How founder Nancy Yen got Omie's $50 kids’ lunch box into Target

When Nancy Yen’s son was in preschool, she wanted to send him off with a kid-friendly lunchbox she could pack both hot and cold foods in. But when she couldn’t find anything that fit the bill, she set out to make one.

OmieBox, funded in part through a 2014 Kickstarter campaign, is a bento-style lunch box with compartments, including one for a removable insulated food jar that keeps food warm. Think Yeti meets Fisher-Price: design-forward with bright colors and latches made for little hands.

Along with its own e-commerce site, the brand got on Amazon early as a third-party (3P) seller through Amazon’s Launchpad program.

“They provided a lot of handholding on…setting up your own listing,” Yen, founder and now CEO of OmieLife, told Retail Brew. “We didn’t have a big team, and we really relied on Amazon to teach us how to be a really effective 3P seller.” That included “telling your story to the audience,” she said.

As of publication, an Amazon OmieBox listing had more than 41,800 global customer ratings dating to 2015, with an average rating of 4.5 out of 5.

OmieBoxes appear frequently in TikTok videos about packing kids’ lunches, with tags like #schoollunchideas and #lunchboxinspo.

“We have a lot of influencers who we do seeding campaigns with, and those influencers are posting on TikTok [and] Instagram,” Yen said, adding that the brand generally partners with parents who pack their kids’ lunches. “The audience needs to feel like the influencer is authentic, and so if they’re just making lunches for no good reason, it’s hard for the audience to believe them, so we tend to work with folks who have kids.”

Major viral exposure came in 2024, when Kylie Jenner posted a morning routine video that included her packing a lunch for one of her children in a pink OmieBox. It received 64 million views.

Hard Target: Yen said it was “three or four years” after starting Omie that she flew to Minnesota to pitch OmieBox to Target buyers.

“They just didn’t think it was a fit at the time, and I totally agree,” Yen said. “In hindsight, I think we were too small to handle being in Target stores.”

But before last year’s back-to-school season, Target reached out again.

“They had noticed that people were searching for OmieBox on Target.com, and then we started having a conversation about whether it would make sense to put OmieBox in stores,” Yen said.

In 2025, OmieBox was tested in 400 Target locations. It had “[more than] 80% sell-through within the first two weeks,” Yen said. “We just felt like this audience was probably very aligned with the core audience that likes OmieBox.”

This year, the brand expanded into 1,800 of Target’s more than 2,000 locations, per Omie. After the back-to-school assortment comes down, the products will remain in 900 locations, as well as on Target.com.

OmieBox products sell for $50, putting them in the most expensive tier of 32 kids’ bento lunch boxes on Target.com, with only one higher priced item—a stainless-steel kids’ bento box from Bentgo—selling for $60. Several others from Bentgo are in the $30–$50 range, and kids’ bento boxes from Target’s private label brand, Cat & Jack, sell for as little as $3.

Yen called Target’s lunchbox assortment “a good-better-best strategy,” referring to the retail tactic of offering entry-level, midpriced, and premium options.

“[Yen] really built out a brand,” Gunce Arkan, Omie’s chief revenue officer, told Retail Brew. She said Target “didn’t realize that we were worth the money in a way until they did, and then they were like, ‘Oh, people are willing to pay $50 for a lunchbox.’”