With OpenStore Drive, Founder Tiki Frederiksen is Getting Back to What She Loves: Building

Frank Kosarek, Business Development

Jan 19, 2024

Tiki grew her Scandinavian-inspired children’s playmat business all on her own. When she thought she might be ready to sell her brand, she found OpenStore Drive.
OpenStore Drive gave Tiki the opportunity to get paid while she takes 12 months off to focus on her next adventure: building new brands.
We took on the management of Copenhagen Kid in September. In a few months, we’ve scaled the brand’s growth channels, like paid social and affiliate marketing.

When Tiki Rolin Frederiksen, founder of Copenhagen Kid, and her husband heard about OpenStore Drive, they instantly agreed: “we've got to do this.”

Tiki started Copenhagen Kid, her Scandinavian-inspired children’s playmat company, when she became a mom and was searching for playmats of her own. Since then, she’s grown Copenhagen Kid into a popular, high-end playmat brand by leveraging tools like Google Ads to grow her sales. She wanted to take the business to new heights but knew that it would be difficult to do on her own. She was also interested in starting another business. So she started exploring ways to sell Copenhagen Kid.

Although Tiki received offers to buy her business, she realized she wasn’t ready to sell. Through that process, she discovered OpenStore Drive, which would allow her to take 12 months off and get guaranteed income each month, while OpenStore’s marketing and operations experts run her business. In September 2023, Tiki decided to hand over the management of Copenhagen Kid to OpenStore Drive.

Turning a frustration into a business idea

Tiki’s love for Scandinavian design began during her childhood in Denmark. Raised by her Danish mother and her African American father, she spent a lot of time between Denmark and the United States and returned to Copenhagen for design school. From the beginning of her career, Tiki loved the process of building something “from scratch.” She started her first business—a hair products company—when she was in her early twenties, which led to her interest in e-commerce.

When Tiki and her husband moved to Los Angeles, she decided to take a break from work. But that didn’t last long. After having her first baby, she came up with the idea for Copenhagen Kid when she was on the hunt for a playmat that didn’t clash with her minimalistic, Scandinavian style. She saw a “hole in the market” and began designing “something that was really functional but also something that could elevate your space and make it look better,” she says.

$1,000 to $20,000 a month in sales

Tiki and her family flew to Denmark to hold a photo shoot with their newly finished playmats. Once she redesigned her website and hired someone from Sweden to manage Google Ads, Tiki saw her sales soar. Copenhagen Kid’s sales grew from $1,000 per month to $20,000 per month in a matter of weeks.

Despite this success, Tiki became frustrated with some of the realities of running an e-commerce store day-to-day A lot of her capital was tied up in the company. She wasn’t taking home a paycheck every month because she often had to re-invest that money in ads and new products, or use it to cover expenses.

Additionally, Tiki was running her company entirely on her own. She felt like she didn’t have the time or experience to explore new areas of growth. And she knew that to scale Copenhagen Kid even further, she needed to start investing in as many new growth channels as possible.

OpenStore Drive gives Tiki the best of both worlds

Tiki started researching options for selling her business and got some offers from different acquirers, including OpenStore. While she was excited by the cash payout, she wasn’t ready to sell her “baby,” the business she had built from the ground up. When OpenStore’s team called her back with its new offering, OpenStore Drive, she was intrigued.

With OpenStore Drive, Tiki could take 12 months off, while getting paid and maintaining ownership of her brand. OpenStore’s team of experts across merchandising, marketing, customer service, and more, manage Copenhagen Kid, leveraging experience and tools they’ve accumulated from running nearly 50 Shopify brands.

Tiki has felt from the beginning that her business has been in good hands with OpenStore. “OpenStore’s doing a really good job of embodying who I am, because this brand has so much of me in it,” Tiki shares. “What I’ve experienced is that I have actually felt very listened to. I feel like I can be as much a part of this as I want to.”

For Tiki, one of the best parts is getting a paycheck for all of the work she’s put into her business. “It feels like such a milestone to get a paycheck and to see all these years of hard work kind of come to fruition,” Tiki says. It’s a relief for Tiki to no longer be constantly “keep[ing] up with the cash flow.”

OpenStore increases Copenhagen Kid’s Q4 revenue by 30%

Since taking over management of Copenhagen Kid, our team has started exploring areas of potential growth, like price testing and paid social across multiple channels. In fact, we increased Copenhagen Kid’s Q4 revenue by 30% compared to the same period in 2022.

Before she started working with OpenStore, Tiki hadn’t explored paid social channels like Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok. Our creative team got to work and produced more than 50 pieces of unique creatives for those channels. On Facebook and Instagram, we introduced advantaged shopping campaigns which brought in 20% incremental revenue and raised the brand’s AOV (average order value) by 10%. We also launched on TikTok Shop and Instagram Shop, helping to acquire new customers at a 15% lower CAC (cost per acquisition). And through our app gumdrop, which connects brands with influencers for brand deals, we’ve also been able to generate a lot of video content for Copenhagen Kid.

Our team also ran tests to determine whether we should adjust the price of the playmats A few weeks ago, we launched a theme migration test, which involves moving the brand’s existing online storefront onto our Shopify environment so that we can test new strategies for increasing conversion rate, AOV, and other key metrics.

Additionally, we’ve continued experimenting with Google Ads. In the fourth quarter of 2023, we increased Copenhagen Kid’s conversion volume by 13% year-over-year and clicks by 11% year-over-year, while maintaining a profitable ROAS (return on ad spend). We’ve also started testing new product titles optimized for search results.

We’ve also scaled Tiki’s Affiliate Marketing channel by adding two large affiliates, which has helped grow revenue generated from partnerships by 31% quarter-over-quarter.

What’s next for Tiki?

Now that Tiki has more time to herself, she’s getting back to what she’s best at: creating. Tiki’s been sitting on two new brand ideas—a children’s wooden furniture collection and an eco-friendly children’s clothing line—that she’s excited to start working on. Both of these new ideas are inspired by her Danish-American background. “I found my mojo…and that’s bridging the gap between Denmark and America. I would not be able to start these brands if I were running Copenhagen Kid full-time.” Tiki shares.

This year, Tiki is also looking forward to spending more time with family and picking up hobbies, like woodworking. (She’s taking a course right now and built a woodshop in her garage.) But as she says, “Even though I’m taking 12 months off, I still own my business. 100%.”

Take time off like Tiki.

With OpenStore Drive, you can get paid monthly while you take 12 months off to start something new (like another business.)

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Founders' stories/ 4 mins