Kiki's Controversial Pivot: Australian Startup Shifts from Subletting to NYC Girls-Only Club, Sparks Backlash
The intersection of gender, real estate and venture capital
As Kiki rebrands to target Manhattan women, critics question the authenticity of claiming 'first' in the girls-only club space, highlighting challenges and skepticism in a city with a history of female-focused social clubs.
Kiki, an Australian-based VC-backed startup, raised $6 million at a $42 million evaluation on an Airbnb-style invite-only subletting company announced that after five years of building their business, they would be pivoting to a New York-based "girl's only club."
The five men who run Kiki hired their first female employee, 25-year-old Caitlin Emiko, who reportedly inspired the change in the target audience, late last year when she joined. According to the company's Instagram bio, Kiki will aim to help Manhattan women "thrive" and "not just live."
"We're not doing subletting anymore," announced the co-founder Toby Thomas-Smith in an Instagram post. The sharp pivot has set the New York startup community on fire with many women-founded startups annoyed by the sheer audacity of a majority male-founded team with a sketchy mission to help young women meet their community.
"Ever since Caitlin joined the team, she’s really enlightened me to this problem I never even knew existed where so many girls in the city have moved here thinking that they’ll live their best possible life, but they’re just living not thriving,” Toby excitedly told his Instagram followers.
Here's the issue, you cannot claim to be the first girls-only social club in New York City and not do your market research about the rise and disastrous fall of previously-run women-focused social clubs throughout the 2010s Girl Boss era. There were iconic female-owned and led social clubs like The Wing, founded by Audrey Gelman in 2016, which have made an indelible mark on modern women's culture in the age of social media.
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Many women in the NYC tech scene have taken to their Tiktok and Substack channels to speak up about Kiki's newfound business venture because the branding is claiming to be the "first" girls-only club. If 2024 is giving 2016 vibes, this is because of the amount of ridicule the founders of KiKi are up against in a world where female venture capital is impossible to garner in an industry that doesn't value women's social spaces.
Moreover, there has been an influx of female-led social communities and apps targeted at lonely and fashion-forward women in metropolitan cities. These communities often focus on connecting women to attend pilates classes, broadway shows, and cocktail social gatherings. It's not so much the mission to bring women together that is problematic, it's the notion that a twenty-something group of male founders thinks they can solve young women's issues by creating an already exclusionary space, moonlighting as a marketplace... for women? The pivot comes as a business shortfall. New York City has strict guidelines and doesn't allow for subletters and sub-leases. Meanwhile, women-led spaces in New York City have previously failed because of a lack of funding as well as lawsuits from males who believed these spaces were discriminating against other genders.
Heads or Tails? Are you betting on the success or downfall of KiKi?
