How KIKI World is Flipping the Script on Traditional Beauty

[upbeat music] Welcome, Jana.

Welcome, Brendan, to Dematerialized, the next episode of where we talk about brands and Web3. You're both co-founders of Kiki World.

Kiki World is a next-level cosmetics brand, innovating at the forefront of Web3 technology. I'm very excited to have you here. We'll talk a lot about your project, but first, let's do a short introduction of who you are.

Yeah, let's start with Jana. Who are you? It's great to meet you. My name is Jana.

I'm one of the co-founders of Kiki, and Kiki is not just a brand, it's a platform, and it's a solution for creators, brands, and communities to create new things.

And really excited to share a little bit more about that on this call. I'm the co-founder and CEO, and really thrilled to be here with my other co-founder, Brendan.

Hi, my name's Brendan, co-founder and head of platform here at Kiki World.

Really excited to be leading the charge in terms of building the tools that will empower creators, brands, and their communities to build the future of community-led commerce.

My background is largely in commerce from an e-commerce perspective and strategy, so really excited to speak today. Cool.

And before we dive into Kiki itself, I think it would be very helpful to know where are you coming from and what led you to that project and company. I can get started a little bit.

I, I can hear there's a lot of accents on this phone call. So I'm originally from the Czech Republic, and I always say I'm living the American dream.

I came to the US several years ago, and I've been a part of several really fast-growing CPG brands, mostly in the personal care and luxury beauty space.

I then started my own company called Epic, which has provided operating services to fast-growing startups, and that's actually how I met Brendan.

Because at that time, we started to incubate some of our own projects on the frontier of technology and its translation into consumer.

And a very key observation that the consumer ecosystem sort of is the last to get the benefits of some of the latest tech that has typically originated in some really interesting labs, and goes into automotive and defense and, and biotech, and all these incredible advancements that we as humans have, and I'm really excited about bringing them to the people's hands.

And so in Kiki's case, the- we got into one room together, thinking about what's the future of consumer, and we had this realization that it will not be people using the internet to sell objects, which is what brands do today, but it will be the internet and people on the internet using this rich medium to connect and create the next things online first, and then bring it into the IRL space.

And so we really wanted to be on the frontier of what does that look like. And in the process of doing that, we realized that blockchain allows us to make customers co-creators and co-owners of these experiences.

And not to get ahead of ourselves, but here we are.

[laughs] I think Brendan's, uh, background is really interesting, and one of the things that makes Kiki strong is that we're a very diverse group of the founding team, and we all bring unique things to the table, and that's why Kiki is, uh,

early, but relatively straightforward, but a complex ecosystem of digital, physical, and cryptographic innovation. Yeah, I was just gonna add in, in terms of how we got here.

So spending a lot of time in the e-commerce space over the past decade or so, watching it go from kind of a novel concept itself, then to the mobile revolution, to marketplaces, and then doing a lot of strategy with larger consumer brands and multinationals, really nicely coincided with my introduction into Web3 around 2016.

And so when we all got together, to Jana's point, and really, really discovered and, and felt very strongly that the brands of the future are gonna be community led, we found this really nice overlap between these areas.

And, and the fact that Web3 space, it's gone through its, its cycles over the past few years, but it's still so young, and its ability to interject and intertwine with existing consumer behaviors and really amplify and allow for, for new opportunities, uh, was just something that we couldn't wait to get started, and has ultimately led us to where we are today.

You got started in 2023. You went through the a16z Accelerator, and now here you are. You just dropped a lot of keywords that I think are very, very relevant to every one of us in the Web3 space.

For people who aren't familiar with those words, what is Kiki and what makes it different then from a normal cosmetics brand? And just to chime in here, I think that's a very good point.

I went through the on- onboarding journey for Kiki World, and nowhere was mentioned that this is anyhow an NFT or that I create a wallet or anything of some sort.

So it's really a Web2 experience and as you say correctly, you have a lot more in the background happening. And maybe, yeah, Brendan, you can expand on that a little bit. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

So we view the experience of anything on chain really as, as a feature. It's part of our stack.

The same way that if you were to sign up for a social account, a Web2 social account, or sign up for a Web2 commerce shop account, you don't need to know the technology that's powering that process, right?

It's just something that happens. And so when we set out to launch Kiki.world, we wanted to really make sure that the general audience, the non-Web3 audience, would still feel very comfortable in that experience.

It's about the actions that they take, the rewards that they earn, and what they can do with them.

It's not about the technology powering it in the back end, except to B2B or except to technologists that are really interested in that process.

And so when we look towards the future, the power of having wallets abstracted in the back end for users that are taking part in campaigns, earning rewards, co-creating with brands and creators, is that we can really start to connect them together.

We can really help identify where, where the commonalities are, where people are really interested in- And then be able to help brands, and creators, and communities better understand where they should be going, how they can create together, and create these really special experiences that, to Jana's point, that really elevate beyond what's possible today.

I think that the interesting part of what you just said is that there are a lot of companies, at least in my view, operating in a single vertical at the moment.

They're operating in the tokenization vertical, and they bring physical products on chain, or they operate in the loyalty and rewards vertical, or they operate in the community vertical and start building communities with NFTs, or they're focusing on data.

And what I think is really interesting about what you do is that you're connecting all those things together.

And one thing you touched upon now, but you haven't expanded on, is what do you do with all that data that you generate do- with your consumers when you co-create those products?

How does that help you in running your business? Yeah. Well, so to- to Jana's point, to not spill too many beans here, I'll hop in with a comment and then pass it up to you, Jana.

We see a really powerful potential in leveraging what we call campaigns. So this might be a vote, it might be a swipe, you know, pick this or that.

Every single time an action is taken, we're understanding what people really enjoy, what they want to bring to fruition, right?

And so over time, you get to really have a verifiable journey of what people are interested in to help not only present them with content that is exciting for them to engage with, but also to inform creators and brands and the platform overall to be able to understand trends, be able to understand intent, and create better experiences ultimately for their fans and users.

Jana, I'll pass it right up to you as well to expand. Yeah, 100%.

I think one of the things that I'm most excited about is that how it can not only empower us to make better products, but how it can empower our audiences to make better products with us, or eventually even without us in the physical world, but still using our tools.

And so this true vision of how do these data blocks, some of which are on-chain and some of which are off-chain, can connect

the community among themselves to build things around interest, is how we really think we're going to find way to build exciting and new innovative products. And we have a lot of use cases in our...

or examples of this already. I mean, we have members from our communities that have said, "Hey, like, I've always wanted to do this, and I saw it in, like, in one of your pipeline votes. Can I do it with you?"

And then we're like, "Oh, well, we thought you'd never ask." [laughs] It's literally what our platform is made for.

And so I think by doing what we're doing, we're laying down the bricks of other people to build with themselves and to create new innovation, and I think that's something that makes me personally very, very excited.

Because the reality is we don't even know what the world, what world we would live in, what it would look like if it wasn't sold to us top-down. We know that in software.

Software is very collaborative, bottoms up, and software has had a revolution for the last 60, 70 years.

In the world of the physical world experiences, everything's been sold to us so far, and I think now that there's an inflection of technology from additive manufacturing to just the different ways of building products, where our technology, collaborative technology, and on-chain ownership mechanisms and consensus mechanisms can allow us to build

objects, companies, projects, physical things in a, in a whole new way, and that's very exciting. That's a concept that I came across when I researched Kiki, which you call open innovation.

And could you expand on that a little bit of how this will play out, and how can I imagine this if you generate that data, some of the data is on-chain, how can other companies or even your consumers plug into that and start building on top of that data?

Well, we'll reveal some of that on April 9th. [laughs] And I, [laughs]

I don't know, Brendan, how much you want to share about how we're thinking about Launchpad and other roadblocks that allow these kinds of experiences to happen. Sure. Yeah, that's why I, I paused.

I wanted to hear how much I, I'm able to say here. No.

So over the coming months, we're gonna be rolling out a number of features in a standalone platform really that are gonna empower, first in a kind of private beta rollout, of course, others to actually build and launch their own brands and communities on the platform itself.

So what you see today on kiki.world, uh, will be expanded to, let's call it, its own universe, where instead of always requiring the need to have a physical product in production or a specific partnership in place, we're gonna be empowering creators and brands to onboard their communities to our platform to run these campaigns natively.

So they will have direct access to the choices that their communities are making when it comes to intent-driven campaigns like product creation, brand launches, events.

The opportunity to reward them in new ways is gonna be something that over time we're going to be opening up to allow others that have requested, basically, the ability to take on that exciting roadmap for themselves to really be able to accomplish that.

And so, yeah, over the next few months, we'll begin rolling these out bit by bit, selectively at first, but ultimately, we want to open this up to really anybody who wants to take part in this new paradigm.

That's super interesting. I'm excited for the announcement beginning of April. And the second thing you use your data for is to shorten the time to market when you produce your products.

How important- Is that, is that even true? Yeah, how important is that for your business? So typical lead time of a beauty product to market- Mm-hmm...

if you're speaking to a corporation, it's probably going to tell you 18 to 36 or more months.

A startup runs probably more like 9 to 18, and ours, we try to do one to three, with the asterisk, because there's a lot of preparations for those one to three months to be true. Mm.

And so the way we have thought, as I mentioned at the start of the phone call, that we...

By the way, we have written a very, very light paper, I think call it like a fun light paper, about how co-creation economy can be the better use of capital, resources, more win for customers, more win for the creator audience.

So very happy to share that with you as well. But I think that comes with its challenges, because obviously we live in a world that promises... I live in LA, there's a one-hour delivery.

And so now you're competing into something that you really want, you've co-created, you're gonna get it cheaper than anywhere else, you were early to it, but it may come in one to three months.

And so it is a different customer experience. I think it's a customer experience that really resonates with actually a lot of the younger audience.

Younger audience, and we see that in our data, we are very Gen Z and even younger audience, naturally, with Kiki.

And one of the things that we talk a lot about is why would somebody that's very, very young c- come to your website? And the answer for...

There's not a good answer, actually, [laughs] that very many brands in the CPG would say, because it's like most websites are kind of glorified checkout carts, and all the fun happens on social media.

It's you buy it from, and then we see s- people using it, they're playing it, they're dancing with it, whatever's happening.

And so unless you see it in, in all of these places, y- you're never even going to come to that website.

And so what we're really saying is, "Come to our website to make something with us," so the fun part comes onto our website, and we think it's very valuable because we see people that buy maybe help us create a product four times throughout the cycle.

So we run our product co-creation cycle one to three months. For example, for SDK, which is a skin development kit, it's a lot more complex. Mm.

We could have 190,000 outcomes out of that moisturizer process when we start. So we split it up into three collaborative rounds. In the first one, we talk about the format of the product.

In the second round, we talk about the hero ingredients of the product. In the third, we talk about what I call bells and whistles. So is it pink or is it blue, or is it fragranced or is it not fragranced?

And so throughout this process, we have now created maybe 45 groups of people that would have wanted that iteration of the product. And our goal as Kiki is not to create winners and losers.

I mean, we're a startup, so we're making one at a time. But once we grow up a little bit, and we're growing quite fast, so hopefully soon, [laughs] the idea is for every product to be backed by an audience upfront.

And we see that we have audiences that really resonate with that, and they're really excited, and they don't mind waiting because they understand that it's a more sustainable way to do business, and they co-created it, and they feel very excited.

They're rooting for their color to win on social, and there's like Team Green and Team Bakuchi Oil.

[laughs] But there's obviously a lot of customers that are like, they think it's crazy that they should vote on lipstick and they just want to go to checkout.

And the great things about coming to Kiki today is that you can do both.

You can either shop our custom co-created products and you can check out in two seconds, and we see those customers actually come back and want to be a part of these journeys.

And then you have a young group of customers that would have never come on our website if we were just selling. They're coming on our website because they can do something.

And so I would say that the lead time is definitely a double-edged sword, and I think there's audience for both.

But I think it's very necessary for any brand that wants to be relevant in the next 10 years to think about why would anybody 30 and under, what are they doing on your website?

Because if it's a bunch of copy with aspirational images in the background, like, they're not there. Yeah. That's super interesting.

Another question I would like to ask you as we progress now in time is what, what are the major KPIs that you look at when you're now building up that platform, that brand? What's most important for you? Yeah. Sure.

Yeah. So, so certainly w- we, we look at, I would say, I would describe them as modified versions of traditional metrics.

And so when we think about traditional app analytics or e-commerce analytics, we're always looking at daily active users, monthlies, amount of checkouts that they, that, that take, that take place over a period of time, lifetime value.

But we always tie them back to the engagement at the campaign level as well. So how many actions does it take to reach, to turn a campaign participant into a customer?

How often do they purchase based off of their campaign engagement? How often are they using the rewards that they earn?

At Kiki.world today, you can earn points for taking part in daily campaign activities, but you can also earn rewards through collectibles. You win...

The, the, your choice wins, you receive a collectible with actually a discount tied to it. It's a custom integration we've built into, to that checkout experience.

So it's really important for us to evaluate not only that our customers that ultimately check out, but that relationship with the brand.

Because the higher the relationship with the brand and that correlation really indicates that you're putting out a campaign that really connects with your audience.

And so as we expand the reach of what we're doing from a platform perspective, making sure that those connection points and those engagement points are really highlighted and provided to those creating campaigns so they can really understand what type of content, what type of campaigns really resonate with their specific audience.

If you compare that to industry averages, did that resonate with your community? Do you have actually higher engagement? Can you measure that? Well, we have engagement that nobody else has.

I mean, pre-purchase actions, nobody has.

So as I mentioned, most of our members that have purchased have voted four times, so that's four actions that are on our platform, not touchpoints on TikTok or Instagram or other things.

When we see open rate on emails north of 50% as a brand, I think it's relatively unique, and it's because we can really have tailored journeys and conversations to what our members are interested in, and also evolve our platform happenings based on those things.

So to Brandon's point, we see votes, we see mints, we see [laughs] swipes. So those are things that nobody else has.

And the other set of data that we have that, um, is very rare, particularly in beauty, maybe less so in fashion these days, is that all of our products are connected.

They all have an NFC tag inside, and so you can pair your product when you receive it. When you pair it, you get points. The reason we have done it originally was very pragmatic.

We wanted to incentivize return of the product, because it's industrially refillable. So it, it... In Europe, this is normal.

It's like when you buy beer in the shop, you can go back and get the little coupon to [laughs] same.

But obviously because of the platform capabilities that we have, we can also, once the product is paired, also reward the customer for repeat use, and we can also unlock different content layers to them if they become a super user.

The other thing that I think we're learning now is when we launched KIKI, we kind of asked everybody on the internet, "What shall we make?"

[laughs] And it's, uh, it's really fun, but [laughs] maybe in hindsight we're like, "Whoa, we could have asked some, like, expert communities [laughs] and people that are already power users in this, uh- Mm-hmm...

in these categories." And I think the great thing about where we are today is that we, uh, now have these subgroups of power users. So next time we launch a moisturizer, we're not starting from zero.

We can ask the thousands of people that have participated in that particular creation and maybe didn't get made next time, but now we want to talk to them and say, "Why did you vote on this?

And what's really important about the texture of this product?" And I can tell you, we have actually... So we sent lab samples to some of the most engaged voters to get their feedback.

So with our SDK, skin development kit, we've already reformulated four times based on customer feedback before we launched.

So it's like a focus group at scale and at speed [laughs] that the world has, I don't think, especially not in the cosmetics space, has seen before.

I think it's an iterative speed that's completely natural in software and some of the other industries, but it hasn't been transposed on consumer.

And because we allow these data points, we are in a position to have these interfaces with our members. That's super interesting.

Before we jump into a very short lightning round to close our podcast, I would like to zoom out a bit and ask you, what are the biggest learnings that you have now from that first year of launching KIKI, and what would you advise branders, marketers, other consumer brands building in that space of how they should approach Web3 without just narrowing it down to NFTs?

What would be your answer to them? I have a biased answer, but I think my answer is first, just entrepreneur to entrepreneur, just get started.

I think it's, get started and take advice from people that have done it before, not those that haven't. [laughs] But those that have done it before will only talk to you after you get started.

So [laughs] just do it, is I think one. But the, but the other thing is that the product needs to be good enough whether or not blockchain is involved.

Like, I mean, is it really solving a problem or providing an experience that is better? [laughs] And, and I think that that is the primary question.

And I think just also pragmatically speaking, and I think you opened with this, is it a feature or is it a product that you're building?

And it's fine to be a feature, but I think it's good to be aware, because I think there's a lot of really talented builders in this space that create incredible solutions that are just one step of the journey.

And so I think just being aware of, like, who your customer is.

If you're a brilliant engineer or a brilliant marketer, like, I would say go find collaborators that can help you make it into a full customer experience rather than obsessing about use of that particular piece of a stack, which probably, again, people on this podcast will understand, but probably not very many outside of that.

That's very good, because I think that's exactly what you did with KIKI World, that you rolled it out from the start and tried to integrate all those different dimensions.

Whereas we have today big consumer brands who innovate at one, like, specific point of their value chain or in one specific activation without thinking holistically about what this technology could enable for, like, their operations or the business as a whole.

Brandon, what would be your answer? I would say, simply put, don't be afraid to go out and try something novel.

If you have an idea and you recognize an opportunity to really connect the dots, to Jana's point, to really create a solution, just go for it. Find a way to hack it together to find the right people to work with.

And don't be afraid if someone says, "Well, that doesn't make sense to me."

If you really have a strong conviction about what you want to do and you find those right cheerleaders for you, those people that are gonna encourage you, I think that we're really fortunate as a company to have strong backers just from a, a momentum and a belief base.

So find those people. Go out, connect with them. And if you have a bold idea, find that solution. Don't get held up by challenges you face if you have conviction in it. That, that'd be my main advice. All right, cool.

So we're almost at the end of the show. I would like to do a quick lightning round with you. Lightning round are short questions with short answers. Some of them Web3, some of them not Web3, and just a fun thing to do.

The first one I'll pose to both of you, of course, is your favorite Web3 project outside of cosmetics. Brandon, please go first. Yeah. [laughs] Sure. Yeah. [laughs] I'll hop in.

I'm a fan of anything consumer right now, and so I think just I look at infrastructure all day and teams building.

Uh, I'm really excited about what teams like Azora have been building when it comes to creating really beautiful interfaces for people to interact.

And I think that ties in nicely to tools like Lens, what they're building.

And so I would say just by nature of what I like to do, I love exploring those types of tools and ecosystems that are starting to bring people together and, uh, at the intersection of creativity and social at the Web3 layer.

So my answer will be also creativity consumer, and I'm trying to think of my favorite most recent physical and on-chain piece. I was really enchanted by the sweaters by Tribute Brand.

I think they were really, really cool, and they just stuck in my mind in a way that I would wanna show one new ugly sweater every Christmas.

And I think it was just a well-done on-chain thing where it also just fit in a natural sort of calendar of human life.

The ones that stick, that's one that sticks out to me, but I think also eventing and, and Web3 is interesting space and some of the things that our friends, like Friends With Benefits and others are doing that, you know, ha- have strong ties to on-chain social, but also are incredibly fun in person.

I think those, those are the ones that we really, really like and like to participate- Mm-hmm... in as well.

I would add two more finalists to the, to, to my side of things, and that would be what the Party App team is doing when it comes to crowd raising, or crowdfunding, as well as I would be remiss if I didn't mention the Farcaster ecosystem as well, what they're doing with Frames and creating some pretty exciting stuff there.

So I know it's a lightning round, so I'll stop there. [laughs] Shout out to all our friends. All our friends. [laughs] All right. Second question, physical products or digital twins? Physical products. Yes.

If I had to pick one, that's short answer, physical product. Okay. I don't believe in this discourse is my other answer. [laughs] Favorite beauty trend or consumer trend? Beauty or consumer trend. I really like cars.

You're looking at me like a beauty girl, but [laughs] I, I like fast electric cars. I felt the Porsche launch of an electric fast car was baller.

I think the way it was executed from a design and like go-to-market perspective was incredible. So I'll go with, like, electric Porsche.

That's, 'cause I thought electric cars were not for fast people, and I just was wrong. So shout out to Porsche. Favorite beauty trend, so not admittedly my per se.

[laughs] I will think about what my partner would say, and I'd say that she would go for clean skincare. What's one book everyone in or outside of Web3 should read? Hard Things About Hard Things.

[laughs] Read, Write, Own. Good one. Yeah. [laughs] First app you check in the morning. WhatsApp. Telegram. The biggest myth about Web3. That it's not for everybody. That it's for speculative layer of economy.

And to close, the biggest opportunity of Web3. To become invisible and omnipresent. I think that's perfectly and well said. Cool. All right. We're at the end of the lightning round. We're at the end of the show.

Thank you very much for tuning in. It was great to have you here both. If you like this, please subscribe. Please like. You can find us on all major podcasting platforms. It helps us to keep the show alive.

Again, Jonna, again, Brandon, thanks for joining us. That has been a very interesting conversation. I'm looking forward to your announcement beginning of April and what's next for Kiki.

You're definitely doing something very interesting here, and I wish you all the best in building that further. Thank you. Great talking to you. Thank you so much.

Great speaking with you. [upbeat music]