687: I Broke Every DTC Rule and Built a $1 Billion Brand From My Garage

**Nathan Chan** (0:01)
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The D2C Playbook says outsource your fulfillment, buy every custom with ads and burn cash until you're big enough to exit. Sandra Oh Lin broke all those three rules and shipped over a billion dollars from a business she started in her garage. Today's guest is the founder and CEO of KiwiCo, the kids subscription brand that shipped over 50 million crates, profitable since 2016 with a team of under 150 and zero pressure to ever sell. Every lesson in this episode is a rule broken. The two-word answer that is buried in her churn surveys that unlock profitability, while running her own warehouse for 14 years, lets her crush every competitor at Christmas time, and the acquisition mix where 70 percent of her traffic costs almost nothing. So if you've only ever heard one way to build a brand, this is the other way. So let's get to it.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:56)
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Welcome to The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan.

**Nathan Chan** (2:10)
Hey, I have a quick ask. If you're loving these episodes, leaving a quick review is honestly the best way to support us. It helps the show grow and means we can keep bringing you the founder stories and insights you tune in for. Please share it with a friend. Thank you so much. Now, let's get into it. Sandra, you walked away from leading eBay's fashion business in 2011
You're a senior exec at eBay. It was one of the biggest e-commerce companies in the world, still is, to start packing craft boxes in your garage in 2011 What was the inflection point that convinced you this personal need for hands-on kids projects could scale into a mass market business?

**Sandra Oh Lin** (2:55)
Those were actually decisions that were made somewhat independently.
So I had been at eBay Inc for about seven and a half years. I'd been at PayPal and then moved on to eBay, where as you mentioned, I was running the fashion business and I decided to leave and I decided that I wanted to join a smaller company without the intention of starting my own company. As I had announced that I was leaving, one of somebody who I knew actually approached me and asked about founding and starting a fashion startup. So I actually explored starting this fashion startup as I was leaving eBay, which was very relevant to my experience right before, and ended up not doing that. But as I was looking into it, I was learning the ropes around potentially fundraising, learning about Santa, et cetera, a new part of Silicon Valley, a part that I was not as familiar with. I started to do hands-on projects with my kids more and more. So my kids at the time were, my two oldest were two and four. And I had grown up doing hands-on activities with my mom growing up. I really wanted my kids to feel like they had agency to create and make. And so we started doing these hands-on projects.
And I was like, this is taking way too much time and energy. Like I need to advertise this. So I invited my friends and their kids over. And one of the moms was like, Sandra, you should start a business around this. And so that's what really prompted me to say, gosh, is there something here? This certainly would not be a viable business around encouraging kids to get hands-on, to make, to create if it was an N equals one problem, just for me. But fortunately, come to find out at this point, we've shipped out over 50 million crates. And so this is something that really resonates with more than just my family.