Kadeya

What I own

Everything commercial at Kadeya runs through me, on both sides of the business.

B2B is the enterprise sale: construction and manufacturing buyers, food and beverage services operators, long cycles and procurement. B2C is the worker who walks up to the station on a Tuesday and decides whether to come back. Brand, demand generation, sales, revenue and the RevOps and CRM underneath all of it, for both.

At a company this size, owning the growth function means running it, so I am setting the strategy and also in the CRM on a Tuesday afternoon.

The mandate has widened over three years. It now includes the parts of the experience that decide whether a customer comes back: UX and UI across the station and the app, the user-centred design research behind both, and the lifecycle and loyalty programme that gets bottles returned. I do not own the product, but I am in the room for it, and the research that shaped it came out of my team.

Kadeya, in use

I came in as Director of Marketing to a company with a real product and a brand that undersold it. The identity read as an early-stage tech startup, which made partnership conversations awkward and put a ceiling on what buyers thought the thing was worth. Surveys put the perceived value of a station more than 90% below what it actually cost to build.

There were brand guidelines, but the team said they did not know how to use them. Underneath that was a harder problem: the company had never pinned down what it was at its core. Fixing that was the first chapter of the role, not the job description.

A user-centred design practice, run on hardware.

This project was about the physical station and the screens on it: where a person reaches, what they touch, what the display does while they wait. I ran it with Kadeya’s internal engineering team, so every finding had somewhere to land.

We started with a blank sheet of paper. On site, with manufacturing workers, I walked each person through an imagined trip to the station: you finish a shift, you want a drink, what happens. Then I asked them to mark on the paper where they would expect to do each action.

Nobody was shown a screen or a rendering first, so nobody was correcting our idea. They were drawing theirs. Those maps set the physical placement of controls and the flow of the on-station screens, worked through six layout iterations against ADA reach and height limits.

It also feeds the loyalty programme two projects down. The return loop only works if returning is easy, and easy was decided here.

Kadeya already had a bottle. The open question was the cap, so I ran the same method on it: in-person sessions with manufacturing and construction workers about how a cap actually gets handled in their environment. Gloved hands. A work bench with no free surface. One hand busy. A shift where you put the bottle down twenty times and need to know which one is yours when you come back, which is why we tested randomising colour per person per day.

Those findings became the brief. I worked through multiple concepts to the final design with industrial product designer Joel Williams.

The bottle is not packaging, it is the interface. Each one carries a code that ties it to the person holding it, which is what makes the return loop work and what turns a drink into something the company can respond to: personalised, measurable, and open to engagement long after the vend.

One person, four surfaces, one account.

Separate from the hardware work, this was the UX and UI of the digital experience end to end: the retail experience, the kiosk on the station, the mobile app a worker carries, and the corporate portal dashboard the customer logs into. Four surfaces that have to feel like one product and one account.

Built with Brandcave on design and Innostax on engineering, against research from the people who actually stand at the machine.

This is where the beverage retail experience gets digitised. Every vend, every return and every preference becomes something the company can see and respond to, instead of a transaction that disappears the moment the bottle leaves the machine.

Most seed rounds are run as a sales process. I ran this one as a campaign.

$1.5M across a RUV, a Wefunder community round and direct angel and VC relationships. The strategy was to build an audience before asking it for anything: segment the investor base the way you would a customer base, give each segment a reason to pay attention, and make the company legible before the pitch.

The engine was a ten-episode original podcast, produced in house and cut down into short-form across the funnel: top-of-funnel awareness, mid-funnel credibility with operators and press, and bottom-of-funnel proof for investors already in conversation. One production, three jobs.

Underneath it I built a full-funnel campaign dashboard so the team could see what was working without asking me. Channel performance, funnel stage and contribution in one view, updating live.

The round closed. The more useful outcome is that the content and the dashboard both outlived it and now run the commercial funnel.