Kulfi friends & family,

Trust me to wait till the last week of October to write this month’s newsletter.

There is a lot to update on the business. The biggest perhaps is that our soft launch date moved from November 2020 to February 2021. Regulatory approvals took longer than I expected. This pushed out our production by a few weeks into the holidays, which isn’t a great time to launch a new brand as it’s really busy with holiday messaging. When I started Kulfi last year, I naively thought I’d launch the brand in 6 months. But the best things in life take time :)

This month, we faced an existential question with our blog, Kulfi Bites.

Many of us grew up not feeling beautiful. I knew I wanted to change that. But how? Beauty, to me, is shared storytelling. It’s what we tell ourselves and tell each other. This is why Kulfi Bites is so important to me, because I want to share 5 or 500 or 5,000,000 stories of South Asian people uplifting and celebrating themselves and each other. As these stories get shared, my hope is that they change the narrative around beauty.

Somewhere along the way though, I looked at page views and site traffic and felt discouraged because we weren’t getting millions of views. We spent hours and hours perfecting each piece, was it even worth it? It’s not a decision I take lightly. As a lean team, each hour we spend on one task means an hour away from another important task. In the time we write an article, we could be pitching Kulfi to magazines (check out our feature in Allure) or developing new products. I felt a bit lost. Then we had a conversation with David Yi of Very Good Light, who has created a space that's redefining masculinity and men’s beauty standards. He was so excited and supportive of what we were doing because he understood that no space like Kulfi Bites has existed before. He told us to not overthink but to keep producing content that was meaningful to us. And I realized that instead of leaning back, we need to lean in and share more stories than ever before.

Samia is leading the charge here - from publishing one story a week, she’s now publishing up to five stories a week. From Janvi Sai in New York City falling back in love with her brows to Tahmina Begum in London sharing her idea of self-care rooted in her Bangladeshi upbringing to Rameen Saad in Karachi discovering how being a content creator helped her find confidence to Ria Biyani in Mumbai embracing her skincare journey, I’m inspired by these stories and their collective impact on us. So, more Bites are coming your way!

I’ll wrap up this month with a photo I just took of our shipping mailers. They are 100% cute, recyclable, and biodegradable, and will be at your doorstep in Feb ‘21 when you order from us at launch :)

Love,

P.G.