Daniel Kiyoi: Co-Founder of Nocturnal Skincare

Episode 889

What happens when you've spent years helping build some of the world's biggest beauty brands—and decide it's time to create one that's completely different?
On this episode of The Kara Goldin Show, I'm joined by Daniel Kiyoi, Co-Founder and Chief Creative Officer of Nocturnal Skincare. Before launching Nocturnal, Daniel built his career at iconic companies including Estée Lauder, Smashbox Cosmetics, Tarte Cosmetics, TULA, and L'Oréal. After years of helping shape global beauty brands, he set out to build one rooted in something much deeper: intentional design, cultural authenticity, and products that truly perform.
Daniel shares the story behind Nocturnal, a luxury skincare brand inspired by Japandi—the fusion of Japanese minimalism and Scandinavian functionality. We discuss why he and his co-founder spent four years developing the brand before launching, why they chose to begin with a single hero product, and why they believe the future of skincare is about creating fewer, smarter products that work with the skin rather than against it.
We also dive into the unexpected success of the brand's now cult-favorite Japandi Knot Bag, how Daniel's Japanese heritage influences everything from product design to storytelling, and what he's learned about entrepreneurship after years working inside some of the biggest companies in beauty.
Whether you're a founder, marketer, product builder, or simply fascinated by how meaningful brands are created, this conversation is packed with practical insights on patience, creativity, authenticity, and building a company with a clear point of view.
Now on The Kara Goldin Show.

Resources from
this episode:

Transcript

Kara Goldin 0:00
I am unwilling to give up. That I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be. I want to be. We just want to make sure you will get knocked down, but just make sure you don’t get knocked out. Knocked out. So your only choice should be go focus on what you can control. Control. Control. Hi everyone, and welcome to the Kara Goldin Show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world’s greatest leaders. We’ll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs, and really some of the most interesting people of our time. Can’t wait to get started. Let’s go! Let’s go! Hi, everyone, and welcome back to the Kara Goldin Show. I love talking to founders who take years, not months, to build something they truly believe in. Today’s guest is Daniel Kiyoi, co-founder and chief creative officer of Nocturnal Skincare. And if you have not heard of Nocturnal Skincare yet, get ready because this is such an amazing, amazing product. So, or series of products, group of products. So, before starting Nocturnal, Daniel spent years helping build some of the biggest names in beauty, including Smashbox, Tarte, Tula-you name it. I cannot wait to hear more about those experiences. But then he and his co-founder decided it was time to create something of their own. So the result is Nocturnal, a luxury skincare brand inspired by Japandi, blending Japanese minimalism with Scandinavian functionality and built around the idea that thoughtful design, clinical performance, and cultural authenticity can all exist together. I cannot wait to hear more from Daniel about everything that he has done and everything that he’s doing to co-found and build this company, Nocturnal Skincare, so very excited to meet you and have you here.

Daniel Kiyoi 2:04
I’m very excited to be here, and so nice to meet you as well.

Kara Goldin 2:08
So, for listeners who are just discovering Nocturnal, how do you describe the brand today, and what problem were you trying to solve when you created it?

Daniel Kiyoi 2:18
So, we like to look at the brand as if it were a person, and separate it into the mind and the heart. So the mind of the brand is that we did a lot of studies on the circadian rhythm of your skin, and found that the 24 hour cycle that your skin is on is different than other parts of your body. So your liver, your brain, your skin-they’re all on different circadian cycles. And essentially, when the sun rises in the morning, your skin barrier gets really thick, and your skin goes into a protect a sleep mode where it’s just shielding itself from the sun and the environment. And then at night, your skin barrier starts to get thinner, and your skin exits that sleepy mode and goes into an awake mode, and that’s why the brand is called Nocturnal, because your skin really functions like a Nocturnal animal and is awake and repairing and highly, highly functional at night. So that’s the mind of the brand, and then the heart of the brand is a term that you mentioned in the intro, which is Japandi. It’s a combination of Japanese and Scandinavian cultures. So my whole family is Japanese. Katie’s family is Scandinavian, and it’s a term that blends those two cultures. And it’s really, really interesting because you know, having so much experience in beauty, the two of us, we always thought that the mind part of the brand, the science, the efficacy, convincing people that it had incredible innovation and incredible technology would be the entry point into the brand. But really, it’s been Japandi that’s been the entry point. People love the heart and soul of the brand and the world that is created around that Japanese Scandinavian look, so that’s the overarching view of the brand.

Kara Goldin 4:08
How did you and your co-founder connect?

Daniel Kiyoi 4:12
We connected at Tarte Cosmetics, actually. So I started there when I was quite young, and I helped them grow to you know what they are today, and and she entered in probably midway through my time there, and we worked together all day, every day. And honestly, she was always the last person that I would talk to before I went to bed, and she would be on the phone with me, her poor husband, like in bed talking to me about all the things that we needed to get done for the next day, and in creative and marketing, I worked in creative and she worked in marketing, so we were just in touch all the time, and we really built a friendship and a partnership during the many years that we worked at Tarte together. Because you know, when it’s so intense. And you’re spending so much time together. You really you have to either bond or you want to kill each other. And we really bonded.

Kara Goldin 5:09
It’s so so true. So you spent years helping other brands build out their brand. And what ultimately made you decide now’s the time to go and build one of my own and my own beliefs. I mean, like, why couldn’t it have happened five years before or five years later? I mean, what was it when on that day when you decided we need to just go do this?

Daniel Kiyoi 5:36
I think the short answer is the creative side of me, it needed a little bit of time to really figure out exactly what I wanted to do. I left Tarte because I wanted to start my own brand, and then I got distracted by all of these professionals and influencers who needed help building product at that time and building brands, and they had such creative, strong visions for themselves. They knew exactly what they wanted. It kind of made me think, “Oh, I don’t know if I truly know exactly what I want creatively and from a brand perspective. I’m going to help them with their brands work on the operational system in order to get those products up and running, and then I’ll circle back, and after working with them and really seeing their visions, it was it allowed me to kind of take space for myself and really think about what is my personal taste and how is it different than Tarte and different than the people that I’m working with and helping them build their brands. And so I think that once that creative-I don’t know-not genius, I guess-but once that creative spark hit, then I knew it was the right time.

Kara Goldin 6:50
Your philosophy-I’ve heard you in other interviews talk about this: fewer, smarter products. I love that philosophy. I guess you’re seeing that more and more in beauty now versus you know building out with tons and tons of SKUs, but I would think in some ways it’s easier, in some ways it’s harder to do what you’re doing with just very very few products because you want to make sure that the ingredients are all there and in in a small amount of SKUs, right? I’d love to hear you talk about that a little bit more. How did you make that decision?

Daniel Kiyoi 7:24
Yeah, there’s definite pros and cons, and it is a lot of pressure to have one product. We are now two and a half years old, and we still only have that one formulation. It’s broken into different sizes, so we have full size and travel size, and it comes in kits. But still, at the end of the day, we only developed one skincare serum, and it’s been our solo product. And I think that the main one of the main reasons is that we really wanted to stay true to that heritage Japandi story that we started telling from the very beginning. And it’s very much embedded in Japanese and Scandinavian cultures to have less, but have them be incredibly well made, and craftsmanship and detail and design are so important in those cultures. And so it was a really nice exercise for Katie and I to dig deep into that heritage and really figure out what is important in those cultures, and the things that I just mentioned really are, and that informed what we wanted to do, which is create a hero product with clinical testing, with true innovation and cutting edge science, with a soul, with creativity, with that quality, and I think that ultimately, too, we had both come from businesses that were releasing a lot of product. Tart and she had come from Tula. I actually didn’t come from Tula. She left Tarte and went to Tula, and then we rejoined. But both brands, you know, released a lot of product, which isn’t a bad thing. It just is, you know, when you’re working at that speed, sometimes you just want something different.

Kara Goldin 9:01
Yeah. No, definitely. So when the two of you launched the concept, and obviously it’s around Japan, is kind of at the heart of Nocturnal. But when you think about the philosophy, even though this has kind of been sitting with you for a while, you have to bring in the community and the consumer. How have you managed to do that through, like, what channels are you really using to get that message out there? And are you telling lots of stories? Are you? I mean, how do you get the consumer to really understand what hopefully they’re going to be purchasing?

Daniel Kiyoi 9:41
That’s a really, really good question, and we talk about it all the time. I’d say organic social is probably the main area that we do all that storytelling because it just people have, you know, are there and they want the stories, and I think that. The main way we tell it, and that we’ve learned, is effective and relatable, is to tell it through personal stories and not just general like this is what they do in Japan or this is what they do in Scandinavia. Of course, we do have some baseline education on those cultural, you know, foundations, but a lot of it is really personal, and we tell a story of our parents or our grandparents and their what they passed down to us. And I think that in this day and age, especially, people really want something that feels really human and something that feels like it has depth and that connectedness that people are looking for, and so I think instead of being super generic on the cultures, as I mentioned, we are hyper specific and how that culture has impacted us as people.

Kara Goldin 10:55
I feel like the consumer response to to a brand and and products is always the energy, as long as it’s positive or as long as it’s informative. I should say, not necessarily all positive, but founders they need that feedback, right? In order to you know tell you that you’re doing the right thing, and oftentimes maybe there’s a story where somebody shares with you how they’ve been using the product or how they can’t live without it in some ways. I mean, I I certainly heard that about the hint consumer. You know how much people you know really wanted to have that and they were relying on it. And when they couldn’t find the product, they would get angry. And you know, it was just there was like a whole series that went on, and and many people’s storytelling that they were sharing with the brand. I’m so curious if you’ve had any of those type of stories that made you smile a little bit, or made you kind of think about you know what your brand was doing to help others.

Daniel Kiyoi 12:00
Oh yeah, we’ve definitely had a ton of those stories. I think one of the main ones that I can think of is it’s really changed people’s nighttime skincare routine and how they think about it. We’ve had people come up to me and to Katie and say, you know, I set an alarm at 10 p.m. because you guys talk a lot about how it’s important to apply your skincare before 10 p.m. and that’s really when your skin starts to come alive. And the whole Nocturnal aspect of the product. And people will say this all the time, like it has changed my nighttime routine. It’s changed my thinking about it. And I I like to envision my skin coming alive at night when I set this alarm as a reminder, so that’s one thing that’s really fun. And honestly, after people started telling me that, then I did it for myself too, and set a reminder on my phone. And I naturally was doing a nighttime routine, but that alarm has helped me be super consistent. And so I know, oh, okay, I need to shower. I need to wash my face. I know my alarm’s coming in, so it’s fun to get customer feedback and then have it impact your own routine. And I think related to that is just people being really mindful of their bodies. And when we talk about the circadian cycle of their skin, it it we hear all the time. I’ve never even thought about the fact that my skin could be on a cycle, or I’ve never thought how it would be on a different cycle than other parts of my body. And I think it just gives people this moment where they check in with themselves and check in with their health and how they’re thinking about it. So we get that feedback a lot, where it’s like it really made me think about the different cycles in my body, and and that was nice for me to go and do like a little bit of research and and look at circadian cycles. And you know, sometimes people come up to us and say we have been down a long rabbit hole now of circadian science because you told us about this product. It like opens up this whole lane of information. So that’s another thing that we get a lot, which is really nice.

Kara Goldin 14:03
Can you talk a little bit about that science and why do you feel it’s so imperative for people, and why? And also, like, why are people so drawn to it once you, you know, get them tuned into it too?

Daniel Kiyoi 14:18
I think everyone or most people want to improve themselves and to learn and be educated on these little things that can help make you healthier, extend your life, make you look better, etc. And so, I think people really tune in to that circadian information because they want to to learn and to improve themselves, and just to give you a little bit more information, I know I touched on the skin barrier and how it gets thicker during the day and thinner at night. It’s really about, you know, you’re on a cellular level, your skin is repairing itself up to three times more at night while you’re. While your body’s asleep and your skin is awake, and because your skin barrier is thinner, that is the time to be putting on your actives. However, one really important distinction is it’s not just any skincare that you put on your face isn’t necessarily going to help your body create more collagen or recover faster because your skin is still a barrier. You need product that has delivery systems within the formula to help bypass that barrier. Because even though the skin barrier is thinner, you know that doesn’t mean that every ingredient is going to enter into it. So there’s a lot of marketing around peptides, around ceramides, around all of these things, and just because it has something in it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s affecting your body on a cellular level. So you just have to look into what the technology is, and is that ingredient actually viable and doing what it says it’s doing, or is it just sitting on top of the skin and like basically evaporating?

Kara Goldin 16:01
Yeah, it’s you know it’s hard when you’re you’ve kind of grown up in the cosmetics industry, working with a lot of incredible brands over the years, and probably know a lot more about ingredients and actives and you know innovation versus marketing. But it’s very confusing for most consumers to to understand exactly what’s going on. Is there something today like around actives that you think are you know super great that you’re really really excited about? Obviously, your own product, but but is there something that you’re just like thank God this is here now.

Daniel Kiyoi 16:43
That’s so like a specific ingredient you’re asking if I’m excited. Yeah,

Kara Goldin 16:48
like ingredients that you’re really that you’re super super excited about whether it’s in your product or whether it’s something just in the industry that you’re kind of watching.

Daniel Kiyoi 16:58
I think the answer to that is related to what I was just talking about in delivery systems, where I’m not just looking for a hot ingredient of the moment, like a copper peptide or like a PDRN or whatever it might be, I’m really looking for is the the ingredient that is on or in the formula paired with some form of delivery system in order to optimize that ingredient. That’s kind of what I’m looking for in this day and age. And I feel like we went through this big cycle of just hitting hard on ingredients, and that’s all you need is like this new miracle ingredient. But what I’ve learned through the study, just through Nocturnal, is that again. It’s not just about that ingredient. It’s about what is the mechanism that is taking that ingredient into the skin. And I think that my advice to people that are looking for skincare these days that might be a little bit more effective is first always check for clinical studies and see what the clinical study was and how they talked about it, and that’s the. It’s really different than a consumer panel. I think that people still customers still get confused in this day and age because they see a percentage and they’re like, “Oh, it was studied, but a clinical study and a consumer panel are really different. The consumer panel is just opinion. The clinical study is an actual research study that’s 10s and 10s of 1000s of dollars to conduct on many different people and faces, and it’s measured. And so, within that clinical study, I always encourage people like do some research. How are they talking about the study, and what were they studying?

Kara Goldin 18:40
So you’ve built brands with other companies. How different is it when you know you’re you’re the co-founder? You’re the one that’s making the final decisions. Is it much harder than you thought, or much more much different than you thought it was going to be?

Daniel Kiyoi 18:59
It’s much harder than I thought it would be. I think I. I think it always goes back to taking a moment to check in with your intuition, because in the flurry of we have to make these decisions, finance is stressful. We’re not necessarily hitting sales marks, or we have to come up with this marketing campaign, I think it can really you can really lose yourself in all of the little to do items because you’re executing so many different things at once, and i I think that I didn’t expect to essentially like lose myself in all of that, and I’ve now had to make practices of of really thinking about what my intuition is. What is it that I feel, and that’s what’s going to make the marketing or the product different because it’s not about copying someone else. It’s really about it’s making the space to come from myself and for Katie. To make the space so it can come from her, and that was a very unexpected challenge. It’s hard to find time for yourself when all these other things are like pulling at your attention.

Kara Goldin 20:12
Yeah, no, it’s it’s so so true because you’ve got to build not just the buzz, but also the community and the consumer, and and then the partnerships, like where you’re going to be sold. If you’re going to be sold, you know, an omni-channel, whatever it is. I mean, all of those decisions need to be made. And so often people think that you know it’s really, oh, I can just go do this. I mean, I should just go start my own company, and they just have no idea how many decisions there are.

Daniel Kiyoi 20:46
I think you’re in a relationship with your business just like you are in relationship with people. If you aren’t checking in with yourself and and knowing where you’re at, it’s really hard to be in relationship with your business. And I think I’ll give you a good example of something I tell people a lot, which is that between Japandi and my community of friends, everyone was all about like neutral colors and minimalist and all these things. And I was like, “Ooh, yeah, like I love. I’m also a minimalist. I also love like all these neutral colors or whatnot. And one day it just hit me. I was like, I actually am not a minimalist, and I actually don’t like those super like minimalist colors and creams and all of that. I’m more of a maximalist. I love rich gem tones. I love earth colors. I like stacks of books on the floor, and I think I had a reset where I just needed to follow my own intuition. And I remind myself of that moment all the time because it it really was a time where I was like, okay, this is who I am. This is me at my core, and I, yeah, I really go back to that. And I encourage people if you have a moment like that where you can check in with yourself and really identify who you are, it helps you in your business.

Kara Goldin 22:14
Yeah, definitely. So when you look at well, you talked about the packaging. So how did you make that decision ultimately to on what direction you would go with with the packaging. How did you and your co-founder ultimately make that decision?

Daniel Kiyoi 22:30
So, in terms of color, it’s related to what I just said, where we like it wasn’t us or me to do a light cream color or all of these like neutrals, we wanted something that felt, and I specifically wanted something that felt really rich and full of depth, and that’s where the the green came from, and it was inspired by both greens in Japan and greens that we find like in the forest and in Sweden at night. And then in terms of the refill system, because for people who don’t know and haven’t seen the product, the serum is on a refill system. It has a beautiful glass bottle, a dark green pump, and then this cap with our Nocturnal heritage crest that’s kind of stamped into gold on the top of the cap. And the refill, you know, we had always heard the beauty industry struggles with refill systems; that it doesn’t work, that people don’t do it, and we do believe in sustainability because it’s important to both Japan and Scandinavia. It’s not our number one message. We’re not saying like, “Oh, we’re we’re only a sustainable brand, but it was a really important element, and we really believe in show not tell. Like we’re not going to just like you know greenwash and say oh we’re sustainable. It’s it’s and I think that people because we weren’t necessarily shouting that on from the rooftops that they really liked the system and they really saw that the outer packaging took a lot of time and care and craftsmanship, and they wanted to save it. And it’s a shame to throw away that bottle every single time you run out of product. And so I think the refills drive, you know, a third of our business. It was way more successful than ever could have hoped, and people really like getting that refill. It’s lighter to ship. It is really, really easy to put the cartridge back on the pump and then back in the bottle. And again, people feel less guilty. It’s just one of those little things that people can do to improve themselves, like we were talking about before. People always just want to take these like little steps to improve, and so I think that that’s why people really like the packaging. And it’s, you know in my opinion very stunning.

Kara Goldin 24:44
So can you talk about the beautiful knot bag that you have that is just absolutely the Japandi knot bag is just darling. I don’t know what to call it, darling, inspiring. What you’ve what you’ve done in in terms of creating something where people are talking about it too, and which I think is really really great.

Daniel Kiyoi 25:10
It’s so wild. I the knot bag truly changed my life. It it was really crazy. Who ever could have seen it coming? Definitely not me, but we, as a part of the experience, originally I wanted the product to come in the bag as like the the packaging, and so when you got a delivery, you would get this little Japanese bag. And the history of it is, we didn’t do the design; we just modernized it a little bit. But it comes from ancient Japan, where travelers on the road would use it to carry little sewing materials, or money, or beauty items. And the design is so genius because it has one shorter handle and one longer handle, and you just weave the longer handle through the short one, and it just carries all these little items and is really really beautiful and unique. And the only change, or we made two changes to the ancient design. We put it in a Scandinavian inspired velvet, and then we added a little magnet to make the items more secure for people that are running around in cars and on trains and stuff in in this day and age. and And the response was wild. We talked about the bag, and the video went viral. I think it has over 6 million views and just so much engagement. It was crazy, and we were we were just giving it away with the product, and we had to put it up for sale because people were demanding. They just wanted this bag, and they wanted more and more of it. We had to do different colors. We did it in an upcycled denim, which sold out so fast. And I think that it people just loved the design and they liked the heritage story behind it because it was it felt authentic and really unique. And it’s not just your average bag. And now, of course, we released the bag over you know two and a half years ago, it. I mean, we’ve seen a ton of dupes and like a lot of coffees, as one does when something goes viral. So that’s been really interesting too.

Kara Goldin 27:12
I love it. And the last question: So when are you going to produce any other products in outside of this, of this, I’m sure you are an innovator. So I’m sure you’ve been thinking about it, and and I’m sure your very loyal consumers are very excited to have more from you. So, at what point do you think you’ll? Will you ever actually launch another product.

Daniel Kiyoi 27:42
Yes, it is time. It is time for our hero product to have more siblings joining the family. We are launching a few products in the fall, and then there’s a pipeline for the next couple of years. The majority of our future products are being made in Japan, which is really exciting, and we’re still having the same ethos where we won’t launch a crazy amount, but we are excited to launch more because the demand is there, and we have a lot of exciting innovation that we’ve honestly been working on for five years.

Kara Goldin 28:16
I love it. Well, Daniel, thank you so much for joining today and sharing all about Nocturnal Skincare, I absolutely love the company and the the sole product that you have now. But I cannot wait to see more of the product innovation that you’re going to be doing, and I will be watching for it in the fall for sure. Everybody needs to follow along. Actually, purchase the product too. And as always, thank you so much for listening. Thank you, Daniel, for joining us today to share all about the journey as well. And best of luck with everything. I know you’re going to do awesome. It’s like such a beautiful, well done product, and especially for your first outside of the big company launch as a founder, I love it. So definitely, everyone needs to give it a try. So thanks again, and thanks everyone for listening.

Daniel Kiyoi 29:14
Thanks, Kara.

Kara Goldin 29:15
Thanks again for listening to the Kara Goldin Show. If you would, please give us a review, and feel free to share this podcast with others who would benefit, and of course, feel free to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode of our podcast. Just a reminder that I can be found on all platforms at Kara Goldin. I would love to hear from you too, so feel free to DM me. And if you want to hear more about my journey. I hope you will have a listen or pick up a copy of my Wall Street Journal best-selling book, Undaunted, where I share more about my journey, including founding and building. Hint: We are here every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Thanks for listening and. Goodbye for now.

Click to subscribe:

Listen on Apple Podcasts
Listen OnApple Podcasts
Listen on Spotify
Listen OnSpotify
Listen on Overcast
Listen OnOvercast
Listen on PlayerFM
Listen OnPlayerFM

People Also Liked

886

Caroline Dell: Co-Founder of Goodword

885

Dr. Whitney Hovenic: Co-Founder of SPOOGE

884

Ayla Barmmer: Founder & CEO of FullWell

883

Lauren Bartholomeusz: Co-Founder of KeraFactor

882

Keith O’Briant: CEO of HYDRINITY