24. Living harmoniously with nature in Beijing. By Miranda

24. Living harmoniously with nature in Beijing. By Miranda

 

I live in a small village north of the Beijing airport. I’ve been more Asia-based since 2009, I have lived everywhere from Cambodia, Indonesia, and I initially came to China to travel. I came directly to Beijing and traveled everywhere: Inner Mongolia, Jiangsu, Guangzhou, just everywhere. Later my work took me to program development, which is why I was living in different places. Around 5 years ago we started sailing and even helped MIT to collect samples from the boat. We’ve sailed from the Caribbean to the Galapagos, through French Polynesia. Our last journey left our boat in Indonesia. When covid started and the borders were closed, I ended up staying in China, because it felt a little more secure and then in the process I started Kiyani, because I needed something active to do and this is something I’ve always wanted to do. KIYANI is an innovative brand that has reimagined body care products to be more sustainable.

 

 

I’m Native American from the Navajo tribe and growing up Native American, we were taught that the importance of life is to live harmoniously with the environment. This means respecting nature, respecting animals, respecting water and being grateful for all the resources that are given to me. So I wanted to create a brand that followed this ideology. Because of the cultural significance of growing up Native American is important to me, it was important to identify the brand as being Native American and Kiyani is short iteration of my clan, which is Kinyaa’áanii/Kiyaa’áanii.

 

What I’ve learned in China is how to operate a business more locally, because I’ve been doing supply chain development, so you get different prices and I know how to operate in terms of efficiency and doing things more local now.

The positive thing about China is the working culture here, I found that people in China are very hardworking, they’ve come above and beyond what their titles should be. And that’s one of the things that keeps me here. Another thing that I love about China is understanding the botanical world, because there’s still so much love and use for TCM. Our shampoo is actually TCM based. I have one customer that said that after she gave birth, she started loosing lots of hair and dermatologists and doctors weren’t able to fix her hair loss problems. She started to use our shampoo, which is based on TCM knowledge and her hair started growing back! Our soap foundation is actually soap berries, which is a Chinese native plant that naturally produces soap.

 

 

Miranda, Kiyani’s product designer and chief soap maker, comes originally from Arizona, the US. She has created eco-friendly home and body products brand Kiyani Botanics, creating products that are zero waste, non-toxic, vegan, biodegradable, low carbon, made from natural ingredients, and have no single-use plastics.

 

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