Inside The Cult Of Kibu - Company Business and Marketing

Industry Standard, The, Dec 25, 2000 by Lori Gottlieb

That meant some Faces would have to be fired. "OK, you can let them go," the CEO replied. I mentioned that maybe she should be the one to do that since, well, I'd barely met these people, nor did I hire them. But she was adamant that I wield the ax. "And they're not being fired," she corrected me. "They're being unhired." Apparently, "firing" was bad for the culture.

The Face of Animals took her unhiring gracefully (she had a day job at the local zoo), but the Face of Advice immediately burst into tears. This was followed by pleading ("The girls need me!"), hysteria (hiccupy sobbing), threats ("I want my image taken off the site immediately!") and although I'm no therapist, what seemed like suicidal ideation ("This job meant everything to me! It was my life!"). To make matters worse, I canceled the Face of Advice's upcoming story, "How to Deal With Rejection." A couple days later, I called to see how she was doing. "I still can't believe I'm being fired!" she wailed. "Oh, no," I assured her. "You're not being fired. You're just being, you know, unhired." It didn't sound that strange at the time.

The Kool-Aid's buzz really began to wear off after I met one-on-one with the remaining Faces to discuss their respective channels. To be fair, all of them were incredibly nice and talented people. But by no fault of their own, most had been hired to do a job for which they weren't qualified. Over the course of these meetings, I learned that the Face of Horoscopes didn't "believe in astrology"; the Face of Fashion (who drove a Porsche and had a condo in Hawaii) kept forgetting that teen girls shop at Gap, not Gucci; the Face of Beauty used the word luscious so incessantly (luscious lipstick, luscious liner, luscious lids) that when I did a search for "luscious" and left "replace with" blank, her word count snot down by 30; and the Face of Guys (a Backstreet Boys look-alike) thought I was being unreasonable because I wouldn't let him wax poetic about his favorite men's magazine, Maxim, on a site that was supposed to be providing "insight" and "inspiration" to teen girls.

At the end of my first month, I attended Fortune magazine's extravagant party in honor of "cool companies." Thanks to our ubiquitous media coverage, Kibu made the cut. I worked the room and spouted buzzwords from our press releases (Fresh! Knowledgeable! Uninhibited! Empowering!). Then I drove home and stayed up until 3 a.m. editing pieces on conditioning mascaras, seamless bras and why hair gel is better than pomade. Something had to change.

month 2: SILICON VALLEY 90210 Apparently, our CEO needed a change, too. At the next all-hands meeting, she announced that, in the interest of preventing burnout, she was heading to a beach in Hawaii. By coincidence, our co-founder was already in Hawaii, as was our Face of Fashion. At a later all-hands we were treated to photos of the three perched on stools at a hotel's beachfront bar.

With our bosses bronzing, certain things about the company culture became clear to me for the first time. I noticed that everyone at Kibu looked the same (tight Lycra tops, wedgy sandals, perfect bodies), acted the same (kiss-kiss, rah-rah enthusiasm), spoke the same ("Rockin'!" "Right on!" "LOVE it!"), and had the same interests (weddings and engagements, the perfect G-string). They all sported lavender toenail polish and got regular massages, waxes and facials. They dutifully coaxed any unseemly frizzy hair into glossy, straight tresses like Jennifer Aniston's. Everyone looked like they'd just stepped off the set of Beverly Hills 90210 or Dawson's Creek. I, on the other hand, worked 80-hour weeks, broke out in stress acne, stopped exercising and let my curly hair air-dry as I returned an onslaught of calls on the way to work each morning.