September 11, 2017

KATIE ANN ROSEN KITCHENS, OF FABFITFUN

KATIE ANN ROSEN KITCHENS, OF FABFITFUN

You’ve seen the unboxing videos, love the swoon-worthy products, and mark your calendars for every season’s FabFitFun box reveal.
We sat down with Katie Ann Rosen Kitchens, an accomplished writer, editor and co-founder of FabFitFun, to find out just how she created the #1 multimedia, lifestyle-sampling platform.

EG: What were you like as a girl growing up?

KK: Oh, gosh. That is an interesting question.
When I was young I was extremely outgoing. I thought I was going to be an actress, dancer or singer. So I would take any opportunity that I could to perform, even if it was just with my grandparents putting me on the top of a table at a local deli, where I would then belt out the song from “Annie.” So, no shame at all.

EG: Can you talk about your journey that brought you to where you are today?

KK: I knew that I wanted to go to school outside of Los Angeles and see something else in the world, so I went to George Washington University. There I studied an English and Sociology double major with a minor in Art History.  After college, I worked in TV production, on some really fun shows, like Jackass and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

While I loved it and I loved that industry, I really wanted to be writing. I thought I would eventually become a sitcom writer like my dad. And I did write some scripts but what I actually ended up selling, much more quickly than a script, were articles to different magazines and newspapers including the Los Angeles Times, Art and Living, Women’s Life, Dining Out, Pasadena Mag, LA Splash, Spoil Spot, Gimundo, and Venice News.

EG: How did you start FabFitFun?

KK: I became the LA editor of the fashion, beauty, and nightlife guide called Schecky’s. I continued to freelance for different magazines and online sites, and I ended up getting connected to my two co-founders brothers, Michael and Daniel Broukhim, in 2010.

We wanted to create a really unique media site where we would write about everything women needed to feel good from the inside out. And that’s actually how FabFitFun started, as an online magazine about seven years ago.

I wrote all the content for the first few years. We were really the sort of DailyCandy model, where we would put out one newsletter every day.  We wanted to do something on the e-commerce side from the very beginning, so we had played around with a lot of ideas and eventually landed on the FabFitFun Box, which we launched in 2013.

EG: In the beginning, how did you find funding for the company and to start FabFitFun?

KK:  For the vast majority of it, it was all self-funded. We really were, and honestly, continue to be, very lean and mean. I think it’s a part of our culture, and even as we raise money, we continue to really focus on the idea of feeling like a startup and only spending where we need to. I think one of the ways that we really invested in the company as a whole is in our team, because I think one of the ways that we can be most successful is by hiring people that are smarter than you.

EG: How do you go about choosing the amazing products in your boxes? They’re always so unique and fun and… What is your process there?

KK: Well, first of all, thank you. That’s really sweet. We work really hard at it.  I had been a writer in the lifestyle space for almost 10 years and I had great connections in the PR world. And so, when we launched the Box with 2,000 members,  I could call a PR friend and say, “Hey, I need 2,000 X, Y, Z. Can you hook me up?”

Now that we are at hundreds and hundreds of thousands of women, the buzz word is “conversation.”  The women who visited our website very much looked and acted like myself. So it was really easy just for me, personally, to pick seven to nine products that I loved and have them love them as well. And now that we’ve grown to scale, it’s a much more diverse group of women. So, satisfying that kind of diversity is a little bit more challenging.
We now have a world-class merchandising team that scours the world for the latest and greatest products.

EG: How did you get celebrities to endorse your products?

KK: We have an amazing influencer team whose job day and night is just reaching out and forming relationships with all of the amazing influencers that we work with. Our influencers are really becoming a part of the FabFitFun world. There’s a new box every season, there’s tons of opportunities in-between, so we really have become a part of their everyday world.

EG: What was the hardest obstacle that you had to overcome on your journey to success, and how did you overcome that obstacle?

KK: Gosh, I think there’s a new obstacle every day. Growth was hard for us, between myself and my two co-founders, Michael and Dan, we are all extremely hands-on and, in many ways, perfectionists. Letting go was a big challenge because we were all used to doing it all and taking a step back was hard.

EG: So what’s next for FabFitFun?

KK: We are introducing FabFitFun TV this spring.
There has been a demand for more fitness products, and fitness is a challenging category because, you know, there’s only so many workout bands that I want to put in the box, and I can’t put a treadmill in the box. So we decided to focus on the fitness space when it came to FabFitFun TV. We partnered with some amazing fitness studios and influencers in Los Angeles and now members have free access to fantastic classes that they can attend anywhere, anytime.
EG: What is the best business advice you have ever received?

KK: You cannot be afraid of failure. The reality is there are going to be things that are not going to work, but you can’t let it break you down. Testing your product is so important.
EG: Can you describe a typical day in your life?

KK: Oh, gosh. Okay, so my days are crazy. I typically wake up anywhere between 5:00 am and 5:30 am, that’s when I spend time with my young daughters and make them breakfast, which I really love doing.

I tend to get into the office around 9:30 am or 10:00 am.
And I do a lot of  in-person meetings with my team and across the organization. I think that face time is really important.

Then I test products and think about what campaigns we want to run, what stories we will tell, whether it’s founder stories or sourcing stories or ingredient stories, making sure members really understand why we picked the products that we did. A lot of it is also around FabFitFun TV and understanding how we can continue to improve the programming.

I try to leave at 5:00 pm, although that doesn’t always happen, so that I can come home and see my family, cook my kids’ dinner, read them a story and put them to bed. Typically, then, my husband and I have that little bit of nice alone time where we watch an episode of TV that we like together. And then I get back on the computer for another few hours because that is the way that I get everything done.
I don’t expect anyone else on my team to be back on the computer working from 10:00 pm to 1:00 am, but it is quiet time where I can get through all of my emails and put out any fires that happened earlier in the day, to make sure that I’m communicating with everyone in a way that I want to.

 

Follow Katie and FabFitFun here:

@fabfitfun 

 

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