Huawei-affiliated entrepreneurs enter the children's sun protection market: Turtle Dad builds industry standards through "pressure-based investment"

Ask AI · Why Huawei-affiliated entrepreneurs are betting on the children’s sunscreen niche market?

Nanfang Finance reporter Zhang Mengqi, Guangzhou report

Many maternal-and-infant products have failed to escape the “three-years-and-then-a-refresh” cycle. Brands follow the child’s growth cycle; after a few years, customers churn, and brands must rebrand. Very few are willing to go deep and truly master a track that is “destined to be abandoned.”

But Hai Turtle Dad is an exception. In 2019, founder Xu Yujang Jiang resigned from Huawei and began building a children’s sunscreen business. By this year—its seventh year since incorporation—the company has not been replaced; instead, it has reached the top tier.

Children’s sunscreen is the only category in children’s skincare that requires “two special certifications” (the Golden Shield + the Special Cosmetics Registration Certificate). The bar is high, and competition is relatively smaller. “Only by making a pressure-focused investment in a new track do you have a chance to succeed.” Xu Yujang Jiang has pinned his faith on this logic: “Get the hard but correct things done.”

He observed that most brands are doing subtraction on adult formulations. So Hai Turtle Dad started from basic research, tailoring a full set of products for children’s skin, and even building a new industry standard. Over two years, the team submitted 11 SCI papers, with the highest impact factor reaching 36.3—setting an industry record. Meanwhile, it holds more than 70 patents, with 32 sunscreen special-certification documents.

These investments have translated into solid market standing. In 2025, Hai Turtle Dad’s online children’s sunscreen GMV reached 820 million yuan, taking up half of China’s children’s sunscreen market.

Recently, at the 2026 second Hai Turtle Dad “Standing at the Peak of Science” brand science gala, Xu Yujang Jiang said that Hai Turtle Dad has built a “professional sunshine” brand image through children’s sunscreen; it has now naturally expanded at least to efficacy-focused children’s skincare. At the event, Hai Turtle Dad also jointly with Southern Medical University officially announced the launch of Asia’s first 0-to-18-year-old children’s skin database, marking the point at which children’s skincare in China finally has its own scientific standards.

In 2019, out of every 100 households in China, only 0.5 households used children’s sunscreen products. Even with such a niche track, Xu Yujang Jiang calls it “a blue ocean within a blue ocean”: “Mature big tracks have already been occupied by top brands. With high entry barriers and fierce competition, the sub-niches are where opportunities exist.”

He also did the math: China’s population aged 0 to 10 is about 230 million; globally it is about 600 to 700 million. Based on brand concentration in the adult market of 15% to 20%, China alone could support a single brand of 5 to 6 billion yuan. “That scale is already pretty good.”

Although it’s niche, achieving the extreme is not easy. At the time, children’s market sunscreen had a contradiction: physical sunscreen is safe, but it can look whitish and feel heavy; chemical sunscreen has better sensory feel, but some ingredients carry safety risks. How to have both—that was the must-solve problem.

“Only by making a pressure-focused investment in a new track do you have a chance to succeed.” Sticking to this logic, Xu Yujang Jiang chose to start from basic research, bringing in Nobel Prize experts and teams of national academicians, and working with the Tsinghua University Yangtze River Delta Research Institute, Southern Medical University, and other institutions to tackle the hard problems for years. “We don’t want to make a mini-version of adult formulations; we want to design an entire system from scratch specifically for children’s skin.”

So in 2023, Hai Turtle Dad built the first children’s efficacy-focused skincare laboratory in China—the Xihe Laboratory. The lab is benchmarked against international advanced standards, equipped with high-end testing instruments, and has a cross-national top R&D team of over 60 people covering the full process including raw material R&D, formulation application, and efficacy testing.

In July 2025, at Hai Turtle Dad’s first brand science gala, the lab jointly with Dr. Qiu Ling—Chief Science Advisor and Associate Professor at Tsinghua University—released a breakthrough result: inspired by the concept of “materials structure optimization” from the mobile manufacturing field, it cross-applied structural modification technology previously used for smartphone heat-dissipation systems to sunscreen agent R&D, successfully developing a new layered titanium dioxide material.

It is understood that this achievement was published in the international top materials journal Nano-Micro Letters, with an impact factor as high as 36.3—this is the highest-impact-factor paper in China’s cosmetics industry published to date. The material can achieve three major breakthroughs: “invisible sunscreen with no false white,” “full-band UV protection,” and “non-permeating safety.” It perfectly resolves sunscreen’s “two hard-to-balance” problems.

The “Xiao Guang Dun Pro sunscreen,” which adopts this technology, surpassed 300k units in sales in 2025. With this super big single product, Hai Turtle Dad has established a professional, healthy brand impression, and its product line has also begun to expand from sunscreen into teen acne-clearing skincare.

This is related to the market expanding rapidly. Data show that from 2019 to 2024, the children’s cosmetics category’s CAGR exceeded 20%, far outpacing the adult market. At the same time, it also fits consumer spending habits. As Xu Yujang Jiang put it: “When moms choose products for their kids, they mostly choose a trusted brand and buy everything in one stop. The user mindshare that children’s sunscreen builds can be extended to products across all categories.”

Looking across the entire children’s skincare field, “the current standards are sound and clear, but they are designed for adults and are not suitable for children.” Xu Yujang Jiang’s ambition is not only to broaden the product line, but to establish a complete set of dedicated skincare standards for children. So he proposed the brand philosophy: “a world of 1.2 meters, a depth of 10k meters—everything starts from children’s height and skin characteristics.”

To this end, Hai Turtle Dad has taken the lead in drafting multiple group standards, including “Test Methods for Washable Fresh Water Cleaning for Sunscreen Products” and “Test Methods for the Suitability of High-Factor Sunscreen-Type Cosmetics for Sensitive Skin in Children,” filling gaps in several evaluation methods in the children’s sunscreen field.

In the “China Children’s Cosmetics Industry Development Research Report (2025)” recently released by the Development Research Center of the State Administration for Market Regulation, Hai Turtle Dad is the only invited participating children’s skincare brand and has deeply participated in the compilation of this guiding document.

More milestone-worthy: at this event, Hai Turtle Dad and Southern Medical University’s jointly built “Asia’s first 0-to-18-year-old children’s skin database” was officially launched. Xu Yujang Jiang said that establishing standards requires continuous investment for 3 to 5 years, and it does not plan to apply for patents. “We hope to push it to the entire industry; in the future, there may be opportunities to become a national standard. Like blood routine tests, this database can set a ‘healthy baseline’ for children’s skin—so efficacy testing and safety testing no longer rely on adult data, but directly on simulations based on children’s skin.”

Hai Turtle Dad’s children’s sunscreen cream has already earned recognition from many international quarters for its quality. But as for the brand itself, it is still far from enough.

In an interview, Xu Yujang Jiang shared a story: an American beauty influencer reviewed Hai Turtle Dad’s children’s sunscreen and initially gave it a very high rating. She said the skin-sensory experience of this China-made product priced at more than 200 yuan RMB was in no way inferior to that of similar overseas products priced at more than 600 yuan. Then the influencer changed her tone, saying, “It’s a pity that it comes from China,” revealing a lack of trust in areas such as China’s cosmetics ESG performance and product safety assurance.

In fact, in 2024, Hai Turtle Dad obtained the “Asian No. 1 children’s sunscreen brand” certification from Euromonitor International, an internationally authoritative institution, and it topped the children’s sunscreen category for four consecutive years. However, building brand mindshare overseas is not easy. As Xu Yujang Jiang said: “China’s cosmetics international image needs to be improved, and that will be continuously improved as cultural exports expand.”

Faced with such difficulties, Hai Turtle Dad’s approach is to first choose countries with relatively lower export entry thresholds, and then gradually focus on mature markets such as Europe and the United States.

In November 2025, Hai Turtle Dad reached a cooperation with Wiselink Zhi Hui Da, successfully obtaining Thailand registration certificates for multiple children’s sunscreen products under its brand, officially entering the Thai market. As an important hub for cosmetics consumption in Southeast Asia, Thailand has strict regulatory entry thresholds, and this step was not easy. In terms of specifications, the brand specifically developed a large-capacity product line to maximize alignment with local consumption scenarios.

Meanwhile, in the Europe and United States markets, its products are still in the market testing stage. Xu Yujang Jiang admitted that competition in the U.S. market is quite fierce. Whether it’s local brands or Korean and Japanese brands, they have already formed stable market patterns, leaving little room for big breakthroughs in the short term.

Xu Yujang Jiang observed that U.S. consumers are relatively sensitive to ESG performance. Therefore, Hai Turtle Dad has already begun to plan ESG-related areas such as green environmental initiatives, packaging that is recyclable, and assurances of product safety. And because sunscreen products are the brand’s core category, they become an important entry point for implementing the ESG理念 and building trust overseas.

In Xu Yujang Jiang’s view, when a brand truly goes abroad, the key lies in gaining cultural-level recognition, which requires long-term accumulation.

“Globalization is not simply going abroad to chase performance; it is to elevate goals, standards, and perspectives to a global level to think about,” he said. “When you think about the future with this perspective, you’ll find that competitors are not only domestic companies, but also globally operating international companies.”

He revealed that for the European market, in the short term, the brand does not rule out achieving a “go-abroad breakthrough by using a local cultural shell to carry its own product core,” through the acquisition of overseas brands.

Xu Yujang Jiang said that China has already entered the global layout phase. Domestic cosmetics companies with hundred-billion scale have emerged. Moreover, data show that in developed countries, children’s sunscreen products have a penetration rate as high as 20% in households—meaning there is still a large incremental space in the global market.

Guangzhou, where Hai Turtle Dad is located, is also the core concentration area for the beauty and cosmetics industry nationwide. According to statistics from Guangzhou Customs, in 2025, Guangzhou’s beauty and cosmetics and hair-care products import and export reached 17.34 billion yuan, up 11.2%; among them exports were 11.63 billion yuan, up 25.2%, maintaining its position as the number one city for beauty and hair-care product exports nationwide. Export products cover more than 170 countries and regions across six continents.

However, insufficient brand premium remains a shared challenge that the beauty and cosmetics industry in Guangzhou faces in going abroad.