Swap Your Next Drink for Kin Euphorics: The Rise of Non-Alcoholic Wellness Drinks with Jen Batchelor

Now they have a new terminology for it, high-intensive drinking.

That's— I haven't heard that one yet.

Yeah. It's like 8 to 10 drinks for women and even more than that for men. The drinking culture is crazy right now. It's more heavy, it's more intense.

We know how bad a hangover feels just anecdotally. And now we have the science to back why it is actually so detrimental over time and why it degrades everything from our physical body, our tissues. Even to our nervous system. And then something that we're reaching for relaxation is actually creating more anxiety, more cortisol and adrenaline in our systems over time because of the reaction our body has to acetaldehyde, which is registered by our brain as a toxin, a poison.

Welcome to the Mind Body Space Podcast, where you can boost your resilience just by listening. We are here to help you reduce stress at the cellular level, enhance focus, and achieve peak performance for you, and your kids. Hi, I'm Dr. Juna Bobby MD. I'm a mom, a board-certified physician, certified expert in mind-body medicine, and a Harvard-trained educator. Join me as I explore fascinating insights on evidence-based strategies to unlock your best life. Today I'm so excited to welcome Jenn Batchelor. She is a mom and an entrepreneur, and she's a leader in the space of adaptogens, nootropics, and botanicals to substitute for alcoholic beverages. Her amazing drink, Kin Euphorics, can be enjoyed anywhere, anytime. I'm so excited to talk to Jen about nourishing our minds and bodies with non-alcoholic functional beverages, alternative to the ever-present toxic alcohol culture that we all live in. She is a trailblazer in this new field of wellness drinks. I hope you enjoy my conversation with her as much as I did. Hey Jen, it's great to see you.

You too, you too. Thank you so much for inviting me on. I'm really excited to be here.

Thank you so much for being here. I assume you're on your phone?

I'm on my computer, but I think my headphones are a little wonky and we're outside, so this might prove adventurous from an audio standpoint.

Fun, fun, fun. Okay, well, it's so great to see you. And look what I have here, Lightwave.

I was just telling my chief of staff, like, I have no— it's sold out all over Miami and Austin, so it's crazy. I don't know what's going on with that product, but it's going gangbusters right now. Yay!

I'm going to open one and we can have A Kin drink together.

Sounds good.

So excited. Okay, so look at this beautiful bottle. Do you think that I should pour it into a glass or should I just drink it outta the can?

I love it. I really like it just straight up. I mean, there's just something so special about just like cracking open a can and going straight for it. But then also there's that ritual aspect that I love too. I'll, I'll just pour it up straight up in a glass, nice and chilled, and it kind of does its thing from there. So. I'm drinking mine out of my can today.

Amazing. Yay. Okay, so here it says, quiet your mind, open a portal to peace. So I'm gonna be sipping on this.

Cheers. Cheers. That's the intention. Hold on, I wanna get us doing that.

Why does my hand look so big?

The depth perception.

It's like that two-dimensional thing. Yeah. Uh-huh. It's so delicious. I'm glad. I love it.

I'm glad.

And I just had this delivered to my door.

Love to hear it.

And you know who has it around the Northeast is, uh, Wegmans.

Wegmans. Oh, they're one of my favorite partners.

And Weg— yeah, Wegmans is huge and it's so crazy to go in there, but they just deliver it. So it was awesome. They deliver it right to my door. The only other one that I've tried is Recess, probably a competitor.

Definitely familiar. It's funny because they started out doing something totally different than us on the productivity side and using cannabis and or hemp really in interesting ways. And they've sort of moved in our direction, but we're still friends. We're still beverage friendlies.

Oh, good, good. Tell me about Kin, and I'm so excited to know everything about you. I know we don't have all the time in the world today. And if we need to, we'll do part 2. But for now, can you tell me a little bit about your inspiration behind Kineuphorics and how this started? I know you were in Ayurveda, used to be a practitioner.

Absolutely. So this is my third venture, my second in wellness. I have sort of been in the wellbeing game from a hospitality and tech building standpoint for many years, probably 12 at this point. I've seen a lot of things come and go in the space, and I think when I went to think about what does the world really need? Not just the category or the industry, but at large, what does the world really need? I realized I didn't have a perspective. I didn't have a POV on even my own wellbeing, cuz I was victim to this fleeting wellness trend thing that happens, right? Where you chase an ingredient or you chase a diet, like, okay, that worked for 2 seconds and now I'm onto the next thing. I kind of wanted some sustainability around my practice. I wanted to incorporate something more fun and sensual, something I could share with friends. And the more and more I thought about it, the more obvious and apparent it was that we really needed a totem. We needed a token and a sort of celebratory drink that we could all celebrate around and come together with a common goal. And it just didn't exist. At the time I was studying Ayurveda up in, in the Berkshires at Kripalu, which is an incredible school of yoga and Ayurvedic science, was just blown away by the depth of the practice. Obviously the ties to traditional Chinese medicine was very strong. While they look at Marma from a physical standpoint, traditional Chinese medicine, TCM, looks at acupuncture, the way the herbs were treated, the fact that stress and the mind were really the first thing that you were trying to solve for when you thought about disease. I mean, all of those things turned my perspective on what feeling well was. It opened me up to so many different concepts and ingredients I wanted to try out in my own life. And off I went just experimenting in my own kitchen. I started to dabble with what, you know, felt really good, what over time I was actually seeing an impact from. I think that was a really big influence in how we ended up, and still to this day, how we think about product formulation and solving problems with Kit. There's a whole 8-year trajectory behind this as to how we got where we are today, but that was really the heart and soul of how we came to formulate Kit. It was really trying to go from mind and spirits outward to redefine what wellness is. And hey, why can't we do it at the bar? Nobody said we couldn't.

That's amazing. I'm not sure if this is true or not. I found it on the internet, so you can tell me if I'm wrong, but maybe somebody in your family had been creating alcohol beverages or something and you wanted to have a different way to celebrate. We all know it's a real problem. Alcohol has a part in chronic diseases, the cancers and cardiovascular disease. All of this, but we never really talk about it.

Yeah, that's a really good point. And there's so many more studies coming out just to suggest, you know, not only is it a type 1 carcinogen and neurotoxin, but it's just one of those things. I think when I look how society does life, when I look at the opportunities within my own network of like, how could we do things a little bit more consciously? How could we do things a little bit more true to who we are and what we're trying to actually accomplish in life? I look at cognitive dissonance. I look at the areas where we're sort of saying we want one thing, but then we're doing another. And alcohol was such a big part of that exploration in my life where I was like, my God, it, it comes back to this common denominator constantly of, yes, it's celebratory. That's sort of why I was proud to have distilling and a pub and all this sort of like alcohol-centered social, socializing and ritual in my family because I saw firsthand how it brings community together. But really what's bringing community together is a shared belief that this is helping us be our better self. This is helping us relax. This is helping us be our real self. Some people are like, I wear one face all day at work and then I can finally let my hair down, have a drink and be myself at the bar, right? There's a lot of lore that has followed a 10,000-year-old tradition of drinking alcohol. That pervades our brains. Better knowing that, okay, yeah, we've known it's a toxin. We know how bad a hangover feels just anecdotally. And now we have the science to back why it is actually so detrimental over time and why it degrades everything from our physical body, our tissues, even to our nervous system. And then something that we're reaching for relaxation is actually creating more anxiety. More cortisol and adrenaline in our systems over time because of the reaction our body has to acetaldehyde, which is registered by our brain as a toxin, a poison. So we all know that, and I think we're getting more and more interested in heart health, longevity, mental health, and cognitive health, right? It's all intertwined. Alcohol just doesn't fit a regimen meant to support those things. And so for me it was like, okay, it's one ingredient. Like we've worshiped this ingredient, it's called ethyl alcohol, this molecule for so long that we've brainwashed ourselves to think it's just fine because it's socially acceptable. But what if there were 10,000 other molecules that we could tap, other elements, other ingredients that we could tap to help relax our nervous system, help us feel that thing that we're trying to feel when we're drinking alcohol, which is just to say I feel my shoulders relaxing. I feel my parasympathetic nervous system activate. I feel connected. There's a lot of science to suggest we have ingredients right in our backyards that can do that. For so many years, we thought certain herbs could only be steeped and we can only enjoy them as teas, right? There's a misconception of how these herbs are meant to be enjoyed and how to get the most potency. Enter the biochemist, enter the biotechnologist and the engineer. And you now have lipids and nanoemulsions and technologies and manufacturing practices that allow these ingredients to actually cross the blood-brain barrier, actually be fully absorbed, or at least 80 to 90% absorbed more so than you would in a steep tea or just taking it as powder. We can tether this modern tech, this biotechnology with ingredients we know work. We have the studies to prove that these work. In high doses, right? But if they're working in high doses and they're only being digested, only 20% of them are being absorbed. But on this end, when you tether them with the technology, 90% of a tenth of a dose is being absorbed. You're gonna feel it the same way, right? So you're getting efficiencies with the ingredient, you're leveraging all parts of the ingredient, so you're getting way more out of this and more things can happen.

Your family owned a distillery. Can you go back to that?

So I grew up in Saudi Arabia, a country that's still under prohibition to this day. My dad was distilling moonshine, which is called sadiqi. It's grain alcohol, wines and beers out of our home.

Mm-hmm.

And so we had a still that he created. I mean, he had the process down pat and, you know, effectively was making, selling, and serving these things to our community. As expats, that was one way we got to reconnect with one another. We got to let our hair down, connect. To a part of home.

Where was home?

For us, it was Florida, or it was the US. For so many of the folks that were coming through, it was London, all over Australia, Malaysia. We had so many people coming to our home to try.

You grew up in Florida?

I was born there, but my dad was in the Air Force, so we moved around a lot. I got to Saudi at a very young age. I spent most of my formative years there, actually.

When you came back to the US, that's when you got involved with Ayurveda?

Oh my gosh. It took another 15 years for me to get involved with Ayurveda. I got back to the US at 16. And my grandmother passed away when I was about 25, 26. She was in her 60s, presumed healthy, right? I mean, she, she, it turns out just had Type 2 diabetes. She was 90 pounds wet, malnourished, dealing with some liver cirrhosis. Unbeknownst to us, this small, tiny woman was really drinking herself to the grave and we didn't know the, the facts on that. That definitely had an impact on me and my family.

Oh, wow. I lost my dad to alcoholism and cirrhosis. I have spent my whole life trying to prevent, because some of it is genetic, become addicted to alcohol is genetic. So I have educated my children. For myself, I had such a bad reaction to alcohol. I, I have that alcohol dehydrogenase deficiency as, yeah, that's great. An Asian woman.

Yeah.

It is kind of good for me because it gave me such horrible hangovers. I couldn't really drink, but then I discovered French wine. In my mid-40s, I was drinking more than ever. And then it gave me a host of other issues like reflux disease and gastritis. So I put it away for good about 6 years ago and haven't drank maybe 4 times a year. I'll have a drink now. I have drinks like Kin.

Here we go.

And Guinness, 0% alcohol.

So it's actually quite good. Yeah. This is what happens. We don't really talk about the genetic aspect of this. We just all assume it's so socially acceptable. We don't even ask, like, is this good for me? Is this going to actually make me feel what it's marketed to do? The way that Kin gets so much scrutiny, right? Like, oh my gosh, this says it's going to energize me. Is it really energizing me? Do you feel it? Do you feel it? This says it's going to fix my skin. There's so much scrutiny and I love it because I feel like it brings people into the conversation of like, yes, you should be a really good steward or the best steward even of your own well-being, how you feel, what you're putting in your body, what the outcome is of that. And so I think it really sparked a discussion at the bar of all places of like, how many of these can I have? What's in it? What is it gonna do to me? Which we weren't doing with alcohol.

Yeah. How many? No, the scrutiny of this versus alcohol, which people now, they have a new terminology for it, high intensive drinking.

That's, I haven't heard that one yet.

Yeah. It's like 8 to 10 drinks for women and even more than that for men. The drinking culture is crazy. Right now it's more heavy, it's more intense. And it's interesting why they would scrutinize something like Kin or Recess or any of those things on the market. Whereas, yeah, you're right. With alcohol, we don't really question it. It's for celebrations, it's for when we're sad, it's for everything.

Exactly. Exactly.

I am enjoying this very much and it is relaxing me. And you know, how much of it is actually chemistry? How much of it is me? I'm very susceptible to any medications or herbs. I'm very highly sensitive, but this is definitely calming me down. I definitely feel a little warmer and a little calmer. Yes.

And that's what we want.

That's what we want. And how many can I drink?

So we like to recommend the way that we dose our products is we'll look at an ingredient. There's a lot of science behind it, but there's also a lot of subjectivity because we're all different. Height, weight, where we come from, right? The powers that be, whether it's the NIH or whatever governing body or scientists came together on different ingredients and decided this is your daily max allowable dose. Of this thing. Whenever you look at a nutrition panel, it's gonna say percent daily value. Where do those daily values come from? It's still a mystery, right? You kind of have to do some digging. It's not all the same agency, it's not all the same person. However, we like to go by that because it's something that you as a consumer can look up, can research, and have some trust behind. The way that we think about dosing is when you're out having fun, drinking, not drinking, whatever it is, we're typically in a 2 to 3 hour session of hanging out, having 2 to 3 to 4 drinks if you're having a really good time. So the way that we've dosed Kin is a quarter dose of your daily allowable max of each nutrient in each can. We like to say max yourself out at 4 because that is by our standards how these nutrients are going to serve you best. That is a full dose of this nutrient. Now, whether you go above that and you drink 5 or 6, you're gonna be okay. Your body will process it, whatever it doesn't need, it will eliminate. That is how we like to think about it, just to give everybody like I also don't wanna hit you over the head with one can with 100% of your daily vitamin C. Maybe you had a supplement in the morning. So that's how we thought about titrating up, allowing your body to adjust, absorb, see how you feel, and then continue to build the experience from there.

Okay. So let's go into some of the ingredients. What are adaptogens, nootropics, and botanicals the way you use it, and how does it work in this can?

Yeah. So nootropics are cognitive enhancing supplements. They're ingredients that potentially exist in nature. There are a number of really beautiful nootropics that we borrow from the world of Ayurveda, like saffron. It's considered a boon for neuroplasticity. It's, it's amazing for staving off Alzheimer's and dementia. So we consider that a nootropic. There's also lab-designed nootropics that are created to help one of 8 executive functions, whether it's learning, memory, just cognition in general, being able to understand and process a thought, come back and reflect on it.

Where are these ingredients coming from? Are they from plants? Where, where are they distilled from?

Exactly. So 90% of our ingredients are from plants. We have ingredients in our product like GABA or 5-HTP, which are meant to mimic, right? And we naturally create these these neurotransmitters in our body, but they've also been successfully recreated in a lab. GABA, for example, or L-tyrosine, a precursor to the, the creation, the natural creation of, of these neurotransmitters in our bodies, mostly in our gut, which we're just learning in our minds. That's how we come to restore these molecules and these neurotransmitters to help us feel safety, joy, connectiveness that comes from you know, dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, endorphins.

And are there any downsides?

Sure. I mean, anything is a poison or a medicine depending on the application, right? Even water. You can consume 20 gallons of water and you'll have an issue with drowning.

Hyponatremia.

Hyponatremia. Yeah. Thank you.

Blood-brain swells up.

That's exactly right. Thank you. So we're looking for the word. Even water be, can be considered a poison in that dose and in that application. Nootropics, were designed for high performance to create and optimize the brain to work like a Ferrari. If you needed to sit and code for 8 hours, you could take 1,000 milligrams of citrulline or, you know, some other nootropic L-theanine that really created a sense of focus in the mind, released all of these precursors to serotonin, which is the neurotransmitter responsible for focus. It's responsible for willpower.. And so you really lock in that neurotransmitter. You could be locked in for 8 hours, or you could take it at an 18th of a dose, come back to life after a crazy day of fatigue and, and feel present. For us, it was the subtle energy that we wanted to feel in a recreational setting, in a social setting, or in a setting where we wanted to relax and just forget about work for a minute. Mm-hmm. That's how we think about treating these ingredients, and that's why we started incorporating them and blending them with adaptogens to reduce cortisol and, and check stress. I love working with botanics that work with hormone balance that help us to feel more in our body and less in our executive functioning monkey mind, reference to meditation or more of a theta state. So for us, it was very much about blending these ingredients for a recreational experience. Some people in a recreational setting wanna feel chill, they wanna feel relaxed, maybe they're overcaffeinated or experiencing some anxiety. For me, I'm usually tired at the end of a long day. I have a mom of two, so I usually wanna pep in my step. And so this one, for example, has 50 milligrams of green tea extract. We pair that with GABA and L-theanine, so it is gonna bring some focus and energy, but it's also going to help the endocrine system balance out. And so that's really what I, I wanted to feel that sort of happy medium at the 5 PM.

And that one's, what is it called, the one you're drinking?

So this one's, uh, called the Kin Spritz. It's just our take on an Aperol Spritz, which is obviously designed for happy hour. It mirrors what's happening too with the circadian, in terms of the circadian clock, it's also mirroring what, what we need physically, mentally at that point in the day.

And I did meet your two cuties. They came to speak when we met at Harvard Business School when you came to speak there. They were so adorable. And yeah, I wanted to talk to you about that. How are you balancing motherhood and entrepreneurship? Entrepreneurship started before motherhood, right?

Yes, it did.

So you're a serial entrepreneur. What were the two other companies before and how did that help you? Start this one because you're doing so much with this. This is not only entrepreneurship, but you're actually breaking into a new space. So that's something that hasn't really existed before. I remember about 6 or 7 years ago I had heard about Sober Curious and Club Soda. Did you about that movement? Yeah. I've had, do you know Biet Simkin?

Yes, I know her well. She's a good friend.

Oh, she's been on my, uh, podcast.

Yeah, we know each other. Biet was already doing her thing on the meditation circuit. And our mutual friend Ruby Warrington was doing astrology as the numinous on Instagram. She's like, there's something here with the Sober Curious movement. She was experimenting herself and I was like, actually, I'm making a drink. We were all collaborating really early days to bring Kin to the world and bring these concepts to the world. I'm actually in Ruby's book, the Sober Curious book that she wrote.

What a small world. Amazing. Well, I love this movement. I've been talking about it ever since.

It's huge. You've seen it from the ground up, but can you imagine how why it's gone so quickly. And I think we have the younger generations too today.

I hope so. I mean, my son has started to drink some zero alcohol drinks when he goes out as well.

I love it.

And going back to my last question, what was your two first companies and how did it evolve and how did you start Kin and did you hit the ground running? I know you've raised a lot of money to get this started. How did that all come about? I know you don't have all the time in the world to go through all the details, but Go for it.

I'll give you the 30,000-foot view because looking back, it's been a long journey. I'm 40 now, so, and I started my first company at 22, 23. So it's been a 17-year journey of entrepreneurship trying to find the thing that lit me up and, and, and the services, products, technologies that I really wanted to devote my energy and time to. I think the through line between my 3 ventures has always been innovation and community, bringing together top tech, but tech that works. I'm an understudy, a pilgrim. And a devotee of IDEO, which is an idea firm that really evangelized the concept of design thinking, right? So creating product, creating service, creating systems that really put the end user in mind first and then build backwards from there. They've done everything from revolutionize the way the Red Cross does blood drawing, from the forms to the pen they're using.

And the mouse.

The mouse.

Exactly.

There you go.

I'm a big fan of IDEO.

I love IDEO. And so I was, I was lucky enough to visit them when I was working in tech and at NSF and, you know, got a full, it was an 8-day or 8-hour immersion learning their process, meeting their team, understanding the philosophy, reading all the books. It just stuck with me. It was jarring looking at other services and other products that were just, weren't doing that and being like, this is the unlock. This is what, this is what divides a cool idea from a 100-year-old brand because it's something so useful, something ideally from a branding perspective. The branding of things and the beauty of things was also really important to me. So to me it's always been, if you marry those two things, utility, beauty, and aspiration, you're giving them something they're actually going to use and be proud of it. That's what makes iconic brands.

Where did you have a background in advertising? Did you study marketing or advertising or is this something just comes natural to you?

It really just came natural. It's a kind of a long story as to how I even got into it, but I just realized, oh wow, Facebook went from .edu now to .com. How are businesses going to be able to take advantage of this? It was more just looking at it from the commercial aspect of like, there's a lot of nascentcy here, there's a lot of blue ocean. How can I help activate these channels for businesses that are looking to grow faster, that are looking to grow more efficiently? I was obsessed with tech and so I really wanted to make sure that I could help eventually start an agency of folks that, that helped design tech platforms, mobile apps, solutions in general that could help these businesses do that. And so I learned a good deal about innovation, what works, what sticks, how to measure it.

But you in the end created a consumer product and I'm sure all of that marketing came in handy, right? I mean, when you create a product, like I'm starting to do this little toy here.

It looks great. You didn't even have an MVP when I saw you last.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Zenbidi. Here it is. It's, uh, cute and kids love it. Hopefully I'll send you one for your kids and, um, they can try it out. It has a little computer bit to it. Even something so simple, it's a lot to make and handle. So how did you go from tech and building to something that's ingestible, actually making something you can drink and getting it in the marketplace and getting it on the shelves of these big box stores? And at the Four Seasons, right? You're at the Four Seasons right now. That's, yeah, that's amazing. And that's so interesting cuz you're at Target and you're also at Four Seasons. So how did you do that?

It wasn't easy. You have to have a certain level of grit, but also a certain level of ignorance, right? Like I, I came into the prod, like the CPG product space being like, I've built mobile apps, I know tech, like I, I've built product. No, it's a totally different world. Unless you're building hardware and tech, which is quite similar, you're doing, just taking component parts, putting them together and praying that it's stable enough to sell. Will this survive, like, being shipped 1,500 miles? Like, there's some, like, tangible, practical things that we learned along the way.

Uh-huh.

At the onset, it was, I very much looked at it like a developer, just having spent so much time with engineers, having project managed and I had all of those aspects down pretty well after being in business for myself for 10 years. This was a special project when it was 2 years of making things in my kitchen, just starting out by experimenting a ton on myself, my friends.

Where would you buy the stuff? Do, would you get like 2 bags of that?

Oh, I, I was so lucky. I was based in New York City, especially Chinatown. What a wealth of crazy ingredients that you can pick up off the street. Incredibly. Dense potteries just full to the gills with things that you could never get online.

So this is what I love to hear about. What were you doing? You were in your kitchen making this stuff? Oh yeah.

I have the scars to prove it. I've got burn marks. It was an intense pursuit.

So you did that for 2 years. How did you support yourself? Were you still working?

Yeah. So my second venture, which we didn't get to touch on, but I'll give you super briefly, is a wellness-focused hospitality firm. Did a number of things. We created technologies and content. For hotels. We designed programs, cleaned up menus. So we were basically the turnkey solution for hotels that said, I wanna have a wellness amenity. I wanna understand what my guest is doing when they're at the gym. How can we sell them into other things or upsell them to try new things? For me, the missing link in that equation was something healthy to drink. Or even when you check in, do you want red, white, or pink? You know, it was just a given. You're gonna get a welcome drink. It's gonna be alcoholic. You're gonna feel like shit the next day.

Yes.

Yes. So for me, I was like, wait, we have all these great amenities. Why are we getting in the way of a good time? Right? Like an actually healthy time. We're coming at people immediately and saying, start your stay, perhaps after a long 8-hour flight from Europe, dehydrated, ready for a good sleep. That's not gonna be ultimately helpful to you having the best experience in this city. So it was like that IDO thinking, I'm gonna take you through the customer journey from soup to nuts. And I wanna see where I can optimize your stay. This idea just kept coming and coming.

Nice. So you did use your prior contacts from working with these hospitality groups and—

No.

Did that help you get into PleaseAscent?

No. Well, in fact, Kim to this day is just scratching the surface on the on-prem opportunity. Wait, I had some friends that were willing to take it on that were restaurateurs early days. It was very lucky for, but not, it didn't come from this work. Ironically.

And you did at some point, did you partner with Bella Hadid?

Yeah, so that was crazy. Here's how we came to that partnership and title. I was approached by Ari Emanuel, who, if anyone's watched Entourage, he is the main character. Ari is a real guy who founded an agency called Endeavor. Endeavor had a number of celebrities they worked with and, you know, I mean, thousands and thousands that they've discovered. And one in particular had taken a liking to our product. And Ari said, listen, I don't know what this magic is that you're doing. I've been sober 8 years. I wanna try your product. And not only that, I wanna invest. Can I invest? And I was like, this is so random. Why is Ari Emanuel calling me? It was just—

wait, he's the guy who played Ari in the show, right?

No. No. Ari in the show was played by Jeremy Piven.

Oh, Jeremy Piven.

Yes. Yeah.

I read he ate so much sushi, he got like mercury poisoning or something.

That actually makes sense. That makes sense. But Ari, the character, is a real guy in real life. Ari Emanuel, a huge deal in Hollywood. I was shocked. I actually thought I was being punked when I got an email from his office.

That's amazing.

At that point, we'd already been in business for 2 and a half years. I had never paid an influencer a single dollar to promote the brand. I was like, Ari, I don't have celebrity money. I've never paid anybody to speak well about my brand, and I don't wanna start now because I'm actually trying to create something that's disruptive. I'm trying to learn from my customer. I love the feedback that I hate the flavor, I don't like, you know, the feeling, whatever it is, because it's helping me make a better product. He totally aligned with that and respected that a ton as well. Nonetheless, wanted to introduce me to this person. And so we decided to name her co-founder. She was helping us break into a new audience. This person was Bella Hadid, and, and it was very cool when we met. She was 23 years old and we were just trying to figure it out. It was like, okay, why do you like the brand? That's so crazy. I never even thought that would be a thing. She was talking about social anxiety and she was talking about all the things that really matter to Gen Z. I created Kim for myself. I'm an elder millennial. I really care about how I feel in the morning, that I'm not feeling hungover. She didn't care about any of those things. She really cared more about these existential challenges that I think, like, every incoming generation, but especially Gen Z, with their life being on such display, all this, all the stuff that's going on in the world with, uh, climate change.

And yeah, they really do have an existential life that we didn't experience.

They take it all to heart, right? And they charge themselves with fixing all of the problems. And so I do think it helps, makes it so they lack sleep. It makes it so they're more anxious. It makes it so they're more self-aware, conscientious of what they're doing. What are they putting in their body? I mean, as a generation, they're really considered, like everything that they do is so considered. And so I think a company like Kin or a brand like Kin's really resonated with someone like her who was thinking about every single thing she's putting body, not only for the sake of saving the world, but because she has Lyme disease also.

Oh wow.

Right. When you have an autoimmune disease, you think about everything. What's this gonna do to me? And Kin made her feel so good that she was like, good, I have to help you.

That's an amazing story. You and Beat, you guys all have young children growing up. What would you say for young moms right now who wanna start a business? I know you started entrepreneurship before you had your kids, so it's a little different, but I know a lot of moms that wanna start something meaningful, but it's very difficult to handle everything. What would you say? I know there's no real balance. I was a working mom myself and always wanted to be an entrepreneur. Do you have any thoughts on that?

I would say, and I'll, I'll steal this from Glennon Doyle, we choose our hard, right? The mom guilt is real. There are nights when I'm traveling, I'm not with them. It breaks my heart. I think about like, Oh, I missed this, or I didn't see that. But I also know how excited they are about the work that I'm doing, how proud they are. My daughter's 3 and a half and she knows Kin. She sees the logo, she wants to drink it. My son is 2. He'll see anything that has the brand and he's like, oh, it's mama's Kinny. And they're part of the tribe and, and they're ultimately gonna carry the torch. So the fact that the work is really meaningful to me. That resonates. I think that is felt by them as well. And so I think if it was soul-sucking work, and that's the thing with me, you have to be a masochist to be an entrepreneur for 20 years.

Really? Yes.

You go through a lot.

Absolutely. And being a bit ahead of you, I'm gonna say that you're doing the most amazing thing because it is so important to have something of your own cuz your kids are going to leave if you want them to be happy and successful and go on to college or whatever they're gonna do. Uh, after high school. I always say I should have done more in the past decade, but you always beat yourself up a little bit. But this is my time now.

No, and they're watching you even now and being inspired, right? So we don't lose time. We always strike when it's right for us. You never know why I even look at my last 10 years. I'm like, what did I accomplish? Because we're always grading ourselves.

And for me, I look at some of these weight loss brands or brands that people don't question, but, and they're doing like, it might be bad for you.

They're doing $100 million in revenue and selling their company. Exactly. You know what I mean?

So I'm like, sugar-coated candy or anything that is addictive.

Yeah.

Sells really well.

The, the temptation to cut corners to get ahead is always gonna be there. The headlines are always gonna be the Inc. articles, the Fast Company, it's always gonna be there. And so I think for me it's like, what is actually at the end of the day, if I'm gonna sacrifice an hour of my time 10 hours of my time with my kids every week, what is actually going to move the needle for me spiritually that I can then go back and say, hey guys, this is what I was working on and this is what I was doing. And so, you know, that always brings me back to earth, but it's hard. It's hard. There's no getting around it. There's sacrifices that are made.

That was Jen Batchelor, co-founder and CEO of Kin Euphorics. Follow Jen and Kin Euphorics on Instagram. Find out more about Kin at kineuphorics, K-I-N-E-U-P-H-O-R-I-C-S.com. Ever wonder what's problematic when it comes to alcohol use? Listen to the next episode to find out. If you or someone you know is struggling with addiction, talk to your healthcare provider, and you can call the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. The national helpline is 1-800-662-HELP or 4357. 7 for free confidential support. Thank you for joining me on the Mind Body Space Podcast. Subscribe, share, and review, and soon you'll have more Zen people around you. Get our newsletter to get special tips and discounts on our new courses and our new upcoming Zen Bitty Plush that helps you and your child train your brain to fight stress at the cellular level while having fun together. Until next time, this is Dr. Juna Bobby MD wishing you and your family wellness.