We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Krystal Penrose a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Krystal thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Crazy stuff happening is almost as certain as death and taxes – it’s technically “unexpected” but something unexpected happening is to be expected and so can you share a crazy story with our readers
The beginning of our business, Kokoleka Collective, was beyond magic. Our Co-Founders, Carlos and Krystal, met on a deeply spiritual journey to study with our teacher, Keith Wilson. Carlos drove South all the way from the Bay Area to Guatemala because of a vision he had of a man with a long beard, who turned out to be our teacher Keith Wilson. I traveled to Guatemala from Portugal based on a continuous voice that told me to return to Guatemala to study with Keith again. Upon my arrival, on my first day there, the first thing I did was meet Carlos. When I was walking on the street, I saw him, and a voice told me “That’s your husband”. I was very embarrassed in the moment but I approached him and we started chatting. Within moments we knew we were about to enter into a big journey together. For the 6 months following our meeting we sat humbly on the front porch of our teacher, Keith, listening and learning from him. At one point he told us we’re ready to go and teach ourselves, and gave us the blessing to go to Kaua’i and start our own business. He also spiritually married us. We moved to Kaua’i one month later, and within 2 months of living there, started Kokoleka Collective. It wasn’t easy to start our business without any funding, investors, no debt, no credit cards… totally grassroots, organic, with no product business knowledge. And with the help of the spirit of cacao, our teacher, and our devotion, Kokoleka has grown 50% – 100% year after year.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
Carlos and Myself (Krystal) are the Co-Founders of Kokoleka Collective. We bring cacao as an ancestral medicine for the modern world.
We do this through our products, which are cacao elixirs that are as easy to prepare as coffee to drink in the morning, as well as trainings, retreats, pilgrimages and immersions with cacao.
When we started drinking cacao, we saw how important this “medicine” was (chocolate IS medicine!) for people in the modern world to learn about. For so long chocolate has had a reputation of being a sweet, a decadent treat. But little do people know that cacao is an ancient medicine with over 700 compounds that heal your body, and 1,000 medicinal uses.
The most intriguing aspect of cacao is that it reduces anxiety and depression, and contains minerals, enzymes and compounds that are bodies in the modern world lack greatly. The second most intriguing aspect of cacao is the timing that it came to the modern world at a time when depression and anxiety were at an all time high, and dietary genocide is peaking.
As a therapist, I saw the opportunity to offer cacao to people who need it most.. the busy folks who work 9-5 jobs. So we were the first ones to pulverize cacao, which usually comes in big blocks, into a powder with herbs and spices, that made it easy to drink in the morning as an alternative to coffee. As you know, coffee is an adrenaline & cortisol producing substance high in caffeine (a drug) that promotes anxiety. On the other hand, cacao is an entheogen that increases energy while decreasing stress in the body and mind. So our goal from the beginning has been to help busy people replace coffee with cacao.
Once people began drinking cacao instead of coffee, they became more curious about spirituality, magic, their gifts. They started to question the “Matrix” and wanted more magic in their lives. That’s when we decided to start teaching people how to share cacao with their communities, through our Cacao Facilitator Training, Becoming the Bridge.
Once folks went through that training, they wanted to meet the lands the cacao came from, so we started taking people to Guatemala to meet the lands and see how cacao is used in a ritual context traditionally.
It has been such a beautiful journey sharing cacao with the world in this way, because it’s always been organic, spirit led, and never forced.
What’s unique about our business is that we’ve spent close to nothing on marketing, and yet we grow substantially every year. We believe that the cacao spirit is truly working through us, and this is the best kind of business we can imagine having!
What’s been the most effective strategy for growing your clientele?
For us, the most effective strategy for marketing has been authenticity. We don’t try to be like anyone else, we do what we’ve received from our own spiritual guidance, and it has led us to where we are. We also paved the way in the cacao industry by pulverizing our cacao so it was easier to use, something no one had done before. Since then many have copied our business model, and we don’t mind actually, because we believe cacao needs to go to more people!
Can you talk to us about how your funded your business?
Carlos and I arrived on Kaua’i in February 2019 with no money, no capital, one beater island car, and we landed in a tiny studio on the North Shore. Even though we had no money, we decided to get help from our local SBDC office, and they helped us form an LLC for free. We were so broke when we started that we showed up to our first farmers market with our product in zip bloc bags and a label printed from our own paper printer, taped on the bags!
We sold out all of our bags, and continued to sell out, as we had a special idea that was fueled by spirit.
Slowly, we began to grow through word of mouth and the farmers markets. People would come to Kaua’i, meet us, and want to bring cacao back to there they live. That’s how we grew to over 50 stores over the US.
To this day we still have not taken out a loan, had an investor, got a grant… we’ve grown our business slowly, humbly and organically. This has allowed us to grow at a rate that’s sustainable for us, and not get bought out by investors.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.kokolekacollective.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kokolekacollective/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kokolekacollective/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcVNf4eL1dnEfZggoQSIywQ
Image Credits
Johnathan Quest Brown Nehemias Sancoy