Priscilla Tsai: CEO and Founder of Cocokind

25:43Out of 32 stores in Northern California, I probably got 24 of them to buy from me in that first year. Wow. And that was me driving to the store, talking to the store manager, having them try it, following up and then telling them that I would do demos. So I would do demos at the stores and had a table, had the products. And sometimes it would take me two hours to get to the store. I do a three hour demo and then I drive home two hours, right? A very long day. And sometimes I'd even do two on a weekend and I would sell the products, you know, and stand in the front of the store. And over a three hour demo, I would sell between six and 12 products.

26:2212 would be like amazing. Six would be like, you know, like it's okay day, but this is over a three hour period, right? Like the product is not moving. Nobody knows about us. The product is not moving unless I'm physically there, like asking people left and right, like, Hey, can I tell you about my product? Just trying to do anything I can to like get the word out. And people would ask me where the ground beef was. People would ask me where the toilet paper was. My feet were freezing. anybody who's ever done a demo at a grocery store, you know, the floors are very cold. And that was very informative as well, because it taught me the power of like, well, one, how hard it takes to sell a product.

27:01Like I had this assumption, I think that like my product is at Whole Foods is going to sell. And then I would get the report and be like, oh my God. And then I'd go to the store and I would sell. And then I would realize that like no products had moved since the last time I was there to sell. So then I had to go back and do more selling. And that was it. Right. And so I was never afraid of rejection, but I really was not afraid of rejection now because a lot of people obviously wouldn't give me a time of day. It's a tough thing to stop for. Right. And then too, it really taught me this value of how precious one customer is.

27:30And I cherish that experience. It's for me more than any success milestones along the way, but yeah, it was a grind. And I would say all in all, if I reflect back at that experience in many ways, that first year. It was not a very successful year, but I did have revenue. I was able to keep going and I was selling some products. I just had to do it in a very old school manual and not scalable way at all. Okay. So then talk to me about what changed to go from you physically in store, selling the product yourself on your feet to getting some scale and some momentum and some traction? So I had done Expo West, which is a show for natural and organic products.

28:16And I had sold the product to other stores too. HEB and Texas put us in a hundred doors. There were other natural and organic chains that put us in the doors too. This challenge was still the same though. Like even though we were getting more revenue, it's still like, okay, we have to sell and the customer doesn't know about us. I have to hire demo people at those states. But we are getting some revenue from the retailers. And we did that for like the first 18 months. And then by the end of that second year, it was like, okay, we started to have some calls of like, we're taking you off the shelf at this like independent store that I had sold into because it's not selling.

28:54So of course I'm like getting a little bit worried. This whole time I'm doing Instagram, but in a very inexperienced way. And so I'm using hashtags. I'm liking other photos with this hashtag, getting followers one by one, again, probably have like 3000 followers or something at this time. And we launched a product though, which is called the My Matcha, which is a lip balm stick with matcha. And so it was green and it was like very novel and unique at the time. And matcha was also gaining so much awareness generally in the US. And I had ended up like messaging a couple of influencers. They were just starting out too.

29:35These are influencers who now have like hundreds of thousands of followers. But at that time, they were really new too. And they tried it, loved it, shared it. And then all of a sudden it was like, oh, wow, there are people coming to me that are not from demos. They're coming on Instagram and I'm having people reach out. And at that same time, like Instagram stories had just launched. And because I had no other choice, I started to do my own skincare routine on Instagram stories. Behind the scenes as you would always wish, right? Exactly. Exactly. And I would show my skin and I still had breakouts then.

30:12And I would show people what I was doing. And just the idea of like someone talking about a skincare product that had breakouts, real breakouts that were visible on camera. It was very novel at the time. So literally me appearing on stories like that. I would get what started off as like 100 views and 10 replies would then become like 500 views and 30 replies. So every night I'm having conversations with people, you know, on DMs, you know, it's a combination of that product, but also just Instagram stories completely change our trajectory. We went from having a couple thousand to, you know, 20 ,000 followers within probably like six weeks or something.

30:48Yeah. And having like our DTC business, actually, instead of doing like a couple thousand dollars a month, it was doing, you know,$90 ,000 that month. That's major. Yeah. It just completely changed things truly overnight in February of 2017. So at that time, we're still only in one region of Whole Foods, but then they come to me and they say, we'd like to roll you out to three more regions. That really started this era of like, okay, let's not do the demos anymore as much at least, but let's focus on social media, which seems so obvious today, but it wasn't obvious to me then. Okay. So I want to know about how you were thinking through additional product development.

31:28So you mentioned the Matcha Lip Balm, but like you had started with just a handful of products. How did you continue to iterate? How did you know what the right cadence was for adding more products? How did you know when a formula was right? Yeah, I'd say like, we didn't really know based on external, like anything, you know, like at that time, it's not like the idea of resets, retailer resets is like in my mind. I'm like just doing whatever we think is right for our website. And we actually have a customer on our website. So we're kind of like living on nobody else's timeline except for our own, right?

32:05We're working on products that were versions of our existing products, but slightly tweaked, you know, a turmeric stick that instead of matcha uses turmeric, a beet stick, which was terrible because it was so hard to manufacture. And there was like so many trials and tribulations with that product, but that had a little bit of payoff. So people had a little bit of a tint. It was with beets, things like that. There were like variations of what we were doing. So still very similar philosophy, but there was a time where it was kind of like, okay, okay, this current way of formulating and developing products is like very niche.

32:40We're not doing any emulsions at this time, which is, you know, oil and water and getting a cream or like a cleanser or anything like that is all anhydrous oil blends really only. So at a certain point felt limiting. And so then we started to, again, go back to that formulary, but like, okay, we want to create an oil cleanser, but one that has an emulsifier in it that kind of just like is able to have a rinse off experience versus just having an oil that you need to wipe off with a con pad or something. So there was, you know, some evolution along the way. So I would say it was like start off as a core and then we expanded within that, but then quickly realized like, okay, we kind of have to, you know, open this world up a little bit and we can't do some of that manufacturing ourselves.

33:21Got it. So in addition to Whole Foods and some specialty stores, you'd mentioned that as Instagram stories started really driving your business, that you did have a D2C business at that point. Obviously, it continued to grow quite a lot. At what point did you start thinking about larger distribution at places like Target and places like Ulta, which is, I feel like, taking things to a whole new level? Yeah, I think in like 2019, similar to this time period of being like, we need to create products for a little bit of a wider audience, not have it be so much like oils and oils only, because that's not for everyone.

34:05That's when we're starting to really have this idea that we're finally a beauty company. Like it didn't register in my mind that we were a beauty company for like the first several years. What did you think you were? A natural products company. Oh, interesting. Very, very interesting and misguided. Our product development, And our formulating philosophy has changed so much, right? And we started off even considering ourselves a clean or natural company. And today we don't use those terms. We don't market off of that at all. But there's some things that have stayed the same since the very beginning.

34:41And then a lot, especially on product development philosophy that has changed. But at that time, 2019, we're like, we really need to open up our audience. We're growing a lot, though. It's not because we're not growing. We're growing a lot. There's clearly, you know, people that are loving what we're doing, but we're starting to see like, people are asking me like, can you create a shampoo and can you create a, you know, cleanser like this? Or can you create like this type of moisturizer? And I'm like, okay, like these are things that we can't do obviously ourselves. And they're asking me for it though.

35:11And so they want me to change something about it. They want me to open up our product development philosophy. So yeah, that's a time where we started to talk about like working with contract manufacturers. We went to Expo West that year. And actually this woman, Kara, she actually was from Target. And at that time, I think she was one of the lead merchants of beauty. Today, I think she's a chief merchandising officer at Target, which is crazy. But she came to our booth and she was like, oh, this looks like it would be a great fit for Target, connecting me to a buyer. And we had previously met with them.

35:42They rejected us, you know, a couple of years past. they met with us at that time and then they were like you know what let's do a hundred door tests with three products those three sticks and so we did that wait is there a panic for you when something like that happens because i'm just thinking about that requires funds that requires you to ramp up production in theory and like that requires a certain amount of logistics so is it exciting when that happens or is it also terrifying super exciting not terrifying at all Great. Okay. So why were you not scared? The business had been self-funded, right?

36:16It wasn't like we had a demand planning function, but we basically produced to order. And like, it was just, we were in this cycle and we were producing ourselves. So the idea of now you have to build out a bigger production team or a bigger facility, but it wasn't like a crazy amount. I mean, a hundred doors, right? People don't realize it's not that many units. Seems like a lot. Yeah. I mean, I think people are oftentimes surprised when they learn that like stores will order like three to nine units per door. So it's not like a crazy amount. And this is three SKUs. It was a reasonable way of starting.

36:52At the same time, I think, you know, it's pretty difficult to go into a hundred doors with three SKUs and actually graduate from that test. So we got lucky, but it was at the same time, like a very unusual way to actually succeed because it's hard to market being at Target when you're only at 100 stores out of 1900. But we did. And because we had this Instagram community, they actually did go buy our products and we did pass their threshold. And so a year and a half later, they did roll out those SKUs to 800 doors and then to the whole chain, you know, six months after that. So this was very much like our social media community going to stores so happy to be finding us there and it worked in that way but yeah at that time those just so happened to be covid too so we took one whole like year and a half to transition everything internally externally including warehouse and everything because we were fulfilling packages ourselves we were literally doing everything ourselves in san francisco so you know it took 18 months but we transitioned everything externally and we became what is more commonly known today as like a beauty company that is focused on product development, marketing, and sales and ops, but not actually running the manufacturing and the warehousing ourselves.

38:13So how many people did you have at that point in time? And how are you thinking about building a team? I think at that time, we probably had nine or 10 people. And then we had a good amount of growth through COVID, but we became a remote company. And so we were hiring. And in the early years, it was really challenging because I didn't have a ton of money to hire super experienced people. And so there was always an element of like our team was catching up to everything that was around us. And we were generally, myself included, very inexperienced. Once we got into Target and everything, like things did change.

38:49You know, we started to institutionalize a little bit more, just of like, who are we hiring? What are we hiring for? That helped a lot in terms of just like the business growing up. Early years were definitely more of like a, let's get as many eager people to help, you know, regardless of what the exact resume looks like. So talk to me about the experience of getting product to actually sell through at Target, because as you had very clearly demonstrated in our conversation about Whole Foods, like getting stuff on the shelves is only half the battle. And there aren't necessarily demos and you're not necessarily sending people out.

39:28So what sorts of changes did you have to make? You'd spoken a little bit about the community that you had built online, but how did you have to think through that piece of it to make sure that it was not only enough to sell through that initial test, but then as it went wider, how it would continue to sell? By the time we went into Target, we had 100 ,000 followers on Instagram. And it was like really homemade, home built, one by one, just nonstop DMs, you know, like just responding to every single thing, every single comment, but it was working. And we also had a community of creators that were posting about us and loving our products and genuinely using our products frequently.

40:09So that was an effort that we had to, of course, like build and maintain and then grow that community as well. And so by the time we went into Target, like we did have a customer that was already asking us like, well, are you going to add this product to Target? What about my Target? Can I get a store map? Like things like that, where it's like, I'm drove 45 minutes to go to this Target for your products, like, really like amazing efforts by our customers to go find us and support our business. So I also want to talk about something that you do, speaking of which, that rather than doing influencer brand trips, which have been very much the splashy rage and fashion and beauty over the last decade, you do community brand trips.

40:50For our audience who might not know, what does that mean? Talk to me about it. How do you think about brand trips? Yeah, we did our first community brand trip in January of 2025. And it started because we had a year of really trying to grow in a way that was like just the more traditional beauty model, trying to have like bigger influencers talk about us and do nicer PR boxes. And we're sitting here in like October of 2024 being like, honestly, didn't really work, right? Like a lot of these like contracts and these fancy PR millers, like they didn't really work. And not that we were sending any like TV screens or refrigerators to people, but like all of a sudden the box is like$25 or$30, you know?

41:37And you're like, well, you send out a thousand of those, that's like$30 ,000. Like that's a lot and it's not working. And so my thought was like, let's like redirect some of these funds that are not doing anything for us. We're not standing out. It's not us anyways. And let's actually do something that bring customers to this experience that typically are only reserved for influencers. And by the way, we're not saying we're not going to do fun or nice things for creators, but we are saying we're going to bring customers along into our marketing because right now it It feels like most beauty and fashion companies are like, you know, influencers are involved in marketing.

42:15Customers are the recipients. Well, now we want our customers to be a part of the marketing and to be the recipients too. But they get to enjoy some things along the way, right? Yeah. And so that's the idea behind it. And it's been amazing. You know, we take eight customers to an experience. We've done four of them at this point. We've done Napa, New York, Miami. Most recently we did Sonoma, but then that same weekend we took eight customers to the Super Bowl. This is a joint brand trip we did with Olipop. I mean, it's experiences that are once in a lifetime for me and for our customers too. And it's like such a great bonding experience.

42:51And it's symbolic not only for those eight customers, but it means a lot for literally everybody else in our community that understands like this is, you know, us putting our money where our mouth is and showing up for our customers in a really cool way. I love that. It's so thoughtful and so special. And I also love the fact that you were able to have the clarity on why are we trying to do the things that other people are doing? You can stay true to your own business ethos and roots and DNA and still move the needle and make something else work, which is very exciting. Yes, absolutely. So you mentioned the collaboration with Olipop, which is so exciting.

43:31You recently created some lip blur balms. I'm curious about as you're thinking about collaborations or as you're thinking about new product development and looking ahead, one, how does that recent launch fit into your overall approach? And two, what sort of things you're looking forward to as you go forward? I love the Olipop collaboration we did. I think not only the product, we created these lip balms last year and our campaign was like, it's a world's first lip balm. And just making fun of ourselves, like there are a lot of lip balms on the market, but But the joke's on us because like since then, there's been like 100 lip balm launches.

44:08We thought that we were the last. Turns out we were far from the last. But our lip balms specifically were at a$12 price point designed for sensitive skin. And we also, our core launch was unflavored. So, you know, very much like that's our point of difference. And they have this really cute ring that you can keep it on your keychain. But along that process, a lot of our customers had been like, I'm a flavor girly though. So anyways, we basically have been working with Olipop on these lip balms and Ulta as well. They're such a perfect company for us because they care so much about their community.

44:40They do stuff like free PR mailers all the time. So it's similar worlds of like how we are building our brands. And so it was a perfect collaboration. I'd say generally for us, like now more than ever, I think there's just a really big focus on just like, why does a product deserve to exist? I always ask my team that, like, why do we deserve to charge$18 for this? Or why does this deserve to be$21, right? Like, why does it deserve to be on the shelf? And we really have to have a point of difference and like a point of clarity that there is some added value to the customer. Generally for us, we design products for sensitive skin.

45:15We believe in providing this like really great, what we call like prestige experience, but at a really, really accessible price point. So that most of the time when people learn our prices after trying our products, it's like a surprise and delight moment, not like a, oh, you know. And so that's kind of the combination of like anything that we can do well, that's additive, designed for sensitive skin, where our price points make sense and can be really accessible. Like we're, you know, interested in what we can develop in that world. But yeah, certainly have like a lot of criticality when it comes to like what we're launching.

45:49So you had mentioned that you didn't think you were starting a beauty company or that you were a skincare founder and that the beauty industry as a whole can be very exclusive and alienating and sort of othering in certain ways. But there are also really great parts to it. And there are also aspects of it that are incredibly rewarding. So as you think about the trajectory of your career with Coco Kind and what you have built, what is the part of this industry that has been the most rewarding in the grand scheme of things? I think it's exactly the idea of like, there are a lot of people in the beauty industry that just want to feel good.

46:28You know, we just want to feel enough. And we just don't want to participate in the like, I need to look prettier or be skinnier or be richer to feel good about myself or to participate in this industry or in this brand. There's so much of that already. And that works for a lot of bands very successfully. But it's just not us. It's not CocoCain. And our growth is a testament to like, there are so many people who want to participate, but just not in that way. That truly is like so rewarding to me because I hear it nonstop. Like I hear it every day in some capacity, someone talking about like them feeling good about being here and not feeling pressured to be something else.

47:11And really, that's ultimately why we're doing this. So I like to wrap up these interviews with the same three questions that I ask everyone. The first one is about mistakes, because I think it's really important to have that transparency that, you know, has been part of the CocoCai and success. But I think it's really important to give women examples of you can make a mistake and you can be resilient and bounce back and things will work out and it's OK to admit mistakes. We don't have to be the Instagram perfect version of ourselves at all times. So I'm hoping that you can tell me about a mistake that you've made at any point in your career and what you've learned from it.

47:50I've made so many mistakes. It's like hard to choose just one. So many people would call how I started a mistake. A lot of people would call that a mistake. You know, I don't. But could we have grown bigger, faster? Absolutely. You know, if I wasn't doing demos myself and thinking that was a viable way of creating this business, like that could be called a mistake for sure. I think more generally a recent thing that I've been thinking about a lot is my role as a founder. And the idea that I think some founders think of ourselves as like, you know, I'm so deeply connected to our customer and like no one knows our sentiment and our customers opinions like more than me at any given point.

48:34that's my superpower that is impacting product development and i realized that that framing is a little bit of a mistake because where i now see myself over the last couple years is like i'm very much a product developer my founder energy is like going to product development because i am so critical you know about like each and everything for our customer and then i use my like customer connection to impact product development not the other way around but first and foremost, my job is to be like extremely critical product developer. And so it's nice to have that clarity, but certainly there's been points where I've been operating in the other perspective.

49:09And I think there could have been, you know, some improvements made along the way from those times. So that's, yeah, one of the mistakes. I'm sure there's a mistake that I made today. So a lot of the folks who listen to this podcast are in their first life, and maybe that's in the industry that they want to continue working in, but just in a different field, or maybe they want to be like you and make a big pivot in their career, but they haven't done it yet. They're scared. They're standing on the precipice thinking about it. As someone who has made a big pivot, what advice would you give someone who's thinking about it, but just hasn't made that leap quite yet?

49:45I think my best advice is just to do it. I think like action is everything, you know, like I hear people so much focus on like, I don't have the right idea, or I'm not the one to have the ideas. And we all know it who started businesses that like the idea is like 2%, you know, 98 % is literally the work, you know, and the action that you bring forth and that you can drive. And when people talk about founders being like optimistic or overly optimistic about like capabilities and stuff, it's actually like founders believe they can do something and then they do it. And that's why we have this like eternal optimism, because we've proven that like We can do really hard things.

50:27And so much of actually taking that leap, it just requires action. And you will be proud of yourself. And that will build this fortitude to allow you to keep going. So my last question, also my favorite question, which is if you could build a time machine and go back in time and speak with younger Priscilla at any point in your career, what advice would you give her? My advice for my younger self would be that I am enough. I think I've grown up with a lot of pressures. And I would say that you have an amazing personality to be a founder. You have the determination. You have the drive. And you are enough.

51:06And it's going to be enough as you get older and you feel like you have so much to do and so little time and so much pressure. But it all works out. And, you know, there needs to be a little bit less pressure on just like constantly trying to prove something and more coming into your own and just feeling enough. I love that. Well, Priscilla, thank you so much. This has been such a pleasure. I have been enjoying watching your career and your company from afar and watching it grow. Thank you so much for your transparency and for your thoughtfulness and for sharing your journey with us today. Thank you for having me.

51:44I'm so, so honored to be here.

51:52That was the founder and CEO of Cocoa Kind, Priscilla Tsai. For more inspiring interviews with women like Priscilla, head on over to secondlifepod.com where we have so many more for you to peruse. If you like today's show, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to rate and review us. We love seeing you spread the word on social. And now you can tag us in your posts. We are at second life pod on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. We always want to know who you're interested in hearing from on the show. So send in your requests to hello at second life pod.com, or you can DM us on Instagram.

52:33I'm at Hillary Kerr. The show is at second life pod. our DMs are always open. I'm Hilary Kerr, and you've been listening to Second Life. This episode was produced by Hilary Kerr, Summer Hammeris, and Natalie Thurman. Our production assistant is Grace Ingram. Our audio engineers are at Treehouse Recording in Los Angeles, California, and our music is by Jonathan Leahy.