In this episode of There Is No Alternative, Tina Bou-Saba, founder of CXT Investments, sits down with Priscilla Tsai, Founder and CEO of cocokind, to talk about bootstrapping a skincare brand one customer at a time and keeping community at the center as it scales.
Priscilla grew up packing orders and stapling flyers at the Michigan HVAC business her mother bought after immigrating from Taiwan, then studied finance at Wharton and covered grocers like Whole Foods as an equity research analyst at JPMorgan. In 2015 she started making 100-unit batches of oil blends in a Berkeley commercial kitchen rented at $25 an hour and sold them store by store into Whole Foods, standing through freezing three-hour demos in two pairs of socks. That scrappy start grew into national distribution across Target, Ulta, and Whole Foods. This is a conversation about why no customer owes you anything, why being on the shelf does not sell, and the resilience it takes to wake up every day as if yesterday never happened.
In This Episode:
• Summers spent packing the warehouse and mailing catalogs at the business her mother ran for thirty years
• Why covering Whole Foods at JPMorgan made it the first customer she wanted to win
• The bridge year: consolidating small orders from Expo West brands for stores in Hong Kong out of a South San Francisco mini warehouse
• Selling into Whole Foods store by store, where stores ordered six units per product and a three-hour demo might move six to fifteen units
• Passing on online-only placement at Target and waiting for a test in 100 doors, which grew to 800 and then national
• Building in public on Instagram Stories a decade before founders called it that, and passing 100,000 followers before Target said yes
• Why the onus of selling is always on the brand, not the retailer
• The Olipop lip balm collaboration at Ulta and the eight customers cocokind took to the Super Bowl
• Mimitime, her new 30-calorie snack with marine collagen, and its first bestseller status at Target
Chapters:
[00:00] Customers Owe Us Nothing, We Owe Them Everything
[01:57] A Fridge Full of Milk for Three Kids
[02:30] An Immigrant Mom Who Bought the Business
[05:12] Proud That Mom Was at Work
[05:59] Wharton, Finance, and the Stereotypical Path
[06:47] Covering Whole Foods at JPMorgan
[09:26] Destined to Do Something Different
[10:37] A Mini Warehouse and Three Weeks in Hong Kong
[12:52] $25 an Hour in a Berkeley Kitchen
[15:26] Two Pairs of Socks and Six Units a Day
[16:57] Target Said No Before It Said Yes
[19:37] Building in Public Before It Had a Name
[20:40] Being on the Shelf Does Not Sell
[21:47] Grow or Decline: Mastering Product Market Fit
[25:06] Olipop Lip Balms and a Super Bowl Trip
[26:29] Community Over Paid Influencers
[28:22] Mimitime and Wellness Going Mainstream
[29:25] The Founder Skill of Erasing Yesterday
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