Johnny Loh – launched a Kickstarter and received funding for 800k - Co-founder of Icosa kitchenware
How did you come up with the name of Icosa?
Initially, we called it Icosa living. My business partner is really interested in sacred geometry, mandalas and platonic shapes. Icosa is short for Icosahedron. According to Plato, each shape represents one of the elements of nature, and Icosahedron represents water. Water represents flow, change, and it gives the freedom of creativity.
How did you get into the kitchenware business?
We were on Amazon, and we were looking for products with the easiest revenue. We realized kitchenware was really popular. We wanted to come up with a universal brand that could represent the new potential products that we were interested in selling; that’s where we came up with ‘Icosa Living’. When we realized people were really into coffee, we knew we needed to create a brand specifically catered to coffee drinkers, and that’s when we created the sub-brand ‘Icosa Brewhouse’. This eventually led us to creating our cold brew coffee maker.
How was the business of your kitchenware products?
We used to sell products like cups, knives and other kitchenware items. We were quite successful, and we would always reach the 1st page of amazon within the first 2 months.
How do you do your sales?
Is your product sold in retail stores?We only do online sales. We haven’t partnered with any distribution companies or retailers despite having been approached by many companies. One of my goals is to travel the world; if we have more customer service as a result of partnering with other retailers and distributors, it ties us down to business hours and means we have to provide custom solutions to clients and partners. This wouldn’t provide us the same flexibility as selling direct to customers through online channels. We believe in structuring our businesses around the way we want to live our lives and have the freedom to travel.
How did you get into the cold brew business?
What we are good at is finding trending products that are relatively new, and capitalizing when the market is still new. When my partner Vance discovered Cold Brew Coffee we used Google trends to analyze the seasonal and annual trends and found that in USA there was a huge upwards trend. So, we seized the opportunity and the rest is history.
Yes, everyday. But we are still good friends. We both recognize it’s hard to find someone that is willing to face the challenges together. We balance each other out really well, and we each have skills compliment each other. We know we are both better together than without. We are both aligned in our purpose and what we want to do in our lives. better together than without. We are both aligned in our purpose and what we want to do in our lives.