An Update on Kinder Beauty

Hi all. Today I’d like to address what happened with Kinder Beauty, as some of you are wondering and I’d like to set the record straight; Kinder Beauty, the vegan beauty company that I co-founded in 2018, went out of business in December. This update from me is long overdue, which I apologise for, but frankly it took a while to work out what was happening, and then to figure out a concise way to share my thoughts and feelings about it. I’ve filmed several videos attempts trying to explain the situation, none of which were concise or well articulated so here I am penning a blog post.

The details on why Kinder Beauty closed are in the statement penned by myself and the other co-founders which was posted in the Kinder Beauty Facebook group. To cut a long story short, one of our major sources of funding was unable to continue supporting the business and it all came toppling down with lots of debts to pay. It’s been a sad time and a difficult process and the Kinder team did everything to try and keep it running but ultimately the business failed. This information is already out there but I wanted to personally address a few things, for the sake of clarity and closure.

Firstly, I am so grateful to all the people who supported us, especially our customers, our investors and the businesses who believed in us. I met so many wonderful people through Kinder Beauty and they are connections I’ll continue to nurture. I learned so much from this venture, particularly from my co-founders, Andrew and Daniella. It was a pleasure working with each and every single person at Kinder Beauty. I’m especially grateful to Andrew, for being the only person to approach me with a business proposition that aligned with my values and my passions. Most people who approach me about social media are asking for favours, shoutouts and free endorsements, whereas Andrew gave me the opportunity to build something. I deeply appreciated being part of this team.

Secondly, I wanted to address why I stopped posting about Kinder Beauty in 2022 - the answer is simply that I wanted to step away from social media and focus on my personal life and my writing. I found the pressure to be online every month promoting a business very difficult to maintain. I didn’t stop posting about the company because I had any grievances, it was instead that the business had a whole team and they didn’t really need me. I was happy for them to do their thing and they were happy for me to go away and focus on my work. And I was really happy for an ethical business to use my name if that helped it. It holding onto its ethics was my primary concern when it came to my connection to it so in a way that stopped me from focusing on the other potential problems that could crop up for a vegan business.

Since then, I have been very detached from the business. I was aware it was struggling to meet its targets, but suffice to say it came as a big shock to me when the news came in that we’d have to liquidate the business. That said, I know the whole Kinder team worked so hard to try to save the business and I don’t think in their position I would have been able to do any better.

I don’t regret being part of this venture, but I am so sorry and sad for how it ended. I’m very aware that there are customers whose subscriptions have not been completed who received no communication, and I understand that must be infuriating and upsetting. I would be furious too as a customer and I feel awful about the company ending this way. Naively, I thought that if things got really bad for the business, we could stop taking subscriptions, pay all our bills and neatly and quietly wind the business down but this turned out to be impossible as Kinder Beauty was never profitable. By December, we had exhausted every option to find extra funding to keep the business afloat and ultimately there was no alternative but to liquidate Kinder Beauty.  

For my part in this process, to help boost some of the ethical brands who lost money when Kinder shut down, I’m going to be sharing some content featuring their brilliant products. Please know these are not ads that I’m being paid for. They are all ethical brands that I want to support in light of what happened with Kinder. I would also like to mention that as part of the effort to settle debts, the Kinder name, website, email account etc was sold to another company. I have no connection to this company.

That’s about all I can share on the situation.

Thank you to everyone who supported this mission to make cruelty free and vegan beauty mainstream.

On a more personal note, going forward I am going to keep it really simple on my social media. I want to go back to sharing things I’m making and things I love and the charities I work with. I will be very slow to lend my name to anything else and for now I’ve no desire to be in entrepreneurship. All I will say is that it’s very, very difficult to run a successful ethical business, and thank you to everyone who supported those efforts.

Evy xxx