How Kira Mackenzie Jackson Helped SET Active Hit Its Biggest Year Ever

0:00Kira Mackenzie Jackson:Hey, business besties. Welcome back to Female Founder World. Today, I'm chatting with Kira Jackson. She's a chief brand officer. You know her from her posts on TikTok and you know her from her work at Set Active where she was before joining a stealth startup that we're not allowed to talk about yet. But Kira, welcome to Female Founder World. Thank you so much. I'm excited to be here. I want to start with the questions that I think most people want to hear from you. And it's, if I want to build a brand as successful as Set Active from scratch today, what should I be focusing on? Yeah I think the answer to that question is multi-pronged I think step number one is there's an element of building in public but doing so in a way that feels authentic to the consumer today I think instead of creating community through the lens of co-creation and so forth it's important to have that that north star of what you want to build and then build the content and community around that North Star versus losing sight through too many hands in the pot.

1:02So that's step number one is have that North Star of what you want to build and then recognize that part of that build is going to be building in public. And if that means creating a WhatsApp community of 50 girls that you're soft sounding your ideas to and maybe 25 girls who are testing your product early and giving you feedback do that, but also save all of those assets for a part of your rollout. So if you're going back and forth and like texting with the girls, screenshot everything and then use it for your rollout, pop it in your CRM, use it on social. I think this ladders back to everything, which is like if you're investing in creating assets, make sure that you leverage them across a million different channels, as many as you can.

1:45Splice, cut, and make them applicable for different platforms. And then step number two, and I think the piece that is a little bit less sexy but is equally important, if not more so, is creating a really strong business. So from day one, being obsessive about your margins, being obsessive about your production timelines, and recognizing that, for instance, set as a drop-based model, if you're building a brand that is going to operate off of a drop-based model, you are essentially, you're cutting yourself off at your knees in the sense of like, you can only get as big as your inventory allows.

2:28So making sure that there is some sort of tiers in the product that you're offering, there's an always-on strategy. There might be a seasonal strategy. And then you have kind of those like limited edition, sexy drops that keep people coming back and that will also make it a lot easier for you. It'll tee you up for wholesale, retail, everything else down the line.

2:48Kira Mackenzie Jackson:The first thing I want to dive into, you mentioned be founder-led and forward-facing but in a really strategic way. I saw you post something that was really surprising to your TikTok that you did a consumer survey and that you found that Gen Z are less likely to prioritize or to want to purchase based on a forward-facing founder and they look at other factors. Can you talk me through what that finding was and how you think brands should be thinking about it? Yeah, honestly, when I first saw the results, I was a little bit shocked. But then the more that I thought about it and I recognized what's changed from a consumer perspective, the more it made sense.

3:27So essentially, this survey had six different elements of a brand. And we asked Gen Z, I think it was 89 % between the ages of 18 to 24, what their prioritization would be of these six things. And it was like product efficacy. It was formula. It was for skincare specifically, kind of like derm, but also just like expert alignment and so on and so forth. And the last ranking that they came back with pretty much across the board was founder positioning and the face behind the brand. And I think part of that is a little bit like they want to paint the picture of not being disillusioned by a founder face.

4:08I think that there's an element of sort of, it's similar to if you would buy something, if it was sustainable or not, like you want to say yes, but like really does that make you convert? We don't know. So something to consider there, I think take it with a grain of salt, but at the same time too, the consumer is so much smarter today than they were five, 10 years ago. I would say the democratization of just access to information, the standard of what is exceptional product is so much higher. And I think where a founder story makes sense and is still unbelievably relevant is if your story ties in with the efficacy of the product.

4:51If you are solving the problem as a founder that you had, then I think that story is much more compelling than what we've seen in the past, which is founders sort of like creating content and being visible purely because they think they need to be. They're not telling that story of the why them, if that makes sense. And coming from private equity previously, everything that I looked at as an investor was founder market fit and product market fit. But if I'm investing in a founder, then I want it to be the founder that is perfect to solve that issue.

5:29Kira Mackenzie Jackson:I think it's really powerful when the founder can kind of embody the customer's story. And if you're building to solve your own kind of pain point, then you are essentially trying to have this superpower where you can really speak to and embody the customer. And I think that's when it absolutely lands. which actually this wasn't on my list of stuff I wanted to talk to you about but that leads me to the Alex Oil and Real Actives of it all and what you think that brand is doing well versus where you think things are falling flat maybe because I'm looking at a lot of the pushback and people saying you know she used she and for context folks Alex Oil the influencer she launched Real Actives an acne focused skincare brand and she's also been really vocal about the fact that she has used medication to clear up her skin.

6:20Kira Mackenzie Jackson:It wasn't just, you know, it wasn't just topical skincare. And so I think that a lot of people were a little bit cynical about her launching a beauty brand and a skincare brand. But then when they launched, they sold, I think it was a million dollars in sales within an hour or something wild like that. So obviously people did, you know, were curious enough that they wanted to try the product and buy in. When you look at that launch and that rollout and that founder product fit. What are your thoughts? I mean, I've seen so much of the pushback and I do see that perspective. I just, I disagree entirely.

6:54I think that she has perfect founder market fit. And I think had her story been more upfront about the, I know I used Accutane, you all know that. However, this is also a component of what healed my skin. Then maybe it might've been taken a little bit better. That's the only piece that I would give feedback on. But I think I've seen people say, why would Alex Earl launch skincare? Why wouldn't she launch like a party makeup brand or what have you? I think the way that the product collection was built, focusing on like a melting cleansing oil that you would use after a night out. Brilliant, because that is her brand.

7:35And then you segue into a foaming cleanser. You get the double cleanse. It actually like really works. And then you roll into an active that is clearly their hero product. And then the final piece is the moisturizer. And I also saw pushback about formulation and, you know, shea butter being included in some of the product. But I think at the end of the day, the association with the dermatologist is what answers that question proactively for the consumer. So to your point, like what is – What is the gap that Alex had as a founder? It was industry expertise. So what did she do? She brought somebody in who filled that gap and did it in a really authentic way where they had a preexisting relationship.

8:21She documented that relationship on social. I mean, don't get me wrong. Any influencer, any celebrity that launches anything these days is going to get pushed back purely because they have a platform. But if you're leveraging your platform in a way that feels authentic to the consumer and you're filling your gaps and you recognize your blind spots and you're building a team that solves for those blind spots, you're doing everything that you can to like remove the friction from the purchase process for the consumer. And I think that's exactly what they did. And frankly, like the proof is in the pudding.

8:54You sell out of your product within a day as many haters as there are. What does that create? It creates additional noise on social and it makes the brand feel omnipresent. So not to say all press is good press all the time, but I think the discussion and kind of that clapback, I wouldn't be surprised if it was a part of the initial strategy or if the team was fully aware, eyes wide open going in of some of the feedback they were going to get. And the response time to that feedback was quite quick. Yeah, I think truthfully the consumer loop was good. Yeah.

9:30Kira Mackenzie Jackson:Yeah. This brings me to the set active of it all because you you were at set for a while. And that I think when you think about founder led brands, public facing brands, community led brands, set is one of the ones that comes to mind that seems to have done this really well. And you hit some pretty wild milestones while you were at the brand. Can you share any of those? Yeah, I mean, our drops, there was one that was well documented and it's since occurred a couple of times, but a million dollars and an hour, obviously, for our last resort collection. And the brand is consistently, I would say, from that point, just like skyrocketed and grown.

10:08And I'm so proud of where the brand is today. And I have no doubt that it's going to continue to skyrocket. Without me, I have full faith in the team. They have an amazing team. One other key note is like that last year, we actually did our best year ever in the business. I left early this year, but close of business last year was the best the business has seen. And yeah, I have no doubt that growth is going to continue. What I think SET does amazingly from a community perspective, and I'm going to give all kudos and flowers to Lindsay, the founder and CEO. She has an incredible parasocial relationship with her consumer.

10:50And it is a personal relationship that then segues into brand affinity and retention. And I think a team that can understand the value of that funnel and optimize it is the type of people that you need to surround yourself with. That being said, I think when we consider community led brands going forward, there is sort of key man syndrome in that situation where you're reliant on one sort of like leader, if you will, of the pack. And I think what could be really interesting and what I'm seeing more of from a trend perspective on like influencer marketing, for instance, is girls creating content together.

11:32So what if that methodology was applied to a brand? I mean, you see it with some of the accounts on TikTok where the team is platformed in a way where five to six are, you know, different personalities. It almost becomes a bit of a reality show. You have less key man syndrome. If somebody leaves your team, you can easily replace them, not to be brutal. But I think thinking about that parasocial relationship, allowing there to be a face or faces of the brand, but using the brand as more of a platform for community versus one person, one talking head talking at you, it's maybe not as compelling for the consumer these days.

12:13Kira Mackenzie Jackson:We've all had that moment when you're sending out an email marketing campaign and you're stuck in some clunky platform drowning in features that you've never even touched, but you're definitely overpaying for. Then you go and ask customer support for help. Please help. And you're hit with an AI chatbot. It's genuinely so frustrating. That's why Female Founder World is partnering with OmniSend, a reliable and easy to use email and SMS marketing tool trusted by over 150 ,000 brands just like yours. The best part, at least for me, is their human award winning customer support team. If you need help, you'll be answered in minutes by real people, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

12:56Kira Mackenzie Jackson:Switching to OmniSend is the smartest swap you can make in your business today. And right now OmniSend will do the hard work for you and migrate your business from your existing email provider to get completely set up on OmniSend in just five days. This is a totally free service for any paid OmniSend user. Try OmniSend at OmniSend.com forward slash female founder world or by clicking the link in the show notes to get a 50 % discount for the first three months using OmniSend. I'm so bored into the idea of employee led and forward facing employees in brands. And that's something that we've started leaning into probably in the last like three weeks.

13:37Kira Mackenzie Jackson:We've just launched a new format of the show where we have a Wednesday like group chat episode, which is basically three of the team members chatting about, you know, brand news, business headlines and what we're doing in our own businesses. Because we have contributors who are building, you know, consumer companies as well. and part of that strategy is also bringing those girls into our TikTok videos and content so that it's not just me because it is a lot of pressure I think being the one person that's kind of embodying the brand and there is the risk the risk to the brand if you make a move that doesn't reflect your community's values or it doesn't feel brand safe but there's also you know I've just had another baby and I didn't want to be on camera all the time and how do I step away from that if there's no one else to fill that role and if you really are the sales driver in the business.

14:26Kira Mackenzie Jackson:And so that's something that I've been thinking about a lot about how do we bring in these team members and how do we bring in these team members when we're remote? And so many people are, and we have fractional teams and how do you empower them to create that content that feels like a recognizable format and brand and isn't just, you know, random creators posting to one account, it feels cohesive. It's challenging. Yeah. Yeah. And I think to your point of like, does it feel cohesive? I'd almost challenge that in the sense that like, nobody is going to a brand account expecting to, I'm thinking about TikTok, expecting for it to feel like an IG feed, right?

15:04So you see videos in isolation. You're not necessarily scrolling through the entire feed, watching every piece of content like we might do when you like ingest an Instagram feed, which I think Instagram, your feed is more of like your website nowadays. And that is like, that's your landing page. And then you get like a little more detail in stories and in highlights and reels and so on. But for TikTok, it's the way that the algorithm works, you're getting like individual content at a single time. So it's almost like, does the content align with the brand and your mission versus like how cohesive is it with the rest of the story, which is great for you if the team is, you know, fractional and if they are all over the world.

15:49I mean, you can actually play with such diversity of content and test so much different content in different scenarios. And then the underlying mission and value can be that through line.

16:00Kira Mackenzie Jackson:Are there any brands that you think do that really well? I look at media brands. I look at Shear Lux, for example, they were just acquired for 40 billion pounds. I think the number was, And they've done such a good job of really leveraging their in-house editorial talent as on-camera talent. And I love their feed. I love consuming what they produce. Is there anyone else that you think does that well? It's so funny. I was literally going to use them as an example. Yes. I think that there's just their blue chip in terms of like how they've operated that. But, and the fact that they have repeatable content formats that feature each of their different team members.

16:41So yeah, it's funny. I was literally going to reference them as well.

16:45Kira Mackenzie Jackson:We've been brainstorming a lot about how do we, like, what's our version of that? I think that's very much where brand TikTok accounts are going. Yes, 100%. I couldn't agree more. The next thing I want to chat about, look, people are going to want to know why you left set. And I wanted to ask you as well. It feels like, you know, a dream job, great alignment, obviously another opportunity came up, but why did you decide that it was the time to move on to something else? Yeah. I mean, I know that the majority of people who are listening to this are probably building their own businesses or working as sort of like the co-pilot in somebody else's business, which I've always been really proud to do in my career.

17:22I think the reason why ultimately it came to the time where I'd consider another opportunity was A, the other opportunity. Um, it is, I'm so excited, but, um, it answered a lot of the things that I felt were missing in my career. So for context, I talk a lot about, um, a portfolio career and that's kind of the way that I think about just my life in general is that at the end of my life, at the end of my career, I want to look back and I want to see the progression of that portfolio. And so each opportunity that I take on, I think of what is lacking from my repertoire, what is something that I feel like I'm missing that will make me that much more lethal in business.

18:10And that's my ultimate goal is at the end of my career, I want to be absolutely lethal. And I tell everybody that that's all I care about. And so each move that I make is about acquiring that next skill set that will get me there. and this opportunity is pre-launch it's pre-revenue it is an opportunity for me to build something from the ground up down to you know product packaging some things are set that are that I'm not able to change but there's so much that I'm able to help build and craft and that involvement that like rolling your sleeves up in such early days that's what's really been firing me up and taking a business from, you know, zero to 100 versus looking at businesses that, you know, when I was an investor, I was investing in post$10 million businesses, usually in a series A or beyond, which is great.

19:04And it was still growth stage, but I felt like I was missing that early stage kind of like VC opportunity as an operator. So I wanted to acquire that. And then I think that there is such opportunity and beauty as an investor. I love the economics behind the beauty industry. So to me, that felt very compelling as well.

19:25Kira Mackenzie Jackson:One of my favorite pieces of advice that you shared on your TikTok is for brands to treat customers like influencers because they are. And I'm curious about why you think that's such a good strategy for success and how brands actually put that into place. Oh my God. Where do I even start? It's so crazy. I've seen girls with 2000 followers convert at a higher clip than girls with 2 million followers. Like the, again, the proof is in, the proof is in the data. And if the girl next door can sell more product than a girl with 2 million followers, because their community trusts them that much, and because they're not diluted in terms of how many partnerships they're doing, then like, how do you capitalize on that at scale?

20:15So one of the things that's really important to me as we're thinking about building this new business is niching down, but doing it at scale. So being so laser focused on who our target consumer is and then meeting them where they are in like the micro communities that they exist. And that could be, you know, the girl next door. It could be the girl with 30 ,000 followers. But the way that we're thinking about doing that is looking at the people that their end result is that they follow. So the girls with two million. And then I start to look at, OK, who are those girls following that influence them?

20:50And then you sort of get into that like next tier. And then you take it a step further and you say, OK, where's the influence starting? And those are your target girls. That's how you build real community, but not just community for the sake of it. You don't you don't want like an LLM. You don't want or what's it called? An MLM. Thank you. That's helpful. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's not the goal. The goal is not that you're like selling a couple lipsticks with every girl. The goal is that you are influencing who influences the influencers. And if you can crack that, then it's scalable.

21:27Kira Mackenzie Jackson:Okay. How do you find these people though? You said like, look who they look to, look who they follow. Like, how do you actually find those people and scale a program like that? Because when you're looking at how many people do they reach, what is the influence that they actually have? It feels less obvious than just going to a big creator who gets heaps of views on their videos and has a brand name. Yeah. And I would love to say that there's an easy way to do that. There absolutely is not. And actually, I've been trying to figure out a way to get my Claude co-work to do this for me. But I cannot yet because I don't think that the Instagram API allows the integration.

21:59But I've been trying to figure it out.

22:01Kira Mackenzie Jackson:I wonder if Manus could do it because they've been acquired by Meta. So I wonder if they have different level of insights. I might actually look into that. Thank you. I'm going to come back to you. But as of now, I'm doing it all manually. So yeah, I look at who they follow. I look at who's commenting on their posts that are smaller creators that they follow back. And then I look at the people that they like their content and comment on their content. So I have a folder in my phone of just like a creator bank. And I just save all of the girls as I see them. And your FYP becomes a little bit more clever, I would say, as you keep doing this.

22:40So it starts serving you some of those people, which makes it a little easier. But yeah, you kind of create that. Who are your 30 to 50 like North Star girls? And then you reverse engineer where you need to start for each of them.

22:54Kira Mackenzie Jackson:And then how are you what's the outreach and what are you offering them? Yeah. So I am not against paying creators, but I am against paying influencers, if that makes sense. I love to pay for content, platform native content that is optimized for that platform. I think that those creators, I mean, they're, yeah, they're content creators. So you're essentially getting like platform native content for a steal. However, where I don't think it makes sense is paying an influencer to influence on a brand that they're not actually actively using or loving. So what I'm offering to these girls is access, product, community.

23:38And it's an opportunity. I think I'm lucky in the sense that like I'm building this brand. It is the brand will have a platform behind it. So it's nice to be able to offer them a little bit of like that platform that that the shininess of that. But at the same time, too, you'd be surprised. girls really want to be a part, not just girls, guys, everybody, especially on social want to be a part of something that they care about and that they feel passionately about and that they have had a hand in building. So giving them a real opportunity to provide feedback on formulation, to send us before and afters, to help name our products, to help us build out our NPD, our new product calendar for development for the coming two years.

24:25Like they're, they're, it's something that it's an experience that you don't get every day. And I think that there's so much to be said for offering that, um, and doing it in a way that feels like very community oriented, putting them in a space where they can engage with other people who are offering, you know, similar perspective. Yeah.