, the couple launched Timeless on eBay to bring skincare products that rival the quality generally reserved for rich residents of Beverly Hills, yet reasonable for the women who worked for them. About a year later, it went live on Amazon with its first smash hit, Hyaluronic Acid Serum, currently priced at $11.99, and the product promptly ranked in the top 10 skincare listings on the platform as online shoppers took to it to search for their favorite ingredients.
“I wanted something from an inexpensive perspective, not cheap, but inexpensive,” says Pedersen. “If you use the word ‘cheap,’ the connotation is not good enough, but I wanted to be a good enough brand.”
Today, Timeless is entering 1,550-plus Target stores with four of its bestselling products: 20% Vitamin C + E Ferulic Acid Serum, Coenzyme Q10 Serum, Matrixyl Synthe’6 and Matrixyl 3000. Vitamin C + E Ferulic Acid Serum. On track to reach $50 million in sales this year after a couple years of double-digit growth, it’s sold in excess of 3 million bottles of 20% Vitamin C + E Ferulic Acid Serum, which followed Hyaluronic Acid Serum as its star product and is a dupe for SkinCeuticals’ C E Ferulic. SkinCeuticals’ C E Ferulic retails for $182, roughly seven times the price of Timeless’s 20% Vitamin C + E Ferulic Acid Serum at $25.99.
Timeless’s Target store rollout comes five years subsequent to its dot-com debut at the big-box chain and as it’s also picked up MCoBeauty, a brand duping makeup and skincare products such as Charlotte Tilbury’s Hollywood Flawless Filter, Drunk Elephant’s D-Bronzi Anti-Pollution Sunshine Drop and Dior’s Addict Lip Oil Glow. Although Pedersen didn’t have dupes in mind at Timeless’s inception, she’s embraced the brand’s reputation for effective dupes and thinks it’s smart of Target to be a destination for dupes of steep skincare products its customers generally can’t or won’t pay for.
“Dupe is a compliment.”
“Dupe is a compliment. I’m flattered to be called that,” she says. “I think it’s healthy for us to have competition, and at the end of the day, the reviews will speak for themselves. I’m thankful to be in a position to be called a dupe. It’s not a bad thing. It’s just how you see it. It’s a glass half full kind of thing. There’s enough in the economy for us all, and it creates a very interesting conversation.”
She adds, “The Target customer is interested in buying $300 of various items versus $300 of a single item. They are very interested in trying something new and chic. Target has really capitalized on that. What I’ve learned from being a customer there myself is it’s trusted. The way the curate products in store and online, they do a phenomenal job, and I’m happy to be part of that.”
Unlike MCoBeauty, a brand in the portfolio of DBG Health, a health, wellness and beauty company formed in 2023 by Australian billionaire Dennis Bastas, Timeless isn’t a cog in a larger corporate entity. Pedersen says she and Alex were equal partners at the beginning and remain equal partners in complete control of Timeless. It has 45 employees and two facilities in Houston: a 30,000-square-foot facility for storage and 60,000-square-foot facility for manufacturing.
Besides its oils, Timeless manufacturers all its products in-house. It’s entire product lineup amounts to roughly 16 priced from $8.95 to $69.95, and Target sells it on its website. Outside of the United States, Timeless has 80 distributors that place it in retailers and e-tailers in China, Australia, Romania, Russia, Poland and more countries. For its retailers and distributors, Timeless’s in-house manufacturing allows it to have quick turnaround periods of two to seven business days.
“We have the freshest product out the door for you.”
Pedersen says, “I like knowing we have the freshest product out the door for you, and it hasn’t been sitting on a warehouse shelf for a year.”
This year, Timeless has no new product releases planned. Even once it does reignite releases, Pedersen hints that the brand won’t stray too far from its existing product specialties. “We don’t offer cleansers. We don’t have scrubs. We don’t have masks. We are strictly facial sprays, oils, eye creams and serums. I tell people to gladly find other brands for what we don’t have,” she says. “We are good at what we do instead of saturating and having too many products.”
Target isn’t Timeless’s only U.S. retailer. In 2020, it landed at CVS, and the brand is eyeing further retail expansion in the U.S. and abroad. Pedersen says, “We’ve mastered the online factor, now we want to master the tangible factor. Obviously, Target is going to propel us to that and hopefully having other partners.”
To help build awareness for its business at Target and elsewhere, Pedersen wants to increasingly communicate her story and the stories of Timeless’s customers. Transparency has long been a core value at Timeless—at the start, she invited customers to ask her questions directly—and she believes demand for it is mounting among beauty consumers.
“It’s not just about providing a product and reselling it with a 4,000%, 5,000% markup. I believe there needs to be efficacy, transparency and an ethical way of selling products,” says Pedersen. “We as cosmetic manufacturers should be able to tell customers, this is what we are doing, this is where it’s coming from, this is what our standards are. We do that, and we really convey to our customers and distributors, we are a U.S. company. Our products aren’t made overseas without oversight.”
