Lisa Hom, KiwiCo | Modern Retail Vanguard 2024
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Over the course of her roughly 20-year career, Lisa Hom has held a variety of merchandising and buyer roles. At each of these jobs, she was tasked with becoming an expert at different categories: girls clothing at Old Navy, or activewear at Mervyns before moving onto the next role.
But when Hom met KiwiCo founder Sandra Oh Lin in 2012, she had kids projects on her mind, as she was eight months pregnant with her third child. As Hom puts it “I was in the thick of making homemade dough and crafting.” So Lin’s pitch – she had recently launched a startup that created themed STEM kits for kids that parents could buy on a subscription basis – resonated with Hom.
Hom joined KiwiCo that same year, overseeing a product design team that would concoct ideas for product kits, which the company calls “crates.” The team brings kid testers into the office to make sure that KiwiCo’s products are living up to its promise to make science, art and engineering “seriously fun.”
“Kids are pretty honest. They’ll walk away from a project if it’s not fun,” Hom says.
Today, she’s the company’s chief product and merchandising officer. Her responsibilities have grown to encompass more than just product design; she also oversees sourcing, supply chain and operations. And KiwiCo itself has grown into a profitable, nine-figure business.
One of Hom’s biggest projects this year was overseeing expansion into Barnes & Noble and Target. Since launching in 2011, KiwiCo has largely stayed a direct-to-consumer business. The company had considered wholesale expansion for years. This year, KiwiCo finally felt up to the task.
“My [previous] experience being on the buying side has given me perspective on what the buyers are looking for,” Hom says. For starters, they’re looking for companies that can comply with 100-page vendor guides, and have the operational chops to supply large orders to multiple warehouses on time. “I was confident that this team could execute flawlessly,” Hom says.
As a primarily DTC brand, KiwiCo has accumulated a ton of data about what types of projects different kids like, from toddlers to teens. KiwiCo parlayed that to retailers, showing that its products could serve everyone from the aunt looking for a last-minute birthday gift to a busy mom looking for a rainy day weekend project.
Since launching in Barnes & Noble in Target and July, Hom says it’s been exciting to see videos and comments from customers who were happy to finally see KiwiCo in stores. And, it’s given KiwiCo even more data to use when deciding what new products to launch.
“It’s an exciting time for us, and we have so many concepts and ideas that we are still ready to deliver, and can’t wait to see them kind of come into the world,” Hom says.