'We did see a significant bump up in our business': KiwiCo CEO Sandra Lin

Sandra Lin, CEO of KiwiCo, joined Yahoo Finance Live to discuss how the demand for KiwiCo's craft subscription boxes was impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Video transcript

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EMILY MCCORMICK: Welcome back to "Yahoo Finance Live." I'm Emily McCormick. KiwiCo is an e-commerce company that offers subscriptions for learning-centric children's toys and kits. Sandra Lin, CEO of KiwiCo joins us now. And Sandra, it's great to be with you and want to ask about your own experience since you were previously with eBay, so definitely a lot of work in e-commerce. And what need did you see in the marketplace in children's toys, specifically, that inspired you to start KiwiCo?

SANDRA LIN: KiwiCo was started partially out of personal need. My kids were getting to an age where I wanted them to get hands-on. I wanted them to be creative. I wanted them to have an outlet where it felt like they could make and create things. And the long story short is that I ended up discovering that there are a lot of parents like me.

There are a lot of parents who are looking for enriching activities for their kids. And if it came to them in a convenient format from a trusted brand, that was something that they were interested in. And for the kids, it was really about having fun and making these discoveries, and then hopefully learning and building their creative confidence along the way.

SEANA SMITH: Sandra, did you see a big pick up in your business during the pandemic, just with so many kids stuck at home, parents looking for various activities in order to entertain them throughout the day? Did COVID impact you at all? And have you changed your strategy as a result?

SANDRA LIN: We were very, very fortunate. And so given the dynamics of the pandemic, we did see that parents were very hungry to keep their kids engaged. And kids were also looking for things to do from home. And so we did see a significant bump up in our business, especially as we started to hunker down in the beginning and shelter in place.

From the perspective of how the business has actually evolved, the very first weekend and week that we were sheltering in place, we actually pulled together some resources for the community, resources about how to actually deal with learning from home, activities and things to do from home. And it was incredible. That part of our site actually ended up crashing because there was so much demand.

And what we did for the summer, then, is we created something called Camp KiwiCo, so free resources, free content. We knew the summer would look very different, but we still wanted it to be filled with discoveries and filled with fun. And so we pulled together four different sessions for kids and families. And we're seeing that that engagement around content is something that's pretty interesting for us as a business, and it's something that we're going to continue to invest in now going forward.

EMILY MCCORMICK: And Sandra, how are you figuring out what types of kits and crates kids will respond positively to, because I saw KiwiCo really stratifies by children's ages? And so are you working with certain researchers or certain research and development programs in order to figure out what might resonate best?

SANDRA LIN: Mm-hmm. Part of, I think, KiwiCo at heart is we try to really understand what makes sense for kids, what makes sense for families. We have a deep understanding now of childhood development. We have a deep understanding of what's engaging, what's accessible, what's fun, what leads to those aha moments, and that's driven by our product design team.

So we have an in-house product design team that is concepting, and ideating, and prototyping, and coming up with all these projects in-house. So these are folks with backgrounds in mechanical engineering, product design, electrical engineering. We have somebody who worked on satellite systems for space. We have somebody who used to have his own bike company. And so a lot of creative people putting their minds together and coming together in order to come up with these projects.

SEANA SMITH: Sandra, you launched this company in 2011, so it's been 10 years. When you take a look out over the next 10 years, how do you see your business evolving?

SANDRA LIN: We have a really great base. You'd refer to our subscription products and so the idea of something delightful and engaging coming every month. And now we have subscription lines that go from baby all the way through to what we describe as kids at heart. So we have eight different subscription lines ranging from things that are based in science and engineering, some in art and design, some in early childhood development. And that's going to be continually a big, I think, source of our continued growth.

In addition to that, we're actually have launched a number of one-off products. So the way that you and I shop online is more one-off than subscription-based. And we're really excited about that, because that's opening up new price points, new use cases, new product formats that we're able to deliver to our community.

In addition to that, we are-- actually saw a really big increase in demand just organically from schools and groups too. So we're going to be continuing to invest in that particular part of the market, as well, going forward. And then I mentioned that we are looking at content as a very interesting way to engage prospective customers, as well as existing customers.