If you think choosing the color of your nail polish or the ingredients in your face cream have nothing to do with blockchain, think again.
Kiki World, a beauty startup founded last year, wants consumers to co-develop products and co-own the company with the help of web3 technology.
On Tuesday, Los Angeles-based Kiki raised $7 million in a seed round from Andreessen Horowitz Cryptocurrency Fund and Estée Lauder Companies' New Incubation Ventures, as well as backers including Orangedao and 2Punks Capital. announced that it had been procured.
Jana Bobosikova, co-founder of Kiki, said she believes being a loyal user of a brand in the Web 2.0 world can be a net negative experience. “You've probably seen many creators on TikTok recommending it to you. You've probably recommended it to all your friends. What do you get out of that? Increase retargeting ads That’s all,” she said.
Kiki flips this model by allowing community members to vote on the features they want before beauty products are manufactured. As a reward, voters earn points for free products and receive internal digital he tokens.
“This is a dynamic that we haven't seen before on the Internet or in the bathroom,” Boboshkova said.
Another benefit of Kiki's on-demand approach is that it uses less capital and resources, as it's not uncommon for cosmetics companies to have large amounts of inventory that they can't sell.
Although members' product votes are recorded on Ethereum, some participants do not need to know that they are taking actions on the blockchain, Boboshkova said. Users can sign in with email, and lo and behold, Kiki has created her account on-chain, which permanently stores members' votes.
a16z decided to back Kiki after the company completed a 10-week cryptocurrency startup accelerator program. “Jana is a force of nature. She was one of the things that most attracted us to the firm,” said Arianna Simpson, general partner of the firm. “She has great expertise in the beauty space, but she also has a unique understanding of Web3, which you don't necessarily get when you have a founder from a more traditional industry background. there is no.”
Prior to founding Kiki, Czech-born Bobosikova was CEO of Epic Future Labs, a product development and brand innovation agency.
Simpson noted that Kiki is not the only company the company is betting on that uses blockchain technology to reward customers. Last year, A16z led his $24 million Series A for Blackbird Labs, his hospitality technology company that developed a loyalty program that incentivized guests to dine at independent restaurants.
So far, Kiki has launched five product collections, including nail polish pens, and consumers can choose which colors Kiki will produce next.
But as Simpson pointed out, Kiki has plans to eventually expand beyond the beauty world.
How long will it be before you can vote on your jeans style or wallet size? Probably for a while.
“We have faced extraordinary challenges on the physical side,” Bobiskova said, adding that some products take much longer to manufacture than others. “The power of asking people what they want and giving it to them is very, very simple. But it's very difficult to do.”