563: From $500 to 120 Stores - How She Lost It All | Kristina Karlsson

The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan

Nathan Chan

Marketing, Business, Entrepreneurship

4.8 • 662 Ratings

🗓️ 9 May 2025

⏱️ 77 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Omnisend | Get 50% off your first 3 months of email and SMS marketing with Omnisend with the code FOUNDR50. Just head to your.omnisend.com/foundr to get started. ✅ Want all-access to step-by-step training from 7, 8 & 9-figure founders? Start your Foundr+ $1 trial today → ⁠⁠Click Here⁠⁠ ✅ Prefer 1-on-1 mentorship to launch or scale your brand faster? Apply for eCommerce coaching: → Starting your ecom biz? ⁠⁠Click Here⁠⁠ → Already selling and want to scale? ⁠⁠Click Here⁠⁠ What You’ll Learn in This Episode: In this episode, Kristina Karlsson, founder of Kikki.K and Dream Life, opens up about building a $100M global brand, losing it all, and why she's starting again—this time, on her own terms. She reveals: ✅ The wild journey of scaling Kikki.K to 120 stores in 6 countries ✅ How losing her business twice reshaped her view of failure and resilience ✅ Why journaling became her most powerful tool for balance and clarity ✅ The hard lessons from choosing the wrong investors and CEOs ✅ How she’s building Dream Life with more freedom, purpose & creativity If you’ve ever had to start over—or fear what would happen if you did—this episode will leave you inspired, grounded, and ready to create again. 📩 How We Can Help You Scale Your Business Faster 🔥 Want to learn directly from 7, 8 & 9-figure founders inside Foundr+? Start your $1 trial today → ⁠⁠Click Here⁠⁠ 💡 Prefer a custom roadmap and 1-on-1 coaching? → Starting from scratch? → ⁠⁠Apply here⁠⁠ → Already have a store? → ⁠⁠Apply here⁠⁠ 🔗 Connect With Nathan Chan 📸 ⁠Instagram⁠ 💼 ⁠LinkedIn⁠ 🔗 Connect With Kristina Karlsson 📸 Instagram 🌍 Website 🛍️ Dream Life Store 🎯 Follow Foundr for More Business Growth Strategies 📺 ⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠ 🌍 ⁠⁠Website⁠⁠ 📸 ⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠ 📘 ⁠⁠Facebook⁠⁠ 🐦 ⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠ 💼 ⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠ 🎙️ ⁠⁠Podcast

Transcript

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0:00.0	It was probably the toughest day of my life because we just went into administration.
0:07.1	That was just the hardest day of my life.
0:09.2	Like the day before, I was up 24 hours just to try to find a way to rescue us.
0:14.3	What was the business valued at at that time?
0:16.2	Over 100 million.
0:17.9	When we went under, I was like, the easiest options would have been to just disappear
0:23.0	and be depressed. That is when I decided, regardless who was going to pick us up, I said,
0:28.9	I had enough. I'm an entrepreneur. If I've done it once, I can do it twice. I'm going to start
0:33.0	again. She lived the dream every founder wanted. Scaling a startup into a $100 million global brand.
0:39.4	And then she lost everything twice.
0:42.3	What she's learned since might just change how you think about business, failure and success.
0:47.0	This is Christina Carlson.
0:48.6	Starting again, it's been a humbling experience.
0:51.2	We put all our dollars back into the business.
0:53.2	So we had nothing in the end.
0:55.2	And the great way of being an entrepreneur when you start is having no money because you just
0:59.6	have to be creative and you have to come up with ideas that you wouldn't do when you have a big
1:05.0	team and a lot of money in the bank. What are the three things that you've taken now that you're
1:09.9	putting into dream life?
1:11.1	You know, number one, passion, passion for the product and be authentic and being real,
1:15.3	living and breathing the brand. But the most important is to hear the stories. Learn the proven
1:24.9	methods and accelerate your growth and future through entrepreneurship.
	...

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