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We’re bringing you the scoop on a new Under 30 community member. Up this week: Miri Buckland, who made the Forbes 30 Under 30 Consumer Technology list in 2022 as the founder of Landing, a digital interior design platform. Now, she’s pivoted the company to Zeen, a “Canva for shoppable products,” where creators can create visual collages of their outfits, interiors or interests, and link out from the images or items included. The following has been slightly edited for length and clarity.
You’re a startup founder. What’s the most startup-founder thing about you? I can make anywhere my office—catch me on calls from the gym, sidewalk, my parents’ house…
How about the least? I don’t drink caffeine.
When did you realize you wanted to build a company? I never expected to start a company. Landing started as a class project—one that just kept growing and evolving. We incorporated, built a team, and hit some crazy milestones. But in many ways, it still feels like a project to me. It took me a long time to own the title of “founder.”
You initially founded Landing as an interior design platform. Can you walk me through what the subsequent iterations of the platform looked like? My cofounder Ellie [Buckingham] and I are obsessed with the idea of empowering creativity. We initially set out to solve the problem of visualizing physical spaces through a collage-based interior design platform, The Landing Home. Our users immediately started creating collages far beyond interior design, like vision boards, fandom art, outfit planning. That behavior led us to build Landing, a social collaging app dubbed ‘Gen Z’s Pinterest,’ which scaled to more than 1 million downloads and landed us a billboard in Times Square.
Fashion was always the biggest vertical on Landing and we saw firsthand how people wanted to shop from each other’s collages, constantly asking “Where did you get that dress?” or “What brand is that?” That insight inspired our latest product, Zeen, a design tool for tastemakers. With Zeen, we’re leveraging our expertise from Landing to empower creators to craft, monetize and distribute shoppable visual content.
What’s been the biggest challenge in navigating this transition from Landing to Zeen? We’ve built strong gut instincts on when to pivot so making the decision to shut down Landing and go all in on Zeen was not difficult. The challenging part was communicating the change to our users.
Who is your target audience with Zeen? Zeen is built for the curators—visual content creators with the scarce talent of taste. Across fashion, lifestyle, beauty, wellness, travel, cooking and hosting, Zeen creators have avid communities who come to them for product recommendations on Instagram, TikTok and Substack. Our creators are time-poor but taste-rich. Zeen makes their content creation process seamless so they can focus on what they do best: curating and creating.
How much funding do you have? What was your pitch to investors? We’ve raised $9 million since founding the company in 2019. We pitch Zeen as “Canva for shoppable products,” built for a new generation of creators. Zeen isn’t just another design tool, it’s a monetization engine that helps creators turn their recommendations into revenue, eliminating tedious hyperlinking and lost links.
What’s a prediction you have about the future of the content creation industry? We’re in a transitional phase of internet culture. As AI-generated content infiltrates our feeds, we’ll look to humans with the scarce talent of taste to be our guides. Kyle Chayka writes brilliantly and extensively about this topic.
How do you see Zeen tapping into the constantly changing content ecosystem? Zeen is launching at a pivotal moment as more creators seek to own their audience and monetize beyond social media algorithms. Case in point: Substack says fashion and beauty subscriptions are up 80% year-on-year! Zeen serves as a connective tissue between affiliate curation, design, and distribution, giving creators the tools to inspire their communities while earning from their recommendations.
You’ve recently started filming “day in your life” videos, or other clips where you take followers along on your journey as a founder. What’s something you do every single day? Talk to our creators. I lead all things go-to-market at Zeen, so I’m texting, DM-ing, zooming with our creators every single day to gather feedback and collaborate on new ideas. We’re a community-led company through and through.
Is there someone (in your industry or totally separate) that you look up to or go to for advice? My peers: founders like Emma Bates (Diem), Aagya Mathur (Aavia), Selin Sonmez (Snag), Dini Mullaji (Sitch). There’s no one more willing to hype you up or give you real talk than fellow founders who are in the trenches with you.
What’s your most-used app on your phone? Gcal. Or maybe my Oura app.
Is there a book you’ve read, podcast you’ve listened to, newsletter you subscribe to, or anything else that you think all other young founders or creatives should learn from? We actually used to have a team book club to discuss all our favorite articles and implications for what we were building. That was cute of us, we should bring it back!
Recently, I’ve been loving the Ladies Who Launch podcast by Rochelle Humes. The episode with Emma Grede is gold!
What’s a hot take you have about your industry or life in general? Waitlist sign ups are meaningless. Until someone actually starts using or, even better, paying for your product, don’t read into it.
How do you see AI impacting your work in the coming years? AI is making it easier than ever to start and build a company: it’s automating the boring stuff, increasing engineering velocity, enabling much faster iteration on marketing ideas, and ultimately letting us scale Zeen with a leaner team. |
