Inside Sonsie, Pamela Anderson’s minimalist skincare brand, from its compostable Adapt Cream jar and its garden-forward marketing that’s nabbed a loyal audience of older customers big beauty often ignores.
In the 1990s, Pamela Anderson spent two hours in a makeup chair before anyone turned on a camera. These days she keeps a jar of Sonsie’s Adapt Cream by the sink that she says she could bury in her garden once the jar is empty, and she reaches for it before dinners, grocery runs, and red carpets alike. Sonsie, the skincare brand she co-founded and came to majority own in 2024, grew out of the vegetable beds she works between projects, and it has never really left them. “I’ve had so many epiphanies out there. It’s where I do my best thinking,” Anderson told The Zoe Report. The garden is where Sonsie keeps finding its next idea, its packaging, and, lately, its numbers.
Last October, Sonsie built a campaign called “Rules of the Garden” around slow living, dirt, and patience rather than a discount code — and the label watched sales climb 800 percent on launch day. While much of prestige beauty was flying creators to resorts and staging influencer spectacle, Sonsie was inviting its customers to think about tomatoes. “The garden is our biggest inspiration. Kindness [is] our most cherished secret ingredient,” Anderson told Inc.
That month, Sonsie opened The Sonsie Garden, a multi-day pop-up on Greene Street in Soho stocked with fresh greenery, heirloom tomatoes from Flamingo Estate, and the brand’s products arranged like a harvest. “I got to bring a little taste of my home to New York City with The Sonsie Garden,” Anderson told Into The Gloss. “It all felt whimsical, like something out of a dream—and exactly how I feel in my own garden.” Her pitch for the brand is openly evangelical about dirt. “I want more people to plant more gardens, to reconnect with nature, to play, so they can feel like garden fairies, too,” she said.
“What we’re building is a point of view. Skincare is one expression of that point of view, but so is gardening, journaling, sustainability, spending time outdoors, and creating moments of intention in your day,” Kailey Bradt, Sonsie’s chief executive, said, The company’s chief brand officer and Anderson’s 28-year-old son Dylan Lee, framed the same idea in commercial terms. “That’s the shift we’ve been chasing — from routine to ritual, from routine to story,” Lee told the outlet.
By all accounts, it seems to be working. In May, Sonsie gathered 25 influencers and editors at a community garden in New York and generated more than 300,000 views from the day, and a video series with the gardener Alexandra Harris opened with a first episode that drew more than 260,000 views before later installments outpaced the brand’s average Reels several times over. Anderson treats the garden as both muse and management consultant. “If you need an idea, go pick some tomatoes. Go plant a seed,” she told The Zoe Report, adding that she considers it a metaphor for life.
The garden beauty approach
Sonsie did not begin with Anderson. The influencer Marie von Behrens-Felipe and her husband, Roberto Felipe, launched the brand in June 2023, naming it after a centuries-old Scottish word for a healthy inner and outer appearance. Von Behrens-Felipe had spent two years developing formulas with a Brooklyn cosmetic chemist after paring back her own overcrowded routine. “The serum is my hero product. I wanted a simple product that calmed my skin, but also moisturized it,” she told Glossy. Her husband put the mission in plainer language. “Sonsie is about authenticity and [helping] our community to connect with themselves at a deeper level,” Roberto Felipe said at the time.
Anderson entered the following year, joining as co-founder and majority owner in 2024; then the brand’s center of gravity shifted toward her garden, her sons, and her recent public discourse for going without makeup. The infrastructure caught up in 2025, when the beauty operator Kailey Bradt was named chief executive to scale a company that had become, almost overnight, a celebrity brand with a philosophy attached.
The clearest expression of that philosophy is Adapt Cream, a clinically tested barrier cream built on a bacillus ferment and an adaptive tripeptide blend meant to stand in for several products at once, doubling as eye cream and full-face moisturizer while it works to calm redness, strengthen the skin barrier, and fade sunspots. Anderson had set a high bar for launching anything new. “If I’m going to launch another product, it has to be out of this world,” she said, calling the finished formula years in the making, her “crème de la crème.”
Its jar is the part she can bury. Adapt Cream shipped in Sonsie’s first plastic-free, home-compostable packaging, produced with the biomaterials company Shellworks from a microbe-grown material called Vivomer that breaks down in soil rather than sitting in a landfill. “It’s fully compostable — you can literally put it in your garden,” Anderson told The Zoe Report. The rest of the line, which runs from a cleansing mousse and a niacinamide serum to a hydrating mask and the brand’s Basic Balm, carries vegan, cruelty-free, and Leaping Bunny-certified credentials, and the balm itself came straight out of the ground. “Our Basic Balm in Sugar-Dipped Rhubarb was born from a childhood story of mine that I had with my grandmother. Ripping off stalks of rhubarb in the garden and eating it right there,” Anderson told Good Morning America.
Sonsie’s customer isn’t big beauty’s usual target
Besides making the case for pared back beauty in the age of 9-step beauty routines, Sonsie has also made a bet the rest of the category tends to avoid, building for women that youth-obsessed beauty marketing usually skips past. Roughly 80 percent of its customers are women 45 and older, and about half of them come back to buy again each month. “Our biggest customers are closer to my age, but there is a ‘youthful state of mind’-style following,” Anderson told Inc.
That audience is buying Anderson’s argument as much as the cream. Anderson has spent the Sonsie years reframing her own image around restraint and self-acceptance, and she sells the brand as an extension of it. “For me, it was about paring it back and starting from a place of true self-love. It’s been a journey,” she told Good Morning America, describing Sonsie as “the glow that comes from being comfortable in your own skin.”
Pamela Anderson’s Vancouver Island garden is where Sonsie wtarts
Anderson’s garden sits on six acres in Ladysmith, British Columbia, that had gone virtually untouched for 25 years before Anderson came back to it, a piece of family land where a front room once held the store her grandparents ran and where she has memories of sitting on the property with her father. She restored it with the Vancouver designer Francesca Albertazzi, documented the work for the HGTV Canada series Pamela’s Garden of Eden, salvaged the wooden boards from her childhood bedroom, and asked, specifically, for a chandelier in the greenhouse. “‘Funky grandma’s’ is the vibe,” Albertazzi told Western Living.
The grounds run to coastal rainforest at the edge of the sea, with a wildflower field, vegetable beds, climbing hydrangea, and a rose garden Anderson cuts for the cabins, and she keeps the whole thing on a closed loop, mulching fallen trees and saving every scrap of plant matter for leaf mould. “I pray and meditate in my garden,” Anderson told Homes & Gardens, and she checks the beds daily when she is home. “The garden is my re-entry back to myself. To begin again,” she said. “It’s full of surprises. It’s not in our full control.”
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