Kong’s Sephora stores felt like exactly the right first step. Inside Retail: After years of operating as a fully direct-to-consumer brand, why was now the right time for Rēphr to enter physical retail? Kenny Leung: For us, retail has always been about getting closer to the people who use our brushes. Online, we hear from our community constantly, but we rarely get to watch someone pick up a brush, touch it and try it live.  We’d actually been looking into opening our own store and quickly realised how capital-intensive it is, not to mention the operational expertise we still lacked. Right around that time, Sephora reached out, and partnering with them just made perfect sense as our next step. IR: Why did Hong Kong, and Sephora Hong Kong specifically, make sense as the first retail market for Rēphr? KL: Hong Kong’s density made it an ideal first stop. Seven million people are served by just seven Sephora stores, which meant we didn’t have to put up a massive amount of capital for the initial launch (turns out, physical shelf space is very expensive!). It’s also a city with a deeply ingrained retail shopping culture and customers who prefer to touch, feel, and explore before they buy, making it an ideal fit for our products. IR: Are there particular markets or regions you see as priorities for future retail expansion? KL: This is something we’re trying not to rush at the moment. We’re a digitally native brand still learning how to do physical retail properly, and our traditional Kumano brush production simply takes time to scale up without compromising quality. When we are ready, Singapore is very interesting to us. It has a similar density and shopping culture to Hong Kong, along with a large English-speaking population that is already engaged with our social media presence. Canada is the other obvious priority, since it’s home for us. IR: Rephr was founded by former tech workers. How did that outsider perspective shape the business? KL: Perhaps the most unique thing we brought over from tech was the habit of shipping, listening, and iterating. The beauty industry tends to develop products in long, secretive cycles and launch them with a big reveal. We did the exact opposite. We released early versions, asked customers what we needed to fix, and let them vote on what we should make next. This community-led development framework has yielded unique products, such as an eyelash curler with two distinct curvatures to accommodate a wider range of eye shapes. IR: What have been the biggest operational challenges in scaling a community-driven business model? KL: As our community has grown, it’s become much harder to process everyone’s feedback in a meaningful way. In the early days, we personally read every single message and feedback form, which just isn’t feasible anymore. This is where we’ve found a strong use case for AI. We use it to ensure that every word we receive is captured, synthesised, and factored directly into our product development flow. IR: Do you think consumers are becoming more selective and intentional with beauty purchases amid economic uncertainty? KL: Economic uncertainty definitely plays a role, but I also think we are coming out of a period of fast beauty. That era was largely driven by platforms like TikTok Shop, where there was always a new viral release being marketed to us. I think customers have gotten much smarter about their purchases and are shifting back toward being intentional and quality-driven. Personally, we are loving this shift away from viral marketing and back toward providing long-term value, which is exactly what our brand has always been built on.