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MOODY is the intelligence, culture and network for ambitious women. Founders, operators, investors, corporates and creatives in the same group chat. These are the girls who get it.

@get__moody · getmoody.co · est. 2026

MOODY weekly: a dark smudge on australia's ambition

get MOODY — Sun, 08 Nov 2026 22:00:58 GMT

01 — the mood

Hi divas 🤍

Every so often a week comes along that tells you exactly where a country is up to. This was one of them, and it left a dark smudge on Australia’s ambition.

For a decade, Canva has been the story we tell ourselves: a Perth uni student with an idea for a design tool, and proof you could build a world-beater from here. This week it made up to 22% of its roles redundant. A day later Heidi, one of our brightest AI darlings, cut 18% of its team, weeks after raising big. I have so many friends caught up in it, and it is heartbreaking. The mood in tech right now is survival mode: get through today, and don’t ask about tomorrow.

If you’ve been impacted by the layoffs and there’s anything a MOODY girl can do for you, an intro, a coffee, a reference, please let us know. The power of this network is behind you.

Then David Jones, a store older than Federation, went into administration with a lot of small brands’ Christmas caught up in it. I feel for the team there, who have been working so hard to turn around years and years of bad decisions. I feel it most for the founders, because I’ve been one of them (more on that below). K Juliet has been speaking out publicly after dropping $50,000 worth of robes into 18 stores right before the biggest trading weeks of the year. That’s stock already ordered and already made, sitting on floors they can’t get to.

If you’re in that position, I’ll be straight with you: there’s not much you can do about the stock that’s already there. What I’m hearing is that concessions will be back in the key stores within a couple of weeks, once agreements are done, and selling before Christmas. Until then, put every hour into what you control: your own site, your other stockists and the story you tell your customers directly.

Here’s what I refuse to let this week do: convince anyone that ambition is a bad bet in this country. Old institutions wobble, and that’s exactly when new names get made. I spoke to a talent scout at one of our top VC funds, sitting on $30 million earmarked for female founders, and their biggest problem is finding them. Women don’t update their LinkedIn titles. They don’t quit their jobs. They build in the shadows, and the money walks straight past them.

So be louder. Change the title, post the thing, tell the room what you’re building.

There has never been a better time to be ambitious in Australia. Even this week. Especially this week.

Love Brooke x

P.S. Help me build MOODY’s 2027: six minutes, brutally honest, and a $100 gift card drawn Friday. Take the survey →

MOODY sydney

Wednesday 11 November, 6pm to 8pm, Sydney. It’s been way too long since we did a good old-fashioned IRL meetup, so we’re bringing the room back to Sydney before silly season eats the calendar. It’s free, it’s short notice, and the venue drops in the chat. Bring one girl who’d get it.

RSVP on Luma

02 — the room

The girls are getting things done. What 1,000 women in one group chat did for each other this week.

THE WINS

→ Two members got a soda stocked. Rach’s Smooch is in the fridge at EVRA in Newstead, Brisbane, because two Brisbane members told the manager about it. Rach: “This is MOODY at its best.”

→ Australia’s first Fashion Law Supper, built on intros from this chat. Chloe Lei and Mariah Saad of Fashion Law Lab hosted 20 women at Gracie’s Wine Room in Melbourne and launched a fashion law academy, with many of their brand partners found through MOODY. Recap → [@by.chloe.lei]

→ More from the room: a beauty strategist’s cold DM landed a Daily Mail beauty editor interview (read); a comms consultant launched a column on AI as an access problem (read); two Melbourne founders launched The Christmas Concierge (@thechristmasconcierge.au); and a Brisbane founder’s membership for women building abroad passed 19 founding members, seats open until Friday (Borderless Collective). 🤍

THE INTRODUCTIONS

→ The week’s asks, timed: a food brand wanted a PR agency and had five names, the first inside a minute; an AI phone-system build drew two developers in eleven minutes.

→Best answer of the week, to “which beauty creators actually change what you buy”: “Any influencer that’s under ‘ex Mecca employee’ when you search on TT.” A retail strategy in one sentence.

→When the Canva news broke, the first offer of help came in under a minute. A former head of marketing asked what to charge and was told, kindly and firmly, to charge more.

→About a dozen new women this week, including a comms lead at a global skincare brand and a creative recruitment founder. Say hi in General.

03 — MOODY spotlight

She gave herself 30 days, $5,000 and no team. Then she hired nine AI agents to argue with her. Ex-Tesla marketing lead Amy Ross built By Limen, a copper-infused silk pillowcase, with nine AI agents briefed to push back, including a “CFO” who asked why she was gifting stock she was short on. Her line for every founder using AI to go faster: “we’re standing next to a car and asking it to be a faster horse.” Read it →

Nominate who you want us to Spotlight next: reply to this email or DM me.

04 — the read

The RBA hiked to 4.85%, and three of nine board members wanted to hold. The fifth rise this year, and the highest cash rate since 2008. Home values fell 1.2% in October, a seventh straight month, Brisbane down 2.0%. Three dissents make a sixth hike a harder sell. RBA · Savings.com.au · Cotality

Canva is cutting or reshaping 1,271 roles, 22% of the company, and calling it a refounding. Redundancies, changed roles and relocations, after growth slowed for the first time in a decade. Perkins: “without doubt the hardest moment in our thirteen-year history.” The exit package is the bit to study: six months’ pay minimum, a year of healthcare and a US$10,000 grant to start something new. B&T · Forbes Australia · AAP

Black Milk, built on one of fashion’s most devoted communities, is in administration. Founded in Brisbane in 2009 by Linda and the late James Lillis, it moved production offshore this year and dropped “Made in Australia”, and the Sharkies pushed back. Still trading while a sale is explored. A community carries a brand a long way, and it remembers every promise. Inside Retail · Black Milk

An AI start-up raised US$80 million. No round this week named a woman founder. Future Secure AI builds AI “co-workers” for banks and law firms, now valued at US$1.2 billion; every other round in the week’s wrap had an all-male founding team. Meanwhile Antler opened applications with up to $60,000 of non-dilutive money for women founders, backed by Coaxial. A sign with a cheque attached. Startup Daily · Overnight Success · Antler

A friend beats an ad six to one. Social Soup asked 850 Australians why they tried a new grocery product: 27% named a person, 4% an ad, and buying on special barely moved repeat purchase. “Recommendation gets people to pay full price in the first place.” See Smooch, in THE ROOM. B&T

Skims sold a US$148 advent calendar of hair ties. TikTok did the rest. Scrunchies, bobby pins and keychains, no clothing, and one unboxing passed 13 million views. Now a customer's TikTok shows an email from Skims apologising and offering a full refund, or the full price back as store credit while she keeps the calendar. Skims hasn't commented publicly. An advent calendar is 24 promises in a box, and the apology is the part worth copying. Complex · NY Post · Fashion Times

Dior's "hand-drawn" Christmas film is being accused of AI. Prada's isn't. Dior's six-minute short, directed by Sylvain Chomet with Robert Pattinson narrating and Rihanna in the cast, was sold as drawn by hand. Animators online spotted a six-fingered hand and stiff movement. Chomet says "everything was drawn by hand", though software filled some in-between frames. Prada's hand-drawn film, by Disney veteran John Pomeroy, landed a week earlier to applause. 45% of Australians say they'd trust a brand less if its ads were mainly AI-made. Craft is the new luxury, and the internet is counting fingers. Inc. · Creative Bloq · Fashion Times · Variety, Prada · Campaign Brief, YouGov

Rhode carried e.l.f. to a 51% quarter. e.l.f. Beauty's sales jumped to US$520.8 million, and Rhode drove about 16 points of that growth. Its Sephora Europe launch was one of the retailer's biggest, and 75% of Rhode's social audience lives outside the US. A founder with a following is the asset on the balance sheet. Inside Retail · NewBeauty

Princess Polly's owner now makes most of its money in America. A.K.A. Brands' US sales grew 14% to US$112.6 million in the quarter while Australia and New Zealand fell 6.7%. Princess Polly has 15 US stores and plans at least six more next year. More and more, the Aussie DTC playbook ends offshore. Ragtrader

Honey Birdette grew 12.1% at full price. The Aussie-founded lingerie brand made US$18.4 million in the quarter with a 62.2% DTC margin, and a paid-vote model search drew 48,000 entrants and over US$1 million on its own. You don't have to discount your way into Christmas. Ragtrader

Meshki cast like a global house for Christmas. “The Invitation” stars Gizele Oliveira, Gabriella Brooks and Cindy Bruna, with a 12-piece Atelier capsule and Meshki Lingerie back. A Sydney brand playing at the top table, and it’s hiring (see Classifieds). Retail Boss

Chemist Warehouse opened in London, and 700 people turned up on day one. Its first UK store is in Harrow, months after owner Sigma walked away from buying Boots. If you're stocked there, a UK door just opened. Inside Retail

Fragrance grew 20% at Estée Lauder. Sephora wants nine new stores here. Fragrance led the group’s quarter worldwide. Here, Sephora is taking its 37 stores towards Mecca’s 110, shooting its first local campaign and stocking Hourglass after 16 years as a Mecca exclusive. Scent is the treat that survives a rate hike, and Mecca’s grip on the counter just loosened. Estée Lauder · Inside Retail, Sephora

Visa sent 22 AI models shopping and they failed 43% of the time. In more than half the failures the agent still bought something, often the wrong thing. Google’s and Meta’s agents scored 82%, Anthropic’s Claude 76%, OpenAI’s 64%. A bad agent doesn’t stop at the checkout. It hits buy, and the return lands on your desk. Fortune · Visa

AI is sending Shopify stores a different kind of shopper. AI-referred orders grew 3.3 times in a year, and 74% came from outside Shopify’s top 100 categories. Search rewards the biggest catalogue; an agent rewards the most specific answer. Good news if you make one very particular thing. Shopify Q3 · Earnings call · TechCrunch, Muse

Three in four Australians say AI makes it harder to know what’s real. Deloitte found 84% want AI content labelled by law and 71% would leave a platform that doesn’t disclose it. If you use AI in your content, say so first. Mediaweek · Deloitte · Mumbrella

Instagram’s Edits app is on the Mac now, and AI agents can drive it. Free, multi-track, 4K with no watermark, and built so AI agents can work it. The day you spent editing one video becomes the hour you spend briefing it. MacRumors

05 — the deep dive

David Jones isn’t over, and neither is your Christmas

If your stock is caught up in David Jones right now, this one’s for you: what’s actually happening, what it means for your brand, and how to make the next seven weeks count anyway.

I’ve been where you are. I once had a D2C brand in women’s wellness tech, and getting into David Jones was the biggest goal we had. We spent more than 12 months working on that deal. I still remember the first purchase order, 100 units, and how excited we were. It only ever went online, because they never ended up stocking the sex category in store (ask me about this over drinks). So I know how much of yourself goes into getting on that floor, and how rough it is when the ground moves under it.

What’s actually happening. On Thursday 5 November, David Jones’ directors appointed McGrathNicol as voluntary administrators, and its lender appointed FTI Consulting as receivers. It sounds final, but administration is a pause button: it gives a company breathing space from its debts while independent professionals work out the best path forward, which here means finding a buyer or new investment. At the time of the appointment, all 38 stores were open and online was trading. The receivers put it down to rising costs, “a significant and outdated retail footprint, and supply chain challenges”, and called this “an opportunity to restructure the business”.

The numbers behind it. The AFR reported this week that David Jones' unpaid bills have risen to around $100 million as prospective owners circle. Retail strategist Brian Walker put that in perspective: against roughly $2 billion in annual sales, it's about 5%. His read is that the real weight is the property and financial structure, not the shop floor: a potentially viable retailer carrying a footprint that's too big. The restructure being discussed reportedly keeps 12 stores, renegotiates seven and exits 19, and he estimates 20–23% of sales are already online. That's why I don't think this is the end of David Jones. It's a reset, and online is a bigger part of the deal than ever.

What it means if you’re a supplier or concession brand. In an administration, suppliers and concession partners are what’s called unsecured creditors. In plain English, you wait while the administrators work out a deal, and what you’re owed depends on that deal. Some of the bigger concession brands were reported removing stock from some stores in the lead-up, and Country Road Group had already announced it was pulling back from nearly 100 concessions in October. As I said up top, the word is that concessions will be back in the key stores before Christmas. Your own position depends on your contract, so treat this as general information and talk to the administrators or your own adviser about the detail. Two practical things in the meantime. If you’re owed money, lodge a proof of debt with the administrators and follow the creditors’ meetings: the first happens within eight business days of the appointment, and the second, usually a few weeks later, is where creditors vote on what happens next. Keep talking to your buyer, too. The people inside David Jones are working incredibly hard, and good relationships tend to outlast moments like this.

The machinery, so it doesn’t catch you twice. A department store usually takes your stock on terms, sells it, then pays you 30, 60 or more days later. That gap is the store’s working capital, and it’s why a big retailer’s cash flow becomes your cash flow. Two things protect you next time, with any retailer. A retention of title clause in your terms of trade keeps the stock yours until it’s paid for, and registering it on the PPSR, ideally before you deliver, is what generally makes it count. A credit limit per account, set at what you could afford to wait on, stops one stockist becoming your whole Christmas. (General information, not legal advice. An hour with a commercial lawyer on your terms of trade is money well spent.)

How to have a strong Christmas anyway. The good news is that the things you control are exactly where the season is heading.

→ Own Black November. Black Friday is 27 November and Cyber Monday 30 November, but as last week’s deep dive said, the season started this month. Give your list early access before the crowd, run one clear offer rather than a sitewide code, and keep your hero product at full price. City Chic pulled back on promotions this year, and while total sales dipped 1.7%, its margin rose and comparable full-price store sales jumped 19.6%.

→ Get recommended, not just advertised. In this week’s Social Soup research, 27% of people who tried a new grocery product credited another person and 4% credited an ad, and buying on special barely changed whether they came back. Ask your best customers to tell one friend, send product to the creators who actually buy in your category, and make it easy to gift.

→ Tell the story. If you’re a small brand affected by this, say so, kindly and plainly, to your own customers, and keep it to your own experience rather than commentary on the process. People shop small at Christmas when they know why it matters.

→ Be the specific answer. Shopify’s AI-referred orders grew 3.3 times year on year last quarter, and most came from outside its biggest categories. Write your product pages like you’re answering one exact question; that’s closer to how AI shopping tools find products.

→ Spread your stockists. Use the next fortnight to pitch two or three independents or boutiques in your best city. Ask for shorter payment terms while you’re at it; smaller stockists often know your customer by name.

My call. First, David Jones will still be trading on Boxing Day. Second, concession brands will be back on the floor and selling in its key CBD stores before Christmas. Third, by the second creditors’ meeting, expected around mid-December unless extended, the plan on the table will be a smaller David Jones built around its flagships, not a closing-down sale.

MONDAY

If David Jones owes you or holds your stock, lodge a proof of debt with the administrators, diary the creditors’ meeting, and call your buyer.
Lock your Black November plan: the date your list gets early access, the one offer, and the product you won’t discount.
Ask five customers to tell one friend. Make it a referral, a gift note or a code they can share. It’s the cheapest marketing you’ll do all year.

Sources: ABC live blog, 5 Nov · ABC consumer explainer · The Nightly · Inside Retail, what it means for suppliers and staff · ASIC, voluntary administration guide for creditors · PPSR, retention of title · Inside Retail, City Chic · B&T, Social Soup · Shopify Q3 call · AFR, unpaid bills rise to $100m · Brian Walker (Retail Doctor Group), LinkedIn

06 — the diary

No link means she’s in the chat; ask and someone will introduce you.

→ Wed 11 Nov · Sydney, 6pm. MOODY Sydney meetup. Free, short notice, come. Venue drops in the chat. RSVP →

→ Wed 11 Nov · Melbourne. Women in AI Mixer by Press Play Ventures and Stone & Chalk. [Brooke: confirm time] RSVP

→ Thu 12 Nov · Sydney, 5pm. The New Trust Economy, a WOW panel, WorkClub Lounge, Chifley Square. Register

→ Thu 12 Nov · Melbourne, 6pm. The Edit by Kit Media Lab, StandardX, Fitzroy. Tickets

→ Fri 13 Nov. MOODY’s 2027 survey closes, $100 gift card drawn. Six minutes →

→ Sun 15 Nov. Applications close for Press Play Ventures’ AI Pre-Accelerator for Women. Apply

→ Wed 18 and 25 Nov · Sydney, 7am. Walk & Talk with Wendy of The Messy Middle, Coogee then Maroubra, $41 (virtual Fri 20). Book

→ Thu 19 Nov · Sydney, 8am. Konnectile’s Women in Business breakfast, Vogue Café, free with code VOGUE. RSVP

→ Thu 19 Nov · Brisbane, 4pm. Currents at Convent Garden, West End, $25. Tickets

→ Tue 24 Nov · North Parramatta, 9.30am. Tech Ready Women’s FoundHER Summit, livestream $28. [MOODY 10% code TBC with Renate] Tickets

→ Wed 25 Nov · Melbourne, 5pm. Born of Ambition’s fireside with Triangl’s Erin Deering. Details

→ 25–27 Nov · QT Sydney. ENESA’s styling suite with co-founder Nat. Book

07 — classifieds

What a girl wants. What a girl needs.

→ Hiring: Head of Marketing at Fleur Studios on the Gold Coast, owning growth across Australia and the US (apply). Digital Marketing & Ecommerce Manager at Viktoria & Woods, Melbourne (apply). Social Media Manager (apply) and VP Digital Marketing & Growth (apply) at Meshki, Sydney. Head of Digital Performance & Growth at The Aje Collective, Sydney (apply). Brand & Content Manager at Grace Loves Lace, Gold Coast (apply). Performance Marketing Manager at WelleCo, Melbourne (apply). Senior National FMCG Accounts Lead (Woolworths portfolio) at MCoBeauty, Sydney (apply). bi at Ivy Social, remote from Canberra, and Talent Manager at One Daydream, Melbourne. GTM roles at an LA start-up, DM Cecilia on LinkedIn.

→ Available: Paparazzi Day, a Surf Coast photographer’s content day for Melbourne and Geelong founders, two launch spots left (details). A Sydney brand photographer with five mini-package spots (@brookedstudio). A Canon G7X Mark III to rent in Sydney (DM Genevieve). An experienced podcast producer is looking for female founders ready to go all in on content: one interview, clipped into a month’s worth of clips you can use, for $1,000 (DM Brooke for the connect).

→ Brands wanted: beauty brands (not makeup, skincare, fragrance or food and drink) for 180 goodie bags at marie claire’s Women of the Year Awards on 19 November, with a print and online mention in return (apply via HYVN, DM Orsika). Also, a Melbourne creator wants Australian brands to trade product for content (@melodyetcetera); a gifting platform has brands after UGC creators (DM Pranjal); Elwood businesses, especially on Ormond Road (DM Huda).

→ Wanted: founders to test Black Friday offers on each other before paying for ads (react to Bec’s post in MOODY ecommerce). A woman new back in Darlinghurst wants a friendship circle over Pilates and coffee; she’s in the Sydney chat.

If you don’t know her yet, ask in your city chat or General; the girls in there do.

Forward this to one girl who’d get it.

Then bring her in: the chat is here, and I’ll add her to her city.

Love Brooke x

MOODY is the intelligence, culture and network for ambitious women. Founders, operators, investors, corporates and creatives in the same group chat. These are the girls who get it.

@get__moody · getmoody.co · est. 2026

she gave herself 30 days, $5,000 and no team. then she hired nine ai agents to argue with her.

Tue, 03 Nov 2026 22:27:51 GMT

MOODY SPOTLIGHT, the interview edition. You know girl of the week, where you meet the girl. This is where we open the books: one woman, one real business decision, and the actual mechanics of how she made it. This week: Amy Ross, founder of By Limen.

by limen, at a glance

→ The brand: By Limen, a skincare-adjacent beauty brand designed in Melbourne that looks beyond the bottle to the things your skin touches.

→ The founder: Amy Ross. Sixteen years building brands for other people, from advertising agencies to more than five years at Tesla, where she ultimately led marketing and growth across APAC, to Head of Brand at The Oodie.

→ What they make: Pillow By Limen, a copper-infused, 22 momme, Grade 6A mulberry silk pillowcase. Or as Amy calls it, lingerie for your bed.

→ The proof: Started as a dare: thirty days, $5,000, no team. Named a finalist for Product of the Year at the Beauty Industry Celebration Awards five weeks after launch.

“What are you sleeping on?”

That’s what Amy Ross’s dermatologist asked when she came in with red, irritated skin, and Amy was almost offended. Vintage French linen, four hundred dollars a pillowcase. Clearly she’d nailed that part. She hadn’t. “I was putting so much thought and money into what went on my face, but I’d never questioned what it spent every night pressed against.”

Why a pillowcase, of all things? “Because it’s such an intimate object and yet we treat it like decoration.” At a dinner party recently, someone reacted to the topic with polite boredom, “and that thrilled me. It meant there was something hiding in plain sight.”

She’s right, by the way. We’ve branded the morning routine, the commute, the workout and the wind-down, but the eight hours we spend face down are still a cotton free-for-all. “I didn’t want to make another serum,” Amy says. “I wanted to bring that same attention to the things touching our skin.”

The business decision I wanted to open the books on is how she built it: on her own, on a brief no client would ever sign off, with AI doing the jobs she used to hand to a team, and a set of agents whose whole job is to tell her when she’s wrong.

I met Amy in Singapore at NRF APAC, through a friend of a friend, which is the most MOODY way to meet anyone. I’ve been watching what she’s building ever since.

01 — make the constraint the brief

It started with a dare to herself: could she build a business in thirty days, with $5,000, just her and AI?

She’d spent almost sixteen years making people look twice at things they thought they already understood. “It didn’t have to be a big, sexy category. Finding something interesting in an overlooked one was often more satisfying.” AI made backing her own idea feel achievable, so she went straight back to being a student, signing up for courses and disappearing down tutorial rabbit holes. “I had enough experience to give the idea a serious go, and I was still hungry enough to start from the beginning.”

With that little time and money there was no way to brief her way around anything she hadn’t done before, so she had to learn it. The biggest line item it killed was creative production. Two years ago, bringing the world in her head to life would have meant a creative team, then a producer, photographer, stylist, hair and make-up. “That’s a lot of people and budget before you have a single asset.” Now she shoots the product on her phone at home and uses AI to build the environment around it, while still making the mood board, writing the art direction and assembling every final piece herself.

“The brief hasn’t disappeared. I’m giving it to a different collaborator.”

The website went the same way. Every template felt like a compromise. “I could see it in my head. I just couldn’t find the version you could click ‘buy’ on.” The old version of this story ends with a brief to a designer and a developer. Instead she did a Claude Code course and built the site herself in about a week. “After years of briefing other people, there’s something quite addictive about getting closer to the making. You can try something, see how it feels and work out what needs to change.” Her rule now: “If the template doesn’t fit the vision, I want to know enough to change the template.”

She’s quick to say none of this is a shortcut. “You cannot offload creative and critical thinking and expect something interesting back. I have to know what I’m trying to make and keep pushing towards it.”

What the maths really bought her was permission to be wrong. If she spends three days on an idea that goes nowhere, she’s lost “time and tokens, rather than tens of thousands of dollars.” Most first-time founders are too scared of wasting money to try anything interesting. Amy made a bad idea almost free, so she could afford to have lots of them. “That freedom makes me more decisive, more curious and much more willing to take a creative risk.”

→ So what: before you hire for a gap, find out whether you can close it yourself first. Even if you hire later, you’ll write a far better brief.

02 — build the colleagues who tell you no

The thing Amy misses most about big business is the people, and specifically the moment when someone sees the thing you missed. Working alone, she says, “can involve a very convincing discussion in which every participant is you. Some days I’m basically that Spider-Man meme, pointing at myself.”

So she built the colleagues. “I don’t need nine versions of ‘Well done, Amy.’ I need questions, different perspectives and someone calling my bluff.” Here’s how her setup works:

One agent per seat. Nine agents, each responsible for a different part of the business, including finance and operations.
Briefed to push back. Each is set up to ask the questions a real person in that role would ask, not to agree with her.
Brought in at both ends. At the start of a piece of work she gets them to throw her a provocative question, “so I don’t keep producing variations of my own favourite idea.” At the end they help refine and finish.
The final call stays human. She still has a real accountant, and every decision is hers.

The best example is her “CFO.” Amy wanted to gift a pillowcase because it would get the brand in front of the right people. The agent pointed out that she was short on stock and asked what made this one worth giving away.

“Suddenly I was defending my spending to a colleague I’d built myself.”

“I don’t need a dream team that thinks everything I do is brilliant,” she says. “I need room to take risks and someone asking whether I’ve thought them through.” The agents help, but they don’t replace the thing she misses most: “the surprise of another person’s mind and making something together.”

The line she won’t cross is handing over her judgement. AI helps make the assets and argue with the ideas, but what goes out with the brand’s name on it is her call, “right down to the leading and kerning. Possibly pedantic. Definitely particular.” As she puts it, “asking it to challenge my judgement doesn’t mean handing that judgement over.” She’s also spent enough time in big business watching a great idea suffer death by a thousand cuts, going round the stakeholders until the work becomes “increasingly agreeable until it no longer really says anything.” Now she’s the one who decides. “If the joke doesn’t land, at least I know whose fault it is.”

The same goes for the words. She’ll ask AI where the strongest thought is across five or six drafts, but the questions that matter are still hers: “Does this sound like us? Have we explained the joke to death? Would I actually stop and read it?” Writing is the part she loves most, “and I don’t want to hand over the part I enjoy most.” She’s just as firm on what goes live: “Just because AI can generate something doesn’t automatically mean I want to push it live for the brand.”

03 — stop asking ai for a faster horse

Amy has written about what she calls the Faster Horse Paradox, a nod to the line attributed to Henry Ford: if he’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse. They were imagining a better version of what they knew, rather than a different way of getting somewhere.

“Faster emails, faster summaries, faster versions of familiar work. All useful, but we’re standing next to a car and asking it to be a faster horse.”

The car, for her, was realising AI could stretch what she was capable of instead of just speeding up what she already did. “What I know how to do today no longer has to determine everything I’m allowed to attempt tomorrow.”

Where she sees founders still riding the horse is copying. Her example is the couple who climbed the Empire State Building with a peace banner and an apparent proposal, and the wave of brands that pasted their own message over the banner. “I remember the couple. I couldn’t tell you whose sale I was supposed to shop.” AI makes it very easy to put your brand into the picture. “It doesn’t give you a reason to be there. That’s where I think we confuse being quick with being clever.”

A jewellery brand might have something interesting to say about the proposal, she says, and a climbing business might have a different take on the climb. “But there needs to be a thought beyond, ‘Everyone’s looking at this. Put our logo on it.’”

For By Limen, her test is whether a post connects to the product, the customer or the brand’s sense of humour. “Something that makes you think, ‘Of course they’d say that.’ Otherwise, I’m adding another version of something you’ve already scrolled past.”

The antidote comes from Tesla, where the job was selling a future most people didn’t want to feel like a burden.

“You give people a reason to want the future, and a manageable way to get there.”

By Limen doesn’t ask anyone to adopt a new ritual. “She already has a skincare routine and already sleeps on a pillow. I’m inviting her to reconsider something inside that life, not take on another elaborate ritual.”

04 — be early, not alone

Amy is not a one-off. Nasdaq’s economists have linked a surge in one-person business formation to AI: applications from solo firms in the US are up more than 20% since early 2025, while companies likely to hire have stayed flat.

Her category is crowded too. Beauty pillowcases are already worth around a billion US dollars globally by most estimates, and silk on its own is not a new idea. That’s exactly why the copper matters. Put my retail hat on and this is the smartest move in the brand: she changed aisles. Pillowcases live in home and linen, where people shop on thread count and price. Copper, a dermatologist origin story and “lingerie for your bed” pick the same object up and drop it in beauty, where people shop on outcome and will pay for a reason to believe. It’s the same product on a different shelf, and a completely different conversation about value. Also, it’s November, and a silk pillowcase in a colourway called Strawberry Sorbet writes its own gift guide.

What’s next is deliberately unfinished. She’s exploring a 3D eye mask and silk hair bonnets, but “I’d like our customers to have a say before I get too attached to them. What frustrates them? What have they been putting up with because they haven’t found something better?” Limen means threshold in Latin, and that’s the brief: “Your skin is where you meet everything, and I’m interested in what we allow close to it.”

She launched with nothing more than a Key Holders list for early access, and five weeks later Pillow By Limen was a Product of the Year finalist. The part that surprised her most was the reception. She expected beauty to be cutthroat. Instead, founders from adjacent brands slide into her DMs just to say she’s killing it. “There are more people who want to see you thrive than you think.”

Her advice for a MOODY girl launching her first product with no team is to give yourself the freedom to fail. “Some of my earliest By Limen posts make me wince. I had years of marketing experience, but I was learning how to make everything myself. I needed to let myself be new at it. Making something and realising, ‘No, that’s not it,’ helped me work out what the brand should become. Give yourself some of the encouragement you’d give another woman having a go.”

rapid fire with amy

Same seven questions, every time. Her answers are why you should follow her.

What’s the mood right now? “It’s giving second-date vibes.” The brand is her alter ego coming to life, and she feels more confident, seductive and electric than ever. “We’re getting to know each other, and there’s still so much to discover.”

Most unhinged thing you’ve done for the business? Seeing how much sexual innuendo she can get out of a pillowcase. Sometimes she wonders whether the audience is having as much fun as she is. “Then I realise, fuck it.”

What are ambitious women doing too much of, and not enough of? “Being beginners in private so we can look like experts in public.” She wants us seen figuring it out more, and admits she’s still working on that herself.

Advice to you five years ago? “You’re allowed to back yourself before someone else calls it a good idea.”

What do you want the MOODY girls to find you for? Help, and the things that didn’t work so you can skip her mistakes. “I believe kindness is a strength. I don’t think ambition needs to come with a locked door.” Also the pillowcase, which she’d love you to fall for as hard as she has.

The one intro that changes your next 90 days? Someone at July. She’s spent time with the founders and admires them as much as the products, and if you’re packing your skincare for a trip, she’d like her pillowcase tucked in beside it. “Getting into bed with a brand like July? I’d be embarrassingly excited.”

Where can we find you? @by.limen and bylimen.co. “Follow now for ‘I knew her when’ privileges.”

the ask

→ Know someone at July? Travel is when we pack the premium version of our routine, and a pillowcase is the one part of your bed you can take with you. It makes too much sense.

→ Tell her what you’ve been putting up with. She’s deciding what By Limen makes next. If something in your night routine annoys you, she wants to hear it.

→ Follow along: @by.limen, for the “I knew her when” privileges and the innuendo.

If that’s you, or you know the person, reply to this email or DM @by.limen and I’ll make the intro.

Thank you, Amy, for answering every question like you had nothing to hide.

The question I’m leaving you with: what are you still briefing out because you’ve decided it’s beyond you?

Tell me. I read everything.

Love Brooke x

MOODY is Australia’s answer to the serendipity Americans take for granted. The room where founders, operators, investors, corporates and creatives are in the same group chat, and it turns out they needed each other. These are the girls who get it and we are in a MOOD.

This newsletter is the highlight reel. The WhatsApp is where we actually live.

Every city, growing weekly.

MOODY weekly: she's splitting the basket

get MOODY — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 09:20:03 GMT

01 — THE MOOD

Hi divas 🤍

Can you believe it’s November? Silly season is officially on, the RBA is almost certainly hiking tomorrow, and I have somehow already got a Christmas-party invitation. Deep breath.

If you know me, you know I am permanently in the wars. There is a Band-Aid in every handbag I own and usually one on my heel, so when the best brand content I saw this week turned out to be theirs, I took it personally. A carb-load dinner in New York for a five-day blister plaster, co-hosted by a sourdough baker who runs through the city, lasagne noodles as name tags, a butter station, a loaf of bread to take home. It stopped my scroll dead. Then it turned out one of the girls in the chat ran the influencer gift-outs, which is the most MOODY thing that’s happened to me all month. Band-Aid, if you’re reading, I am ride or die, put me on the press list. A plaster with no celebrity attached made the best thing I saw all week, and that’s the point of everything below.

The same week, Jennifer Lawrence launched a haircare brand. Three products, US$34 to US$52, built with a biotech firm that’s raised US$78 million, a story about a decade of other people controlling her hair, and a cinema screening at 10am to launch it. Instead the internet spent the week on her Cut cover and the surgery she talked about in it, and the brand got maybe a day. She called it a “forced manifestation”, the most honest line anyone in celebrity beauty has given us in years. Here’s mine: I would not be caught dead buying a celebrity haircare brand. I’ll go to a colourist for that. Scarlett Johansson’s skincare line closed in September after four years, and Gaga just made herself CEO of Haus Labs after a shade-range backlash and her CEO walking. Full disclosure, I’m on Gaga’s side here, because the Haus Labs foundation is the best in the game and it’s the one on my face right now. That’s the difference. The celebrity beauty brand still has a pulse when the product is the point. The version where the face is the strategy doesn’t, and Lawrence launching into that week is the test case.

Then on Sunday I opened Phia, the shopping app with the famous cap table and the summer it spent explaining how its referral codes ended up on sales it didn’t drive (it says that’s fixed), and the app’s feed was celebrity outfit breakdowns. I thought it was a shopping app, not TMZ. Levina made the investors’ point in the chat: if you’d written a cheque into a shopping app and it came back as a style account, you’d want a call. Turning into a media brand after a trust wobble means asking for people’s attention at the exact moment you’ve lost their benefit of the doubt.

Fame isn’t a strategy. A plaster proved it, a movie star is finding out, and the deep dive is about the only person whose opinion counts this month, the woman with the basket.

Love Brooke x

02 — THE ROOM

The girls are getting things done. What 1,000 women in one group chat did for each other this week.

THE WINS

→ My stylist launched a Substack and it reads like a retail strategy memo. Shannon has run Désordre since 2009, built it to eight figures without outside money (her words, in the chat), and her first piece is on reading a person, selling out styles, and why ten clients matter more than ten thousand followers. Experiential retail, one woman at a time. Read it →

→ Bec’s fragrance brand, only just out of the gate, was named Emerging Innovator by Cosmetic Executive Women. Fleurac makes perfume oils and balms in Australia to the standard she’d hold skincare to, and I can confirm the hype: she sent me Woodpetal and it’s unreal. The awards night is in New York on 18 November and she can’t fly over, so if you’re there and own a good outfit, she needs someone to accept it for her (see CLASSIFIEDS). @fleurac_fragrance

→ More from the room: a Melbourne podcaster’s episode with our brand strategist went live, the one where she quits her job on impulse and is booked out in under a week (listen); a Sydney founder published her first essay on what startup programs are actually for (read); a Sydney creative is a finalist in the RUSSH Creative Showcase, the prize a spread in the March issue (vote in THE DIARY); and our Brisbane city lead came back from her wedding, flooded in at the homestead, which is the most romantic way to be trapped, and co-hosted drinks at Wild Legs with Jen the same week. 🤍

THE INTRODUCTIONS

→ The week’s asks, timed: an event photographer for a Sydney brand launch, two names in three minutes and a 35mm film specialist by the next morning. A mid-level AI engineer for an early-stage product, an agency intro in a minute. A Shopify developer, a recruiter within the half hour. Emerging Australian brands for event raffles, a Sydney planner and a Brisbane host in her DMs inside 25 minutes.

The one I loved: a creator-industry contractor with six years’ experience was offered a day rate in the mid-$500s and asked the room if that sounded right. A recruiter who runs a creative division answered inside two minutes with the market rate, $800 to $900. No salary guide required, just the girls.

Also new in the room this week: seventeen women, a dozen of them on Tuesday, including a recruiter with a creative division, a packaging-design platform, a hospital-parking startup, a dating-reflection app, a branding agency split between Melbourne and Berlin, and the woman building what she calls Australia’s first female pleasure experience. Say hi, they’re in General and Melbourne. That’s the room working.

03 — MOODY SPOTLIGHT

She hand-delivered samples across Sydney on a Friday night. If you missed last week’s Spotlight, it’s a PR 101 with Pardis Mahdavi of BYOND, the Sydney agency behind ghd, Ole Henriksen, Crown Sydney and VEGAMOUR’s Australian launch. Her first question to any founder is “Who, specifically?”, because “awareness on its own is a very expensive way to feel busy.” Her pitch method starts with the angle only you can tell and the person, not the list. Her red flag is any agency that guarantees coverage, since editorial can’t be bought. Her honest line for the room: not every brand needs PR, or is ready for it yet, and if you need sales this month, paid is the better spend. The Friday-night sample run was so an editor had them for a Saturday shoot. “My client wasn’t missing out on that coverage.” Read it →

Up next, Thursday: Amy Ross, ex-Tesla, who built By Limen in 30 days with $5,000 and nine AI agents set up to disagree with her.

04 — THE READ

Inflation hit 4.3% and all four banks now expect a hike tomorrow. Fuel up 23.6% and electricity up 12.8% over the year, trimmed mean 3.6%, cash rate 4.60% going to 4.85% at 2:30pm AEDT, the fifth rise this year. Pricing anything this month? Budget as if it happens. ABC · ABS · The Adviser

Woolworths comps grew 6.1%. Coles grew 2.7% and lost 8% in a day. Eleven straight quarters of lower prices and a Disney collectables campaign on one side, a flat profit warning on the other. Leah Weckert: “we are seeing a lot more splitting of baskets.” Specials in one place, the rest in another, and discretionary feels it next. Woolworths ASX · Coles call

David Jones borrowed $10 million to buy Christmas stock. From Hilco, the lender behind Cue’s receivership, after missed payments to concession holders; the new CEO is reportedly weighing cutting 38 stores by more than half, and Country Road Group is pulling nearly 100 concessions. Department stores fell 6.5% in Vicinity’s centres while jewellery grew 9.4%. If a department store is your biggest account, it’s also your biggest credit risk. Zimmermann, same week: $38 million profit, wholesale down to 29%. Inside Retail · Vicinity ASX · Ragtrader, Zimmermann

Canva’s founders lost $6 billion and a brand that started on eBay is fifth on the Young Rich List. Perkins and Obrecht still top it at $12.5 billion; Georgia and Daniel Contos of White Fox jumped twelve places to $1.38 billion between them. Rachel Dillon debuted at 74. Women are still the exception on it. Mumbrella

October’s raises: $64 million for a brain-cancer startup, $23 million for spacecraft power, and three women founders in twenty-odd rounds. Coherence Neuro (co-founder Elise Jenkins) led the month, then MP Space, Cuttable’s $20 million and Skopos Bio’s $12 million. Cut Through’s last quarter had women and mixed teams at 32% of deals and 2.7% of the $4.2 billion. The bright spot: Victoria doubled the Alice Anderson Fund for women-led companies with another $10 million, after $9 million into 46 of them pulled $64 million of co-investment. Syncrowin’s Aisshwarya Kansakaar, on her $3 million: “A significant portion of what we need already exists, it’s just not running intelligently.” Overnight Success · Cut Through Q3 · SmartCompany, Alice Anderson Fund

Louis Vuitton now has a Chief Brand Creative Officer, and he isn’t the designer. Hector Muelas, ex Tiffany and Apple, started yesterday running campaigns, content and the “content factory”. The biggest luxury brand in the world just made content a C-suite job separate from the clothes. You’ve been running that org chart alone on your phone. The Impression

adidas had a record quarter, Puma shrank 6%, both stocks went up. €1 billion of operating profit and raised guidance on one side; inventory cut by a quarter and a smaller loss on the other. Same consumer, same week. The gap is heat and discipline, not demand. adidas · Puma

Meta launched an AI stylist that builds a wardrobe from your Instagram. Style Sketch suggests outfits, plans trip wardrobes and tries clothes on a model matched to your body, live in Southeast Asia first. Your grid was always a wardrobe archive. Meta now treats it as a shopping signal. Engadget

Fashion brands are writing AI face-swaps and digital clones into model contracts. Reuters read a dozen of them: swap the face, clone the body, no extra pay. One AI studio generated 190,000 outfits last month. If you sign a talent release, the AI clause is the contract now. Reuters via Inside Retail Asia

Anthropic’s IPO is now a Queensland story. A two-gigawatt data park outside Dalby with Anthropic as first tenant, 23,000 signatures against it, and the company confirming it will run Claude queries here but not train models, because of Australian copyright law. The AFR says Labor is drafting a ban on suburban data centres. Australians hold close to a trillion dollars of US shares through super, so most of us will own a piece of ANT whether we buy it or not. CNN · Capital Brief, AFR · Startup Daily

Instagram is paying YouTubers up to US$500,000 to post long videos as Features. Non-exclusive, from US$50,000, days after Mosseri said creators “primarily get paid by brands”. No revenue share, so it’s buying supply with cheques. In our chat: I asked where it fits. A podcaster won’t watch 90 minutes on a phone; a strategist pointed out you can cut it into Reels that link back, a free repurposing engine for the YouTube you already have. PetaPixel · TechCrunch

AI agents have placed “several hundred” DoorDash orders. In total. Against three million deliveries a day. Same week: DoorDash buys Instacart for US$17 billion, and Google takes ads inside AI Mode to ten more countries, Australia included, with click-through comparable to organic. The agent economy is a demo. The ad business inside AI answers is open. Be the answer she reads before you worry about the store an agent buys from. TechCrunch · CNBC · Google

Canva shipped its second homegrown model in a week. Brush edits a design in steps and keeps it editable, 69% faster and 46% cheaper than its last agent by Canva’s count. Owning the model is how 265 million users stop paying rent on every image. Pro only, so Pro is the tier now. Fast Company · Startup Daily, Craft

AI chatbot dependence is now in the digital duty of care bill, penalties to $109.2 million. Passed the lower house Wednesday with Kate Chaney’s amendments; the Senate inquiry reports late November. If your product has a chatbot that talks to young people, design just became compliance. Startup Daily

05 — THE DEEP DIVE

Silly season starts this week, and it’s going to be a sorted one

Here is the only thing you need to know about Christmas 2026, whether you sell a product, sell your time, run a team or get paid by someone who does: it’s happening in November. The deepest discount won’t win it. The brands and the women who know exactly who their committed customer is, and give her a reason to say yes before the crowd turns up, will.

The season has moved forward a month. The most useful line I heard at Retail Doctor Group’s State of the Nation breakfast this week was this one: “Black November rather than Black Friday, it can be called.” The keynote analyst expected Myer and Peter Alexander to start heavy promotions by around 5 November. Most retailers will wait until the 13th or 14th, still a full fortnight before Black Friday itself on 27 November. The forecast was better sales growth in November than in December, with Boxing Day “more about clearance activity”. Or, more bluntly: “Consumers are certainly trained for the promotion.” Last year’s four-day Black Friday weekend was tipped to hit a record $6.8 billion by the retail council and Roy Morgan. This year the weekend becomes the finale of a month-long sale rather than the main event.

We have seen this shape before. The last time the RBA hiked in the first week of November, in 2023, retail sales rose 1.6% in November and fell 2.7% in December, household goods down 8.5% in a month and department stores down 8.1%. The ABS said it in one line: people brought December forward to catch Black Friday. The sale didn’t add spending, it moved it, and December paid the bill. If your plan has December doing the heavy lifting, this is your warning.

The backdrop. Silly season lands in a strange week. CPI hit 4.3%, a rate rise is expected on Tuesday, and AGM season brought a run of soft warnings: JB Hi-Fi’s Australian sales went backwards from July to September and slowed again in October, and Wesfarmers said Bunnings has slowed too. Yet the same breakfast heard retail sales described as “remarkably resilient”, trending above 5% and easing toward 4% next year. “It’s not a recession, but it is a slowdown.” Both things are true because the average is hiding two shoppers. One is cutting back. The other, cushioned by income growth and the household wealth built over the past few years, is still spending, but only on things she has decided matter. Halloween was the dress rehearsal: Australians spent $510 million, up 2%, which is less than inflation, because fewer people turned up, 4.4 million, 400,000 down on last year, yet the ones who did planned to spend $117 each, up 13.6%. The casual shopper dropped out and the committed one leaned in. Pureprofile’s Christmas survey says the same thing from the other side: 79% of us are adjusting Christmas spend, the average gift budget fell for the first time since 2023 to $487, and 58% will use the sales to fund it.

Here is the bit most operators will miss. The real risk this Christmas is pricing, more than demand. Research presented at the breakfast found that 77% of retail leaders plan to raise prices over the next 12 months, while 33% of consumers have already stopped shopping with a retailer because it no longer offered great value. The committed shopper will pay more, but only where the value is obvious to her, and everyone else leaves without telling you. The same research measured the AI gap: around 31% of Australians already use AI somewhere in their shopping, but only 10% would let it complete the purchase. AI is “trusted to help, just not yet to actually make that purchasing decision”. This Christmas, AI helps her build the shortlist, and the brand on that shortlist still has to close the sale.

What this means for the room. The founders with a product are the obvious ones. The fragrance, the gift edit, the pillowcase, the hydration soda landing at the end of the month: every one of them is competing for a $487 gift budget that gets spent in the four weeks before the 27th and barely at all after. The move is one offer, one window, and a reason to buy at full price before it, because a brand with 2,000 customers can know them by name in a way Myer never will. Ten clients over ten thousand followers is the same argument from the service side. If you sell your time, your December is already decided by who books in November, so the sale you run this month is on January, and the “gift” is the slot. The corporate girls have a different job: you’re the one standing in front of the trading update in February explaining a soft December, so start saying “November and December together” out loud now and get the value message onto the shelf and the homepage before the 13th. The creators have the best month of the year ahead of them, because every brand marketing budget in the country just moved into November and Instagram is literally writing cheques for long-form. Pitch the Christmas campaigns this week, hold your rate (the chat priced the market at $800 to $900 a day for a reason), and don’t take the deal that lands on the 20th at half the fee because they panicked.

My read. I love a promotion as much as the next girl with a basket open at 11pm. What I don’t love is a brand that trains me to wait for 40% off and then wonders why I never pay full price. The brands that win this season will give the committed shopper a reason (early access, a gift-with-purchase that makes sense, a drop that never goes on sale) instead of handing everyone a blanket discount. My call, with dates. First, the ABS household spending data for November, out in early January, will show November beating December, just as the room predicted. Second, the Black Friday weekend will come in under $7.1 billion, which is last year’s $6.8 billion forecast plus inflation, so it shrinks in real terms. Third, by the time half-year results land in February, the retailers that held prices and sold through at full price will report healthier margins than the ones that ran the earliest, deepest promotions.

MONDAY

Lock your November now. Decide which week you go live and what you won’t discount. Early access for your best customers beats a sitewide code, and if you sell a service, sell January this month.
Find your committed few. Pull your top repeat customers, clients or brand partners and give them something before the crowd: a preview, a bundle, a reason to buy at full price.
Make the value obvious. If you’re raising prices, show what got better. If you’re the one presenting the numbers, present November and December as one season. A third of shoppers will leave quietly if you don’t.

Sources: Roy Morgan, Black Friday 2025 forecast · ABS Monthly CPI, September 2026 · The Adviser, big four forecasts · Inside Retail, AGM season · JB Hi-Fi Q1 ASX · Roy Morgan, Halloween 2026 · Pureprofile Christmas Report · ABS Retail Trade, December 2023 · Retail Doctor Group State of the Nation breakfast, this week (attended)

06 — THE DIARY

No link means she’s in the chat; ask and someone will introduce you.

→ Today · Sydney. Mel swaps her day job for OzHarvest’s CEO CookOff, cooking alongside the chefs for people doing it tough. Every dollar is two meals and she’s chasing $5,000. Donate →

→ Thu 5 Nov · Sydney. Techella, Australia’s first tech festival built by women, UTS Underground. Ticket sales have closed, so if you’re going, find the MOODY girls there. techellafest.com

→ Sun 8 Nov. Voting closes at midnight for RUSSH’s Creative Showcase, where one of our own is behind “Seeing”, a finalist. Thirty seconds. Vote →

→ Thu 12 Nov · Sydney, 5pm. The New Trust Economy, a WOW panel on winning attention and trust now AI has made attention cheap, with Tora from Uber, plus Eftsure and Canva, WorkClub Lounge, Chifley Square, hosted by a recruitment founder in the room. Register

→ Thu 12 Nov · Melbourne, 6pm. The Edit by Kit Media Lab, StandardX, Fitzroy: editing, content systems and the why behind growth, hosted by Kim. Tickets

→ Thu 19 Nov · Sydney, 8am. Konnectile’s Women in Business Circle breakfast at Vogue Café, Darling Harbour. Free with the code VOGUE, $35 if you want the breakfast. RSVP

→ Tue 24 Nov · Sydney, 9am to 7pm. EDGE by Ampere, a full day of leadership training for startup operators with special forces, elite sport and exec coaching on the bill, Establishment Ballroom. $20 off with gracie20, approval required. Tickets

→ Tue 24 Nov · North Parramatta, plus watch parties in Melbourne, Adelaide and Brisbane. Tech Ready Women’s FoundHER Summit, from first build to first raise, with Emily Swaffield and Mia Bowyer speaking. MOODY gets 10% off, ask Renate. Tickets

→ Wed 25 Nov · Sydney, 6pm. From AI User to AI Builder, a free hands-on workshop where you build an assistant that answers questions from your own PDFs. No coding experience needed, food and drinks on them, hosted by a Sydney founder in the chat. Register

→ Fri 27 Nov · Brisbane, 6pm. The Design Party by PEDRATOPIA Collective, Vacant Assembly, West End. “Less screen, more touch”: art, vinyl and conversation, BYO. B&T wrote it up this week. pedratopia.com

→ Fri 4 Dec · Gold Coast. The REAL Perspective supper club: Conscious Agency in the Era of Agentic Intelligence, with Lisa. Past tables

07 — CLASSIFIEDS

What a girl wants. What a girl needs.

→ Hiring: a hydration brand that sponsors the Australian Open is building its roster of event and campaign photographers and videographers, email holly.chapman.ext@waterdrop.com. A founder taking an AI product for comms and PR professionals to beta wants a mid-level Python and LLM engineer, part-time contract, remote, Australia-based, working alongside a senior reviewer (DM Paige in Tech + AI). A Sydney brand launch in late November needs an event photographer, portfolios to krishaa@goodtimes.site.

→ Available: content, sorted. Our own Georgia, MOODY’s head of content, is taking The Content Files to Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane from mid-November, shoot days or full social management, spots limited (DM Georgia). Serena is taking two or three more founders at $500k-plus revenue who are tired and want to scale, intake fee waived for the chat; she’s also looking for podcasts to talk about her book [FE]MALE-CENTRED, out next year (DM Serena).

→ Brands wanted: Australian jewellery, fragrance, leather and fashion brands for The Pillars’ Christmas gift guide, and event hosts open to running raffles of emerging local brands (send Orsika your site and story, for both); small-batch, upcycled or handmade Australian designers for upcoming opportunities (DM Huda); small Melbourne and Australian brands for a feature on @melodyetcetera (DM Melody); a non-alcoholic drinks brand for Vee’s FoundHER night in Melbourne (DM Vee).

→ Wanted: a New York diva in a great outfit to accept a CEW award on 18 November for an Australian fragrance founder who can’t fly over (DM Bec). Six to eight women for free, honest, structured conversations about this chapter, run by a sexologist in the chat (DM Paige L).

→ Vote: Soph of Nice One is a Female Founder Awards finalist in the London city category, public vote, open until January. Vote →

Don’t know her yet? Ask in your city chat or General; the girls in there do.

Forward this to one girl who’d get it.

Then bring her in: the chat is here, and I’ll add her to her city.

Love Brooke x

MOODY is the intelligence, culture and network for ambitious women. Founders, operators, investors, corporates and creatives in the same group chat. These are the girls who get it, and we are in a MOOD.

@get__moody · getmoody.co · est. 2026

she hand-delivered samples across sydney on a friday night

get MOODY — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 21:59:47 GMT

BYOND, at a glance

→ The agency: boutique PR and communications, Sydney based, working across beauty, fashion, wellness, food and beverage, hospitality and travel.

→ The founder: Pardis Mahdavi. She’s worked on brands like ghd, Ole Henriksen, Crown Sydney, Lululemon and VEGAMOUR’s launch into Australia.

→ What they do: media relations, influencer partnerships, events and founder profiling, with every account senior-led.

→ The proof: BYOND Showings, their first in-person event, brought 13 brands and 200+ guests into one room and went on to generate 400+ pieces of coverage.

“Who, specifically?”

That’s the first thing Pardis asks every founder who comes to her saying they just need people to know who they are. Her follow-up is my favourite line in the whole interview: “Awareness on its own is a very expensive way to feel busy.”

Every brand I speak to right now wants cut-through, and most of them haven’t decided who they’re trying to cut through to. Pardis makes that decision first, then gives every single thing a brand does a job. A brand trying to get into retail needs a completely different plan from one chasing sales or a founder who wants a profile, and getting that wrong is how visibility budgets quietly disappear.

I met Pardis at an HSR Aussie Angels event in Sydney, and she has been showing up ever since. Somewhere between all those rooms she became a genuine friend and our go-to girl for anything PR, and she’s now one of our MOODY Sydney city leads. We love her, and when she talks about getting the right fifty people in a room, she’s speaking from experience.

01 — Give every tactic a job

Her first job with any brand is getting specific. “I want to know who the brand needs to reach, what they want those people to do once they know about it, and why they should care right now.” Once those answers exist, she says, “the strategy gets sharper, the story gets clearer and the budget goes much further.”

Ask Pardis what strategy-led PR actually means and she gets very practical, very fast. “Nothing goes out because ‘that’s what you do at launch.’” Before her team pitches a single journalist, they agree with the brand on what it needs most, whether that’s sales, stockists, credibility or a founder profile. Then each tactic is assigned a role in getting there.

“A beauty editor exclusive might be there to build credibility, a creator gifting round to drive sales, and a founder interview to open doors with retailers.”

Compare that to the press release sent to a list and left to chance. Nobody can tell you whether it worked, because nobody decided what it was for.

She’s also refreshingly honest about what PR can’t do. “PR isn’t marketing. Marketing is designed to drive a sale today. PR builds the brand people choose tomorrow.” So BYOND agrees KPIs with every client up front, usually a monthly target for quality coverage in the titles their customers actually read, watch or listen to. Alongside that, she watches for the signs a brand is growing: more people searching for it, more followers, inbound interest from media, retailers and creators, and the brand coming up in conversation without anyone pitching it.

Her most generous line in the whole interview is this one: “Not every brand needs PR, or is ready for it yet. If what you need is immediate sales, paid marketing might be the better investment right now.” I love that a publicist said that out loud.

→ So what: before you spend a dollar on visibility, write down the one thing you need it to do this quarter. If you can’t, that’s your first job.

02 — How you actually get press in 2026

According to Pardis, getting coverage starts with the story, because a product launch on its own is rarely news. Her team digs for the angle before a single email goes out, “because it’s the difference between a reply and a delete.”

Journalists agree. In Muck Rack’s State of Journalism 2026 survey, 43% said it was rare to get a pitch relevant to their beat, yet 86% said at least some of their work started with one. So the pitch still works when it’s done properly. Here’s Pardis’s version, which I’d screenshot:

Find the angle only you can tell. A milestone, a surprising number, a founder with real expertise, or a link to something people are already talking about.
Pick the person, not the list. Every journalist has their own beat, audience and way they like to receive stories.
Make it easy to say yes. Strong imagery ready to go, a founder who’s available and samples on hand.
Use the first hit. “Coverage builds credibility, and credibility makes the next pitch easier.”

The founder piece is where she gets really good. “Media can’t interview a product, but they can interview a person with a point of view.” What makes a founder interesting isn’t the origin story, it’s what they know that people would pay to learn. Her example is REN Haircare’s Renee Marshall, a master colourist with decades behind the chair, which makes her an expert on breakage, scalp health and the at-home blowout rather than “a founder with a brush”. Founders who can comment on the wider conversation in their category, not only their own product, are the ones media come back to.

New media was the bit I was most curious about. About one in three journalists now publish independently, per Muck Rack’s first State of Creator Journalism report. “Substack writers, podcast hosts and creators have built communities that trust their taste, and that trust is what makes them so powerful for brands,” Pardis says.

“Their audiences treat a mention as a personal recommendation, so the approach has to feel personal too.” That means thinking about what genuinely fits their world rather than sending the same pitch you’d send a masthead, and it’s “often a conversation over time, not a single email.” Mastheads still carry the credibility, the business stories and the gift guides that drive sales. Her summary is the cleanest description of a modern media plan I’ve read:

“The masthead gives you the headline, and new media gives you the conversation. When the two work together, a brand feels like it’s everywhere.”

03 — Make your customers feel like insiders

When I asked what’s actually getting cut-through, I expected her to pick between stunts, IRL and AI content. She went straight to IRL, and specifically to community.

“Customers want to feel like influencers and be treated like them.”

The brands doing well right now, in her words, “are putting their customers at the centre, building a status system where their VIPs feel special, recognised and rewarded.” That might be first access to a launch, an invite to an intimate event or “a gift that makes them feel chosen.” Then comes the line every founder should stick on their wall: “When a customer feels like an insider, they talk about the brand the way an influencer would, and that word of mouth is worth more than any paid post.”

This is the whole reason MOODY is a room rather than an audience, so I nodded so hard reading it I nearly pulled something. The brands that win are the ones whose customers feel part of something, and the smartest influencer strategies are built on top of that community.

What’s overrated? Paying an influencer because she sold out someone else’s product. Her influencer ladder is the most useful thing in this piece if you’re working with a small budget:

→ Start with contra. Partner with a range of creators and see who genuinely connects with the brand and whose audience responds. “That stage tells you more than any media kit can.”

→ Then pay one or two. Put your money behind paid posts with the creators who already supported you organically. “They already like the product, their audience has already seen it, and the content feels real because it is.”

→ Only then, an ambassador. It’s the most valuable creator relationship a brand can have, and the biggest commitment. “Never jump straight into an ambassadorship without knowing how that creator’s audience responds to your brand.”

Her test for events is brutal in the best way: “If the same message could land in an email, it probably doesn’t need an event.” The pretty-photos problem “happens when the styling is planned before the story,” so BYOND starts with what every guest should walk away with, “whether that’s a story to write, content to share or a genuine connection with the brand.” Then it’s the guest list. “Who’s in the room matters just as much. Fifty of the right people will always do more than two hundred of the wrong ones.” The work doesn’t stop when the doors close either: “The follow-up is where most of the coverage is won.”

She put all of it to work at BYOND Showings, a showroom-style event in Rose Bay that brought media, influencers and tastemakers together with 13 brands, including Napoleon Perdis, REN Haircare, Àerre and Wilhelmina Studio.

“The idea was simple: create a room where brands could connect directly with the people who shape what gets covered, posted and bought, and where discovery felt genuine rather than staged.” Her verdict on why it worked is three words long: “the guest list.” More than 200 people came through, including editors from Vogue Australia, AFR, Mamamia and News.com.au, plus creators like Jules Robinson, Jadee and Phoebe Spiller. The event generated more than 400 pieces of coverage with a reach of over 12 million.

I did the maths on that, because I can’t help myself. Four hundred pieces across thirteen brands averages out at roughly 30 pieces of coverage per brand from a single event, which is a serious return on one room. The part most people wouldn’t know is the lead time: it took two to three months to plan from scratch. “If you want it done well, start planning early.”

04 — How to hire a PR agency (and when not to)

Bookmark this one if you’re weighing up whether it’s time. Pardis says you’re ready when four things line up:

→ A story worth telling. A launch, a milestone, a founder with something to say or a move into a new market gives media a reason to care.

→ You know who you are. A clear message, a clear look and a clear idea of who the brand is for. “If that’s still shifting, it’s worth getting right first, because media will notice.”

→ You can commit. PR builds over time and the real momentum usually comes after a few months. If the budget only stretches to one month, a focused project might suit you better than a retainer.

→ You’re ready for attention. If a story takes off, can you keep up with stock, orders and enquiries? “Great coverage for a product people can’t get their hands on is a missed opportunity.”

When you’re choosing an agency, look for one that “asks about your business before it talks about its contacts”, knows your category, and is honest with you. “A good agency will tell you what’s realistic, even when it’s not what you want to hear.” Her red flags are the two I’d underline: anyone who guarantees coverage (”editorial can’t be bought, so nobody can promise it”), and the agency where the senior team wows you in the pitch and then hands you to someone you’ve never met once you sign. She’d add one more test that founders forget: “Chemistry matters too. You’ll be sharing your brand’s biggest moments with this team, so you should genuinely enjoy working with them.”

That last one is exactly why BYOND is boutique by design. The people who build your strategy are the same people talking to media every day, there are no layers of approval between a good idea and getting it out the door, and the scope fits the brand, whether that’s a retainer, a launch, media only or an influencer focus. A new client’s first weeks go into strategy and a press kit, plus a one-on-one session for founder-led brands to dig out the angles “the founder hadn’t thought twice about.” Then it’s introductions to media and creators, and weekly updates on what’s landed and what’s next. “Larger agencies do brilliant work at scale,” she says, “but for brands that want a partner who’s genuinely invested and moves at their pace, boutique is the difference.”

The two most common mistakes she sees are expecting overnight results and “bringing PR in too late”, because “the brands that commit for the long run are the ones that see real results.” Media plan months ahead, especially for gift guides and seasonal features, so if you have a launch in the first half of 2027, the time to talk to a PR agency is now, not the week before it hits shelves.

Rapid fire with Pardis

Because this series comes with a rapid fire round, and nobody leaves without doing it.

What’s the mood right now? “Growth.” The team and the client roster are both expanding heading into 2027.

Most unhinged thing you’ve done for your career? Hand-delivering samples across Sydney on a Friday night so an editor had them for her Saturday morning shoot. “My client wasn’t missing out on that coverage.”

What do you want most? A 30 Under 30 list, ideally before she turns 30. Pardis, consider this your nomination.

What are ambitious women spending too much time on, and not enough? Too much time comparing themselves to other people’s highlight reels. Not enough time celebrating their own wins, out loud.

Advice to you five years ago? “Back yourself sooner. You’ll never feel completely ready, and that’s okay.”

What do you want the MOODY girls to find you for? Anything that gets a brand talked about: launches, media coverage, founder profiles, influencer and brand partnerships, and events with a reason to exist. Plus honest advice if you’re not sure you’re ready. “I’d rather tell you to wait than sell you something you don’t need.”

Where can we find you? @byondagency_ and @pardismahdavi on Instagram, and byond-agency.com.

The ask

Pardis told me exactly who she’d love to hear from after reading this.

→ Australian brands ready for their next big chapter, whether that’s a launch, a new category or finally getting the recognition they deserve at home. Beauty, fashion, wellness and hospitality are where she feels most at home.

→ International brands launching in Australia or New Zealand that want a local team who know the market and can make them feel like they’ve always belonged here.

→ The one intro that would change her next 90 days: a marketing director at a major beauty house planning their 2027 launches in Australia.

If that’s you, or you know the person, reply to this email or DM @byondagency_ and I’ll make the intro.

Pardis, thank you for being so generous with your playbook, and for everything you do for this community as our Sydney city lead. This is the PR 101 I wish I’d had years ago.

The question I’m leaving you with: if you had to give every piece of visibility work in your business a single job this quarter, which ones would still make the cut?

Tell me. I read everything.

Love Brooke x

MOODY is Australia’s answer to the serendipity Americans take for granted. The room where founders, operators, corporates and creatives are in the same group chat, and it turns out they needed each other. These are the girls who get it and we are in a MOOD.

This newsletter is the highlight reel. The WhatsApp is where we actually live.

Every city, growing weekly.

MOODY weekly: nostalgia isn't a museum

get MOODY — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 23:44:15 GMT

01 — THE MOOD

Hi divas 🤍

I’m writing this from the Qantas lounge before my fifth flight in a week, which tells you how my self-care is going.

This week I went to see Hilary Duff in Sydney and I have not been the same since. A stadium of women born between 1991 and 1995, every one of us a Lizzie McGuire girl with a mortgage and a skincare routine now, was so loud she had to stop and take it in. She wasn’t performing the old Hilary at us. She brought the woman she is now and let us bring the women we are now, and it hit harder for it.

That’s the trick, and it’s rare in retail. Oroton did it: same heritage, new girl, a bag you’d carry again. Plenty of the brands we grew up with are still working out which decade they belong to. Nostalgia on its own is a museum. Nostalgia with a point of view about who the girl is now is a growth strategy. Gucci has spent three years in the museum, and the deep dive is what that cost.

Sunday morning, before the airport, I was in Sydney for Sally’s ZIISH x She Walks fundraiser for Breast Cancer Network Australia. I’ve lost both my grandmothers to it and too many friends are going through it right now, themselves or with someone they love. If you can give anything, the page is here.

Two asks before they call my flight. If MOODY has got you something this year, a hire, a client, a friend, a yes you didn’t expect, reply and tell me. I want to hear it, and with your okay, share it. Then tell me what the girls want from MOODY before the year ends: a dinner, a city, a Deep Dive topic. I have forty minutes and a bad coffee, so I’m starting the list now.

Love Brooke x

02 — THE ROOM

The girls are getting things done. What 1,000 women in one group chat did for each other this week.

THE WINS

→ Alycia got Claude to build the reel editor the chat had been asking for. Alycia runs How Do I Podcast, and her tool cuts vertical video to look like you rather than a template: it asks about your brand and fonts first, and you change a cut by commenting on it. Ten free spots, eleven requests inside a day, and one tester’s review in full: “BRILLIANT”. Reel Studio →

→ Chiara closed her round. A SAFE with an $8m pre-money cap, pre-revenue and pre-launch, with the cap 30% above where she opened the conversations. She then turned around and talked another founder through how she priced it (see THE READ).

→ More from the room: a sales coach built her first website in an hour at a member’s free Canva workshop, a Sydney events founder got MAC to partner her YSO screening, a Melbourne founder’s canned hydration soda lands in late November, and our Brisbane city lead got married. 🤍

THE INTRODUCTIONS

→ The week’s asks, timed: a small-business accountant, four names in seven minutes. A Brisbane colourist, six in twenty. Hair and makeup at a client’s Sydney hotel, four artists in two minutes. A food technologist for a functional drink, the co-founder of Heaps Normal within the hour. None of it needed me, which is the point of the whole thing.

Also new in the room: a brand strategist ex-Zimmermann and Broadsheet, newly in Sydney; a former San Francisco engineering exec now running breathwork on the Northern Beaches; the founder of a social-led agency in Collingwood; and a Melbourne creative who joined ahead of the Melbourne event we’re planning. Say hi, they’re in General.

03 — THE VLOG

The Melbourne launch, and running in drag for charity. If you missed it last week: 180 of Australia’s most ambitious women in one Melbourne room, then Bridge to Brisbane in heels and a wig with Lulu LeMans for Small Steps 4 Hannah. Watch →

In light of this mornings news, should we move the Vlogs to IG?!

MOODY SPOTLIGHT is taking nominations. No interview this week, on purpose. After Vic of Vicalates, Rach of Smooch and Mel Drennan of Napoleon Perdis, who should be next? Reply with a name and one line on why, and I’ll chase her.

04 — THE READ

Temple & Webster let sales fall 8% and the shares jumped more than a quarter. Less discounting, some higher prices, contribution margin dollars up 16%, FY27 EBITDA guided 50 to 80% higher. AI did the operating work: recommendations lifted conversion 56% and 58,000 product pages were republished for AI assistants. Selling less on purpose, and getting paid for it. Inside Retail · Small Caps

Consumer confidence is at its 12th-lowest reading since 1973. ANZ-Roy Morgan printed 67.7, 56% of people say their family is worse off than a year ago, and ANZ expects another rate rise in November. Against that, Urbis has jewellery as the fastest-growing category across 516 centres at 11.6% and CBD centres leading at 7.1%. Smaller things, closer to town. Ragtrader · Ragtrader, Urbis

Chemist Warehouse comparable sales are up 9.8% and beauty is doing the lifting. Sigma’s AGM update names beauty, healthcare and GLP-1 support products as the strong categories and women’s fragrance as the soft one. In the week Gucci lost her, the pharmacy beauty aisle found her. The Motley Fool · Rask

TVSN closes on 15 November with small labels saying they haven’t been paid. Direct Group found no buyer or backer, a closing-down sale is clearing about $30m of stock, and labels including Caju Designs say invoices are outstanding. If you wholesale, your biggest customer is also your biggest credit risk. Ragtrader

Shona Joy is closing after 26 years, and it isn’t the money. Shona Thatcher told her 33 staff this morning that the label she started on Bondi market stalls in 2000 will close, everyone paid out, the name staying with her. Five years in Byron, a Rosebery commute that stopped working, four years of thinking, buyers that never felt right. Her line: “This business is my baby and my passion. But my children are my priority.” The bridesmaid dress half this chat has worn is closing on its own terms, which is an exit too, just not the kind anyone writes a LinkedIn post about. Cue closed 26 stores because it had no choice. AFR · Ragtrader, CEO exit in March

Gucci’s owner had its worst day on record. L’Oréal grew 7%. Kering fell 16% on Friday, the morning after reporting Gucci down 6%; Hermès hit a four-year low; L’Oréal grew 7.2% like-for-like and Puig’s make-up grew 16%. The gap between those numbers is where our customer is standing, which is the deep dive. Reuters · Kering

Witchery landed on Nordstrom, then hired American taste. Bellroy is opening twenty stores without a celebrity. Dani Michelle, who dresses Kendall Jenner and Hailey Bieber, got a 23-piece edit in September; Elsa Hosk got 25 this week, days after Witchery went live on Nordstrom.com. Borrowing American taste before asking for American customers is the smartest thing it has done in years. Archie Rose relaunched with co-owner Chris Hemsworth the same week. Bellroy’s is the one to study: $146m revenue, New York and Kuala Lumpur inside six months, each store meant to repay its fit-out within three years. Ragtrader · Marie Claire · B&T · SmartCompany

Anthropic filed to go public this morning: US$16.3bn of revenue in six months, an US$80.7bn loss. Ticker ANT on the Nasdaq, pricing aimed at mid-November, and the FT says investors expect US$1.5 to 1.75 trillion. Revenue was US$1.16bn in the same half last year; the loss is mostly accounting on convertible notes. Five days earlier it launched Claude Duet, an assistant that works in the background and asks before it sends, pays or deletes. For the girls who build on these tools, one thing changes: the company whose model is in your workflow now reports to you every quarter. CNBC · NPR · Claude Duet

Instagram is doing long-form video, and Mosseri admits he was against it. “Features” is horizontal, up to 90 minutes, US first, built for the TV, with Reels clips linking to the full episode so nobody leaves for YouTube. Rosie Brown’s read within the hour: Stories answered Snapchat, Reels answered TikTok, this answers YouTube, so build your pillars into a series, not a clip. The catch: no ad revenue share, just your existing brand deals. Until that arrives, Features is distribution for the audience you already have, not a business. 9to5Google · The Hollywood Reporter · Variety

OpenAI told Parliament it would “potentially” pay Australian creators. Asked by Labor MP Tim Watts whether it would pay into a fund for Australian creators, OpenAI’s written answer was “Potentially”, depending on “the activities and data that are in scope” and whether the scheme is “competitive with other jurisdictions, particularly the US.” It also wants to anchor a $7bn Sydney data centre. The data centre comes with a cheque. The creators come with a “potentially”. Forbes Australia

Canva launched its own image model the day after Getty Images filed for bankruptcy. Craft was trained on Canva’s human-designed templates, built in six months, and will run inside ChatGPT and Gemini. Getty, three decades of licensing the photo you were about to use, went into Chapter 11 after the Shutterstock merger collapsed. The moat moved from the archive to the taste of whoever trained the model. TechCrunch · Yahoo Finance

Cuttable raised $20m at a valuation north of $142m to automate your Meta ads. AirTree led. It turns the photos and video you already have into ads, and 450 companies have run $370m through it. Meta’s ad prices rose another 14% this quarter, which is the bill Cuttable sells against. SmartCompany · Mumbrella, Meta

How the chat values a pre-revenue startup. Don’t pay a broker to tell you what you’re worth. For an angel round you set the price, investors are buying what the business could become, and a SAFE or convertible note lets you skip the valuation until a priced round sets one. Chiara read the YC material, looked at comparables, picked a band and went. A pre-seed raise, explained (Batko) · Cut Through Venture Q3

05 — THE DEEP DIVE

Desirability can’t be discounted

The week in one sentence: the woman who used to save for a Gucci bag bought a Charlotte Tilbury palette, a Michael Hill chain and a very full Chemist Warehouse basket instead, and Gucci’s owner lost a sixth of its value finding out.

She didn’t ghost luxury. She ghosted Gucci. That’s the whole argument, and the difference between those two sentences is the difference between a pricing problem and a wanting problem. You can discount your way out of the first. Nobody has ever discounted their way out of the second.

What happened, without the spreadsheet. Four of the biggest companies in the business of making women want things reported in the same week. Kering, which owns Gucci, said Gucci’s sales fell 6%, and its shares fell 16% on Friday, the worst day in its history. L’Oréal grew 7%. Puig, which owns Charlotte Tilbury, grew make-up 16%. Hermès grew too and its shares still hit a four-year low, the market pricing a harder 2027 for the whole category rather than judging the bag. One was punished, two were paid, and the fourth got sold off for keeping company with the first.

The tell. Buried in Kering’s release is the line a merchant reads first: traffic was “the main constraint” while conversion, average price and basket all improved. Fewer women are walking into Gucci, and the ones who still do are spending more. In a downturn traffic and conversion fall together; here traffic fell and conversion rose, which is what it looks like when a brand stops being the one you tell your friends about. Hermès proves it from the other side, leather goods up 10.8% in the same quarter from the same wallets. The bag is fine. Gucci’s bag isn’t, and on its second new designer in three years you cannot ask a woman to save for eight months toward a brand that hasn’t decided what it is.

Where she went. Puig’s make-up grew 16% while its skincare, Charlotte Tilbury’s included, fell, which looks a lot like a woman choosing the thing she can see, finish and gift. Kering’s own jewellery houses grew 11%. At home, Chemist Warehouse is up 9.8% with beauty named as a driver, Michael Hill’s Australian comps are up 4%, and jewellery is the fastest-growing category in our shopping centres at 11.6%. She is still buying luxury. She’s buying the version that fits in her handbag and gets used every day.

Why you can’t discount it. Every merchant’s instinct when traffic falls is to lower the price of entry, and the analysts are already there: the consumer “still thinks prices are too high to digest,” one told Reuters, and Kering is “refining its product and pricing architecture,” handbags first. Fine. Price is necessary and nowhere near sufficient. A cheaper Gucci nobody wants is still a Gucci nobody wants. The $60 lipstick works because it’s the full brand at a price you can justify in a bad month; Gucci’s $4,000 stopped working because it stopped feeling like Gucci. One number to watch: wholesale grew 45% off a base Kering gutted to protect scarcity. It’s 9% of sales, not a leak yet, but if it keeps growing while the stores shrink, the outlet era has begun.

What this means if you sell anything. Your $300 hero is the bag; your $49 entry product is the lipstick. The brands growing in a quarter where 56% of Australians say they’re worse off are the ones whose entry ticket carries the whole brand. Pillow Talk isn’t the cheap version of Charlotte Tilbury; it’s the brand in your handbag every day, and the reason you eventually buy the Magic Cream. The mistake is making the entry product feel like the consolation prize. The bigger mistake is putting the hero on sale to fix traffic, because once a customer learns to wait for the discount, she never unlearns it.

My read. I collect Tom Ford-era Gucci bags, the 1990s ones, and Demna’s show in Milan a month ago has my heart: a replica Gucci store for a set, horsebits on everything, Demna talking about the bourgeois Gucci before Tom and refusing to build a whole vision on the 90s. That is the Hilary trick from THE MOOD, heritage with a point of view about who the girl is now, so the design problem is being solved.

None of it is in these numbers yet; the collection doesn’t reach stores until next year. Kering is also closing at least 125 stores, which fixes the rent bill faster than the wanting. JPMorgan called the progress “very early stages” and, as someone who wants to buy the bag, I think that’s fair. Two tests, with dates. If Gucci’s own-store sales aren’t growing in the fourth-quarter numbers Kering reports in February, on a comp that already fell hard, the closures were the easy part. If they still aren’t growing a quarter after the Milan collection lands, so the numbers next July, the recovery is a 2028 story and the Tom Ford girls will keep buying vintage. Meanwhile the money is at the beauty counter and in the jewellery case, and the Australian brands that build an entry ticket worthy of the brand will take it.

MONDAY

Audit your ladder. Write down your cheapest product and ask whether it carries the whole brand or apologises for being cheap. If it’s the second, re-present it before Christmas (packaging, copy, photography) and redesign it in the new year.
Protect the hero. The product that defines you never goes on percentage-off, Black Friday included. Volume moves through the entry product, bundles and gifting.
Watch traffic, not just revenue. Shopify sessions against conversion if you’re DTC, sell-through if you wholesale. Sessions falling while conversion holds means desire, not price, and no promotion fixes that.

Sources: Kering Q3 2026 revenue · Hermès Q3 2026 revenue · L’Oréal sales to 30 September 2026 · FashionUnited, Puig Q3 · Reuters, 23 Oct · Ragtrader, Urbis benchmarks · Ragtrader, Michael Hill · Ragtrader, consumer confidence · Sigma AGM update via The Motley Fool · Wallpaper, Gucci S/S 2027 show

06 — THE DIARY

No link means she’s in the chat; ask and someone will introduce you.

→ Wed 28 Oct · Sydney. Marika’s invitation-only founder dinner, ten seats.

→ Wed 28 Oct · Brisbane, 7:30am. MOODY coffee at Industry Beans, Newstead, via Jen Garner; Friday cocktails too.

→ Thu 29 Oct · Sydney. ENESA Styling Suite, personal styling for the room.

→ Thu 29 Oct · Sydney, 5:30pm. Aussie Founders Club’s first Sydney night at Stone & Chalk: Nevam, Upcover and Relume founders on the decisions they nearly got wrong. Free. RSVP

→ Fri 30 Oct · Brisbane, 3:15pm. Lisette’s Glimmer Luncheon raffle is drawn, $28,000 in prizes for the Mater’s stillbirth research centre. Enter →

→ November · Sydney. Wendy’s Walk & Talk mornings, three women a session. Book

→ Date TBC · Sydney, 5:30pm. WiSE launch party at UTS Startups with Christy Laurence (Plann) and SJ Kurtini (Tinybeans). Approval required. Request a seat [Brooke: date isn’t on the Luma page, check before send]

→ Thu 12 Nov · Sydney, Moore Park. Startup Padel for founders, operators and investors, racquet included. Apply

→ Thu 12 Nov · Melbourne, 6pm. The Edit by Kit Media Lab, StandardX, Fitzroy, hosted by Kim. Tickets

→ Thu 12 Nov · Sydney, 6pm. Bills to Business Class, WeWork Barangaroo, co-hosted by Priscilla, early bird $69. Tickets

→ Tue 24 Nov · Sydney, plus watch parties nationally. FoundHER Summit, with Emily of Emily Pivots speaking and Mia Bowyer’s AI set-up session. MOODY gets 10% off, ask Renate. Tickets

→ Fri 27 Nov · Brisbane, 6pm. The Design Party by PEDRATOPIA, West End, BYO, $15 early bird. pedratopia.com

→ Nov · Gold Coast, and Dec · Perth. The REAL, Lisa Kjerulf’s supper club for founders and investors, now a series with the Perspective X podcast; Melbourne, Sydney and Auckland next year. Past tables

Ali Skiba’s breathwork and sound journeys on the Northern Beaches are 10% off with the code MOODY. Dates

07 — CLASSIFIEDS

What a girl wants. What a girl needs.

→ Hiring: Process the Podcast wants a contract partnerships lead as Arielle heads to LA, New York and London to record 24 episodes. Email arielle@cinemathom.com with the first brand you’d call; closes Fri 30 Oct. Rosie is hiring a full-time social media manager in Melbourne, plus a freelance food creator (DM Rosie).

→ Available: Janine (JP) runs influencer campaigns outside the agency model, currently for Neutrogena and Aveeno (DM Janine). Brooke Dixon shoots 35mm and Super 8 (portfolio). Mae will do design work for the experience if the brand is right (DM Mae).

→ Brands wanted: a beauty partner for Polly’s next YSO screening (DM Polly); an activewear brand for Orsika’s giveaway (DM Orsika); a non-alcoholic drinks brand for Vee’s FoundHer night in Melbourne (DM Vee).

→ Wanted: a few aligned VCs and businesses behind Lisa’s The REAL x Perspective X series (deck, DM Lisa); a visionOS developer for Sababa’s AI On Apple hackathon team (DM Sababa); a Victorian discrimination lawyer for Laura’s women-only event (DM Laura).

→ For a good cause: Britt walked 7 Bridges for the Cancer Council yesterday, her 14th year. Donate →

No link means she’s in your city chat or General. Don’t know her yet, ask; the girls in there do.

Forward this to one girl who’d get it.

Then bring her in: the chat is here, and I’ll add her to her city.

Love Brooke x

@get__moody · getmoody.co · est. 2026

the vs angel was always just a media budget

get MOODY — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 07:12:32 GMT

01 — THE MOOD

Hi divas 🤍

There’s something in the water in Sydney right now. Thursday I was at the NORA retail leaders forum in the morning and at a startup party that night with , the Claude team, the Notion team and about two hundred people who have clearly been practising. Everyone had their line. Who they are, what they’re building, what they need, in the time it takes to get from the bar to the balcony.

I didn’t have mine. I’ve hosted stages for Amazon in three countries, I run a community of a thousand women, and when a founder I’d never met asked “so what’s MOODY?” I gave her four different answers and none of them was the good one. It’s a funny thing to notice about yourself at thirty-something: I can sell anyone else’s business in a sentence and I still fumble my own.

So that’s the homework this week, mine and maybe yours. Not a mission statement. The sentence you’d say in the lift. The girls in this chat are getting very good at asking for exactly what they need (scroll down, it’s the whole issue), and the pitch is the thing that turns a good conversation into an introduction. I’ll post mine in the chat on Wednesday. Hold me to it.

Love Brooke x

02 — THE ROOM

The girls are getting things done. Businesses launched, a website rescued, creators found in hours.

THE WINS

→ Britt launched State of Brand Coaching. Two programmes for founders and creators ready to take their personal brand seriously. Front Door is four weeks; The Build is twelve. Early bird closes 1 December. Explore → · @stateofbrand.co

→ Claudia launched Season Style Club across Australia and New Zealand. Share, sell, borrow or buy outfits at season.style. She’s at Melbourne Fashion Week this week. @season.styleclub

→ Four more from the room: Bianca Le Page released her free Q3 Australian Beauty Industry Report, Sam Freidin launched a free Brand Voice Mini Course, Sia hosted her first MerryMakers & Co Creative Ritual, and Catherine opened memberships for The Modern Menopause Manual. Charlotte Riggs, new to the chat, launched COMPARTMENTO from Noosa.

THE INTRODUCTIONS

→ Paige connected a founder paying $5,000 a year for a website she couldn’t edit with her boss, Jake Shelley at Jiffi. He fixed it in an evening with his product, Palate, and he’s said anyone in the chat can email him: jake@jiffi.co, say you’re from MOODY.

→ Natalie needed a creator. Pardis found Lilly in three hours. Emily needed a social freelancer. Vee introduced Udoka. Clare needed Melbourne workshop hosts. Four volunteered in forty minutes.

Also new in the room: Petra, building FASI AI for small businesses navigating sustainability, and Magdalena, scaling her second business from Brisbane. Say hi.

THE CHAT

→ The Yap Challenge hit the editing wall at day 24. Amelia, Cha and Lisa all said it: filming is fine, editing breaks the streak. Ari’s fix is CapCut’s transcript edit, cut the text and the video cuts itself. Wendy is on day 25 and has not missed one.

Francesca came back from Melbourne with an acronym: B2A, business to agent. Marketing now has a third customer, the agent shopping on the human’s behalf, and it reads product data, not ads. Shopify opened that feed the week she said it.

Sababa started @sydneytechowl because the Sydney tech scene is “so gatekept.” Events, founder interviews and open-source tools for non-technical founders, filmed on an iPhone; three MOODY girls found each other at Startup Street Social because she posted the Luma link. She’s after an iOS or visionOS developer for the Apple x ElevenLabs hackathon, details here.

Not one of those introductions needed me. That’s the room working.

03 — THE VLOG

The Melbourne launch, and running in drag for charity. Eighteen minutes: 180 of Australia’s most ambitious women in one room in Melbourne, the bit where I realise what the room has turned into, and then Bridge to Brisbane in heels and a wig with Lulu LeMans for Small Steps 4 Hannah. Watch it on the train. Watch →

MOODY SPOTLIGHT, this week: Mel Drennan. The MD of Napoleon Perdis on bringing the brand back without throwing away thirty years of recognition. She kept the name on every box. Read →

04 — THE READ

Record $4.2bn quarter for Australian startups; women-founded and mixed teams raised $114m, down 14%. Strip out Firmus’s $2.85bn and the quarter is $1.31bn, up nearly 80%, with female and mixed teams at 9% of that capital, down from 18%. The headline is a boom and the number nobody put in the headline is going backwards. Cut Through · Startup Daily

Cue is closing 26 stores the week Forever New announced its first in Texas. Both shortlisted bidders for Cue and Veronika Maine rejected the same 26 leases, leaving about 20. Forever New hit about $400m turnover, half of it offshore, across 466 stores in 24 countries. Same category, same country: one lease book nobody wanted, one that’s an asset. Ragtrader · Ragtrader

Lush will let all ten of its Westfield leases expire. It wants “the right locations” and still plans to grow here, a year after its one-day national closure over Gaza when Westfield reportedly covered its window posters. The first national tenant I can name that walked away from a landlord after a values dispute and said so. Inside Retail

Reese Witherspoon and Mediawan are buying a majority of Hello Sunshine back from Candle Media for “low-to-mid eight figures,” per Axios; Candle bought control at a US$900m valuation in 2021. Bumble agreed a US$1.3bn take-private the same week, more than 90% below its IPO peak, with Whitney Wolfe Herd stepping back as CEO. Witherspoon took money off the table at the top; Wolfe Herd held through the slide. Axios · Dealroom

Hailey Bieber kept the decisions at Rhode; Isamaya Ffrench no longer works at the brand with her name on it. Rhode did about US$390m last year, up roughly 80%, and e.l.f. let Bieber keep “nearly all” the calls. ISAMAYA has been dark for twelve weeks and Ffrench told a customer on 9 October she’s “not associated with the company anymore.” Bieber kept the decisions because e.l.f. bought the brand with her in it; Ffrench’s name is on boxes a company she left is still shipping. Fortune · Cosmetics Business

Mamamia is launching a 24/7 channel on Samsung TV Plus “in the coming months”; more than 30% of its podcast consumption is already video. Netflix cut 6% of staff and moved on chief content officer Bela Bajaria the same week. A women’s publisher turning podcasts into television while the biggest streamer cuts tells you which way the money is leaning. Mumbrella · Variety

Shopify opened its billion-listing catalogue and Shop Pay checkout to any AI agent; Google’s Universal Cart went live in the US two days later. An agent can now search, fill a cart and pay inside a conversation with the shopper confirming the total, and merchants weren’t asked. Your product data is now the sales pitch: fix the variants, stock flags and returns copy before an agent reads them to a customer. Australia timing unconfirmed. Shopify via EcomCrew · TechCrunch

The Digital Duty of Care Bill landed with a “My Feed, My Way” rule: users 16 and over get periodic prompts to switch off algorithmic recommendations. Anika Wells also floated a right to sue platforms; proposal, not law. If your reach is built on the algorithm, count how many people you can reach without it. B&T

05 — THE DEEP DIVE

Gisele’s Victoria’s Secret contract was reportedly worth US$25 million. This year’s Angel won her wings on a YouTube reality show, and the prize was a contract with IMG Models. Here’s my read, plainly. The Angel was never really a model. She was a media budget, and Victoria’s Secret has worked out how to spend it on 16,000 people instead of one.

What actually happened. Victoria’s Secret took more than 100,000 applications for its first new Angel since 2021, cut them to three across Angels Among Us, a seven-episode YouTube series, and crowned Solange Omon, Maine-based and signed to a regional agency, on a free runway stream this morning, Brisbane time, beside Kylie Jenner in the first Fantasy Bra since 2018. Every look was tagged to buy, with a creators-only shopping window the next morning. In retail terms that isn’t a fashion show. It’s an eight-week campaign with a sales window bolted to the end.

How the budget gets spent. The internet spent last week arguing that the girls want the unattainable back, and they’re half right: unattainable sells the dream, attainable sells the bra, and Victoria’s Secret has built a machine that does both at once. Kylie in diamonds is the dream. The mall casting is the door. Underneath both sits the VS & PINK Creator Program, running since October 2023 with more than 16,000 members, mostly customers and small creators, in tiers that open up higher commission, gift cards, reposts and, for the top advocates, a seat at the show.

This is the content factory every brand is building right now.

Shapermint has more than 5,000 TikTok Shop affiliates who have made over 20,000 videos since January; it briefs them weekly in a Discord channel, penalises anyone who takes a free sample and doesn’t post, and is on track for about US$10 million there this year. What Victoria’s Secret has added is the thing a creator army needs to keep marching, which is a ladder with something worth climbing for at the top. The Angel is the top rung, televised, and every customer filming a haul now has a story where the rungs go all the way up. She films it on commission, not a retainer.

The retail problem nobody is saying out loud. Victoria’s Secret doesn’t have an awareness problem. Tracksuit’s US brand tracking puts it at 87%, against 44% for Skims. Its problem is the roughly ten million active customers it has lost since the peak (about 25 million now, against 35 million), and every one of them knows exactly who it is. A free show built for reach is aimed at the problem the brand doesn’t have, unless the tags turn viewers into buyers.

The business can afford the experiment: second-quarter sales rose 10% to US$1.61 billion and full-year guidance went up to US$7.1 to 7.18 billion. What it hasn’t published is the number a merchant would actually ask for: conversion from the tagged clips, lapsed customers reactivated, cost per piece of content. The last network broadcast, in 2018, drew 3.3 million viewers, and the company now talks about 1.7 billion impressions. Impressions are lovely. Show me the second order.

The cost of spending it this way. When selection is the content, rejection is content too. Romee Strijd, 31, mother of two, the Angel who closed the 2018 finale, posted two TikToks last Monday: she’d trained all summer, flown to New York for the standard model casting, heard nothing for five weeks, then been told by her agency she “wouldn’t fit in the show this year.”

The brand told Vanity Fair she was released on 6 September and that it “communicated directly to her representation.” Technically airtight, and beside the point. Her first video passed 3,000 comments, one reply cleared 35,000 likes in a day, and nobody in those comments cared which party dropped the email. A brand that spends a year selling the moment someone hears yes owns the moment someone hears no. Anyone running a creator army carries the same exposure at a smaller scale: thousands of people who applied, sampled or posted, and heard nothing back.

My call. As a media plan it works: it runs for eight weeks instead of one night, and it turns 16,000 customers into a sales force on commission. The only proof that counts is the active-customer number at the next results. If 25 million hasn’t moved, Victoria’s Secret made a very good television show.

WHAT TO DO ON MONDAY

Build the ladder, not just the army. If you run an open call, an ambassador intake or a creator tier, give people visible rungs (better commission, a repost, a seat at the event) and film the climb. Your applicants are the warmest audience you will ever have.
Write the no before the yes. Decide the wording, the date and who sends it, and send it to the person as well as their rep. Five weeks of silence was the whole story.
Ask for the second order. Every time you report views, report the number that shows someone chose you: the repeat purchase, the lapsed customer who came back, the waitlist that converted.
Sources: VS&Co Q2 2026 results · YouTube Official Blog · Glossy · Puck · Fortune · Just Jared, 12 Oct · VS statement via Just Jared, 17 Oct · Fashion Times · Ynet · Daily Beast · W Magazine · VS Fantasy Bra · Rolling Out · Martin Cid

06 — THE DIARY

Here’s where MOODY girls are showing up.

→ Wed 21 Oct · Online, 1pm AEDT. Pippa on recyclable packaging and greenwashing, Boomerang Labs. Free. Register

→ Thu 22 Oct · Sydney, 4pm. Canva’s free hands-on website workshop, Surry Hills; Hollie’s going. Details

→ Thu 22 Oct · Melbourne, 5:30pm. ELEVATE x Radical Yes leather-charm painting with Jacqui; four spots left. Tickets

→ Sun 25 Oct · Sydney, 8am. ZIISH x She Walks for Breast Cancer, Clark Park, Lavender Bay; $25 minimum to BCNA. [links needed]

→ Sun 25 Oct · Online. Emily’s free Make Your Expertise Make Cents masterclass. Ask Emily in the chat for the link.

→ Wed 28 Oct · Sydney. Marika’s invitation-only founder dinner, ten seats. DM Marika.

→ Wed 28 & Fri 30 Oct · Brisbane. Coffee at Industry Beans 7:30am, cocktails at Wild Legs from 5:30pm, via Jen Garner. Confirm in the Brisbane chat.

→ Mon 2 Nov · Sydney. Mel Drennan cooks at OzHarvest’s CEO CookOff. Support her

→ Thu 12 Nov · Sydney, 6pm. Bills to Business Class at WeWork Barangaroo, co-hosted by Priscilla; early bird $69. Tickets

Further out: MerryMakers Creative Ritual, Sydney, 21 Nov (DM Sia); FoundHER Summit, Sydney, 24 Nov (Renate has details); Wendy’s Walk & Talk mornings in November, book here.

07 — CLASSIFIEDS

What a girl wants. What a girl needs.

→ Hiring: part-time Events Coordinator, Sydney (DM Sandy B); junior marketing project assistant, Brisbane CBD (DM Elise).

→ Creators wanted: paid BTS and social filming at a Wynyard speaking gig, 11 Nov, iPhone fine (DM Sharon); Sydney and Melbourne creators for Georgia McFarlane’s client referral list (DM Georgia).

→ Available: Emma, newly in Sydney, for copy, SEO, photo, video and editing (DM Emma); Alexis Fenton, fractional CMO, one-month incubators and go-to-market to year end (LinkedIn).

→ Founders wanted: Petra at FASI AI needs SME owners who want a sustainability plan without a consultancy bill (DM Petra).

→ Mudgee retreat, early November: Zensi wants facilitators, photographers and videographers. EOI

→ For a good cause: Lisette’s Glimmer Luncheon raffle for the Mater’s stillbirth research centre, $28,000 in prizes, no need to attend. Enter →

No link means she’s in your city chat or General. Don’t know her yet, ask; someone in there does.

Forward this to one girl who’d get it.

Then bring her in: the chat is here, and I’ll add her to her city.

Love Brooke x

MOODY is the intelligence, culture and network for ambitious women. Founders, operators, investors, corporates and creatives in the same group chat. These are the girls who get it.

@get__moody · getmoody.co · est. 2026

she kept the name on every box. napoleon perdis is back in our makeup bags.

get MOODY — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 21:13:26 GMT

Napoleon Perdis, at a glance

→ The brand: Australian makeup, first store in Paddington in 1995, best known for foundation, primer (“not to prime, is a crime”) and the counter makeover.

→ The operator: Mel Drennan, Managing Director. Ex-THE ICONIC and Catch.com.

→ The bet: fewer, better products, a quarterly subscription called Your Golden Ritual, and getting back onto pharmacy and salon shelves.

“Electric.”

That’s the word Mel Drennan uses for the mood inside Napoleon Perdis right now. The first Your Golden Ritual box sold out, the upgraded foundations have landed, and after eighteen months of rebuilding she says the brand is “finally on the front foot.”

It’s a word you don’t often hear about a brand that went into voluntary administration in January 2019 and was sold to KUBA Investments a few months later. Mel is the one who has been doing the rebuild, and one of the biggest calls she made along the way was not to start again. They properly debated a full rebrand, with a new name and a clean slate, and decided to keep the name. “You can’t manufacture thirty years of trust.”

She came in from the other end of retail entirely, having spent the best part of a decade taking THE ICONIC from startup to market leader and then leading a turnaround at Catch. “I’d done the scale-up story, and this was the more interesting one. I knew what it looked like to build something from nothing. What I hadn’t done was bring an icon back.”

She also walked into one of the most crowded categories in the country. Global beauty is a $450 billion industry, and Mecca alone turned over $1.43 billion in the year to December 2025. Mel’s read on all that noise is the reason I wanted her in this series:

“Beauty is crowded. But it’s crowded with brands asking women for more: more steps, more products, more decisions. I saw room for one that gives back more than it takes.”

I met Mel at a NORA NRF Bring It Home event, where we both had the pleasure of hosting, and I was smitten instantly. We’ve been hanging out in the retail leaders circle ever since, and I am so stoked she’s now part of MOODY. Very few people in Australia have brought a brand back from administration, and Mel has told me she wants the MOODY girls to come and find her for exactly that kind of advice.

01 — Don’t rebrand. Reintroduce.

Being this recognisable cuts both ways, and Mel is clear-eyed about it. The upside is she never has to introduce herself. “Say ‘Napoleon’ and she already has a memory attached: a first foundation, a counter makeover, the look she wore to her formal.”

I’m one of those women. I wore Napoleon to my high school formal, and while we were still in high school my sister and I did the three-day Napoleon makeup artist course on the Gold Coast. When Mel talks about the counter memory, I know exactly which one she means.

The downside is that most women still picture the brand as it was. Some customers remember the peak, some remember the administration, and plenty just assume it disappeared.

“So the job isn’t building awareness. It’s earning a second look.”

A rebrand would have thrown away recognition that took three decades to build. In Mel’s words, a new name means zero recognition, zero memories, and zero reason to pick you up over the hundred other brands on the shelf. Then she said my favourite line of the whole interview: “The name was never the problem. The business behind it needed rebuilding, and that’s a very different thing. You don’t knock down a house with great bones because the plumbing’s bad.”

So they kept the name and changed who the brand is about. A brand built on one man’s face now puts the spotlight on the woman wearing the product: real women, minimal retouching, every age and life stage. The artistry stays, but it’s been redefined as artist-level performance in a product she can apply herself on a Tuesday morning in under ten minutes. “We didn’t reinvent. We reintroduced. Same attitude, new face, grown up alongside the women who grew up with us.”

→ So what: before you spend money on a rebrand, check whether customers actually have a problem with your name, or with your stock, your range and your service.

02 — Grow properly, not loudly

This is the part that gets my retail brain excited, even though nobody will ever post about it. 2025 was the reset year: a leaner range, stable stock, disciplined pricing, new systems from the ERP to the 3PL, and repaired relationships with retail partners.

Mel doesn’t dress it up.

“None of it is glamorous, but it’s what lets a brand grow properly rather than just loudly.”

Moving to a new ERP and 3PL while the business keeps trading is genuinely hard work, and it decides whether stock actually reaches the shelf when a customer goes looking for it. The range had also grown too big, with too many launches and too much noise, so she cut it back to “fewer ranges, stronger icons” and pointed the whole business at foundation and primer, the two categories where NP loyalty has always been built.

The first proof point landed this year with a foundation upgrade. Same shades she already knows, with higher SPF, smoother application and more skincare in every formula, reworked for the Australian climate, with more shades coming by the end of next year. I love this move, because improving a product she already buys asks very little of a loyal customer. “When she gets a great result every time, she comes back.”

What the business earns goes back into innovation and brand, which Mel describes as “a flywheel, not a campaign.”

She’s also refreshingly honest about the trading conditions. “Australian retail is a tough place to trade right now, and like a lot of brands our size, protecting cashflow has had to come first.” The global numbers back her up: McKinsey now expects global beauty growth to slow from 7% a year to 5% through 2030. In a market like that, a smaller range also means less cash tied up in stock that isn’t selling.

03 — Out of the aisle and into her bathroom

This is where Mel’s years at THE ICONIC really show. “At THE ICONIC, every click told you something.” A department store counter tells you almost nothing in real time, and by the time sell-through comes back from a partner, Mel says, “the moment has often passed.”

Her answer is Your Golden Ritual, a quarterly subscription. She does a short quiz on her colour profile and coverage, and four times a year a curated edit of full-sized products arrives at her door. That’s over $2,000 of product a year for the equivalent of $2 a day. The idea came from Mel’s own life and her team’s: “So many of us are leaders, mums and jugglers of everything, and beauty had quietly become one more chore on the list.”

The spring box sold out and started shipping in the first week of September. There’s already an early presale open for the summer box, shipping from the first week of December, because they didn’t want anyone missing out a second time. Kelly McCarren and Alisha Bhojwani hosted a live podcast event for the launch, which Mel describes as “the moment it all came together.”

I did the maths on this, because it’s the first thing I’d want to see if I were an investor looking at this business. The equivalent of $2 a day is roughly $730 a year, or about $180 a box, for over $2,000 of full-sized product. For her, that’s an easy yes. For the brand, the mechanics are just as good. A subscription is paid for before the box is built, which helps with cashflow and means you know how much stock to make. Every renewal is a customer you didn’t have to pay to win again, which in retail terms means a lower cost to acquire her and more value from her over time. For a business that has spent the year protecting cashflow, that’s a very sensible format to build.

What interests me most is what the subscription does to the relationship. “We’re not waiting for her to walk past anymore. We’re in her bathroom every season, hearing directly what’s working for her.” Every subscriber hands over her shade and coverage before the first box ships, so the brand holds its own customer data instead of waiting on a retail partner’s reports, and it grows every quarter. Mel’s pulling it into one picture of the customer and using AI so the team spends “less time chasing numbers and more time acting on them.”

She’s not romantic about the data either. “Data will never replace the counter. That’s where she feels special: she sits down, gets a makeover, and has someone’s full attention.” What she’s building is both: “the warmth of the counter and the smarts of the data, working together.”

→ So what: if you sell wholesale, find one format that gives you a direct line to your customer. Even a small direct channel gives you customer data that wholesale reports can’t.

04 — The contrarian bet

I asked Mel what bet she’s making that the rest of the category isn’t. No hesitation: “That she wants less, not more.”

Most of the category is built on launching more often and selling longer routines. Mel’s bet is that her customer is exhausted by it. “She doesn’t need another product to figure out. She needs fewer ones she can trust, that work every time, and that fit into the life she’s actually living.”

The research is drifting her way. McKinsey says the “more-is-more consumption” era has ceded ground to shoppers who are “value conscious, skeptical of hype.” In Euromonitor’s 2024 Asia Pacific beauty survey, 32.1% said they’d rather buy fewer, higher-quality items.

Every decision in this piece goes back to that one bet: the tighter range, the upgraded hero foundations, a subscription that takes the aisle-standing off her plate. Mel puts all of it through a single question: “does this give her more than it takes?”

“Less noise, more impact. I think that’s where the category is heading, and we want to be the brand that got there first.”

My read: I think Mel is right about where the category is heading, and I’d love to see more Australian brands brave enough to cut their range the way she has.

Rapid fire with Mel

Because this series comes with a rapid fire round, and nobody leaves without doing it.

Most unhinged thing you’ve done for the business? Launching a brand-new subscription and a full foundation upgrade within weeks of each other, while still rebuilding the business underneath them. Would she do it again? “Absolutely.”

What’s the mood right now? “We’ve done the hard yards, the launches have landed, and the team can feel the momentum. It’s the growth chapter, and everyone knows it.”

The thing you want most? “For NP to be the comeback story other brands study.” She wants to stand on a stage one day and share all of it, the hard parts and the mistakes included. (Mel, when you’re ready for that stage, I would love to host it.)

When did you realise you were building a community, not just a brand? It started with her team, the people who stayed through the hardest times. “You can’t buy that kind of loyalty.” Then she noticed it everywhere: “Everyone has a memory, and everyone wants to see us back.”

What are ambitious women spending too much time on, and not enough? “Too much time on the small decisions. What to wear, what to buy, which serum, which shade.” Not enough on themselves and each other. “Every great thing I’ve done has come from someone sharing their experience with me.”

Advice to you five years ago? “Take the risks. Not everything will go to plan, and that’s okay. Catch didn’t go the way I’d hoped, and neither did Green Friday, but I learnt more from those chapters than from any win.” Plus: “it’s not all on your shoulders.”

What do you want the MOODY girls to find you for? “To help them grow.” Ecommerce, building a team, a tough chapter, “or just needing someone to say ‘you’ve got this’, come find me.”

Where can we find you? Melissa Drennan on LinkedIn, @napoleonperdis on Instagram, napoleonperdis.com, “and on your doorstep every season with Your Golden Ritual.”

The ask

The one intro that would change Mel’s next 90 days: pharmacy and salon partners who want Napoleon Perdis back on their shelves.

→ Pharmacy groups. “Pharmacy is where she shops every week.” It’s also where the momentum is. Chemist Warehouse network sales rose 14% to $10.3 billion in FY25, with beauty named among the growth categories.

→ Salon groups. “Salons are where she already trusts an expert’s advice,” which suits a brand built on artistry.

In Mel’s words: “We’ve done the hard work. The range is tighter, the foundations are upgraded, the stock is reliable.” If that’s you, or you know who runs category at a pharmacy or salon group, reply to this email and I’ll make the intro.

The question I’m leaving you with: what are you still adding to your business that your customer would actually thank you for taking away?

Tell me. I read everything.

Love Brooke x

Mel, thank you for opening the books on this one.
So glad the NRF Bring It Home stage put us in the same room.

MOODY is Australia’s answer to the serendipity Americans take for granted. The room where founders, investors, operators, corporates and creatives are in the same group chat, and it turns out they needed each other. These are the girls who get it and we are in a MOOD.

This newsletter is the highlight reel. The WhatsApp is where we actually live.

Every city, growing weekly.

moody weekly: relentless perseverance

get MOODY — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 07:00:46 GMT

01 - THE MOOD

Hi divas 🤍

Amelia won a $10,000 grant on Thursday. She applied four times. Three weeks ago she was working out how to pay her developer at the end of the month, and she filmed every day of it anyway. I have watched a lot of founders this year and the ones who get there are not just the most talented, they’re the ones who apply a fourth time. I call this relentless perseverance. I am so proud of her I could burst.

The best thing I did this week happened in the car. Three and a half hours on Saturday, Brisbane to the coast and back, and I spent the whole drive talking to Claude out loud. Not typing, talking. For weeks I’ve been stuck on the MOODY partnership stack, the actual document that says what a brand gets when it works with us and what it costs, and I could not get it onto a page. Something about the drive and having to say it out loud, the way you would to a friend who happens to be a very good advisor, shook it loose. By the time I pulled into the driveway there was a first cut of the deck waiting for me. We kept going from there but the talking was the magic bit. If you’ve got a thing you’ve been circling for a month, take it for a drive.

The other thing I’m on is money health, because I’ve decided it’s the same project as the health kick. I built a little agent this week that runs every Sunday and goes through my subscriptions looking for the leaks. Embarrassing result: about $400 a month in things I’d forgotten I was paying for. Four hundred dollars. It took four minutes to set up and it is the single highest-return thing I’ve done this year.

The chat line of the week belongs to Pinky, who asked for a Brisbane pop-up venue and had three options inside ten minutes: “You girls are better than ChatGPT.” Rosie sent a photo on Saturday of Hollie on her Melbourne couch, two women who met in this chat, with the note “All because of you.” That one’s going on the fridge.

Brooke x

If a girl in your life would get it, forward this and add her to the chat.

02 - THE VLOG

No vlog this week, so watch this one instead. Sophie Hood on the Amazon pod. Scaling Seoul Tonic into thousands of stores, playing offence on Amazon, and the one job AI doesn’t get. Her update this week: So Topical is “going really well, everything has still been entirely organic,” and clinics and PR are next. Watch → · Read →

03 - THE READ

The week in consumer, here and everywhere, and what the girls said about it.

→ TVSN is closing after more than 30 years. Direct Group couldn’t find a buyer and has put Reader’s Digest up for sale too. Alexis and Levina both had clients on it and asked the chat where that shopper goes now. She’s 55-plus, she buys on a demo, and she’s already on TikTok Shop and Facebook Live with nobody in this country building a channel for her. That’s a gap, not a funeral. Inside Retail

→ Country Road Group is pulling 100 of its 283 concessions out of David Jones. DJs has lost $170m over two years and its CEO admits a “perception problem.” Chanel, Dior and Gucci had already walked; this is the landlord’s own biggest tenant. When your anchors would rather pay their own rent than share your floor, the problem isn’t perception. Inside Retail

→ Suboo is in liquidation owing $655,000. The Bondi swim label worn by Gigi Hadid and Matilda Djerf, stocked in 300 boutiques across 17 countries, owes Shopify $140k and Wayflyer $105k. Seventeen countries of wholesale is seventeen sets of payment terms and one cash-flow problem. Inside Retail

→ Australians will spend $346 each this Black Friday, up from $324, and 62% will use AI for part of the shop. Shopify’s report, with Princess Polly already on an AEO roadmap. Six weeks out, the job isn’t a bigger discount, it’s making sure ChatGPT can read your product pages. The six steps are in 005. IT Brief

→ Kmart pulled its Anko camera glasses after the Privacy Commissioner opened an investigation into the Chinese developer, which ignored the regulator’s letters. They sold out in under a week in July. Kmart’s superpower is speed to a trend; this is what happens when the trend outruns the due diligence. B&T

→ Leslie launched Paparazzi Day. Built in public, with the chat’s notes. Watch →

→ Vera launched ZON, sun-protection clothing, and wants your feedback. zoncollection.com

→ Jay-Z is reportedly weeks from buying LVMH’s half of Fenty Beauty. His fund MarcyPen is closing on the 50% stake. Fenty did about US$450m in 2024 and Rihanna keeps hers. Read it as LVMH admitting it can’t grow a celebrity brand past the celebrity. theGrio

→ Adore Beauty opened its biggest store, at Melbourne Central. Double the range, 150 brands, a K-beauty shop inside, and the group hits 25 doors by year end. The pure-play that swore off stores now opens one a quarter, because the maths on paid social lost to the maths on a lease. If you’re a DTC beauty brand, this is your wholesale channel for 2027. Inside Retail

→ Banu Skin is in 23 Sephora doors in the US. Roz Samimi’s acne brand sold out online in its first week and came through Sephora Accelerate. The programme is the door. Apply. Inside Retail

→ Pinterest launched AI Beauty Guides and its first Beauty Trend Report with Sephora. “Caramel nude” nails up 943%, cluster lashes up 646%, and 85% of users say they see beauty trends there first. The most under-used channel in Australian beauty is about to get expensive. Cosmetics Business

→ Boots sold for US$8.9bn to the Weston family, No7 included. Private equity bought it, stripped it, flipped it. Chain Store Age

→ Sophie at MYRRAR shipped a new feature. Send it a product link from social and it tells you if it suits you. @_myrrar

→ Meta banned ByteDance from advertising on its apps in seven markets including the US, after TikTok throttled links out to Instagram. Meta’s line: “We don’t have to run ads from a competitor whose goal is to pull people off our apps.” Three weeks ago TikTok stood on a stage in Sydney and told a room of Aussie brands to go all in. The platforms are at war and your brand is the ground, so don’t build the whole house on either. Music Business Worldwide

→ Pinterest now lets brands sponsor your Pins without a deal. You get an email, you approve or decline. A platform finally paying creators for the back catalogue, not the next post. If you’ve got five years of boards, turn it on. Social Media Today

→ Week five. The 30-day yap challenge didn’t end on Wednesday. Ari posted new prompts this morning and the chat kept going. Britt’s yap, “you can be great at marketing and still have a weak brand,” is worth the minute. Britt → · Ari →

→ Rosie Chong went full-time freelance as a personal branding and LinkedIn strategist. LinkedIn →

→ ChatGPT got a visual interface. Charts, calculators and maps inside the answer, alongside GPT-6. Every one of those is a product page that didn’t get a click. TechCrunch

→ Meta and Sierra published a standard for how AI agents deal with businesses. Shopify, Stripe and Walmart are among the launch partners. This is the quiet one that matters. Next year a chunk of your orders will be placed by software on someone’s behalf, and if your store can’t talk to it, you’re not in the answer. Constellation

→ Claude moved into Google Docs, Sheets and Slides. Sidebar, all paid plans, asks before it edits. The “paste it into ChatGPT” era is about six months from over. Reworked

In our chat: the Tech + AI girls compared cloud credits. Lauren Kennedy runs vision on GCP and text on AWS, Sababa says Azure gave the most, and for GCP “make sure you have a product website, not just a landing page.”

→ Firmus pulled its $7.1bn float. The biggest IPO in a generation at a $44bn valuation: the offer was set at $11 a share, advisers tested $9 and then $5.50, and on Friday morning the board walked. Same week, Square Peg closed over $1bn, its biggest raise, on $1.4bn returned across 19 exits. Not even plastering Roxy Jacenko on this one could save it. The private money is there; the public market isn’t. If you’re raising this quarter, that’s the room you’re walking into. SmartCompany · Forbes Australia

→ Nicola Forrest put $20m into Antler’s new fund and $10m aside for women founders. $60,000 non-dilutive at first cheque and again at the next milestone. Antler’s own number: all-women teams return 2.6x against 2.1x for the fund. Women outperform the fund and still needed a billionaire to ring-fence the money. Startup Daily

→ Amelia Godfrey won SPARK’s $10k women in business grant for Pelvy. Danielle Lewis gives out $15k every quarter to SPARK members a year in. Moodi’s $1,000 grant is announced at Born of Ambition’s Thursday night in Sydney, applications shut tonight. SPARK → · Moodi →

→ Oura is defending a US lawsuit over its sleep-staging claims, a fortnight after postponing its IPO. Wearables sold themselves on “clinical.” The lawsuits are the bill for that word. B&T

In our chat: Sughra pulled together a Melbourne girls’ dinner at JUNI on Friday, “most of us met each other through MOODY,” and five of them have already asked for the next one. Paige is making personalised hypnosis audios with AI and copped to being “a skeptic with some woo in me,” which is the room in one sentence.

04 - THE DIARY

Where we’re showing up.

Today, Sydney. Australian Marketing Summit, ICC. Sababa has free tickets, ask in the chat. australianmarketingsummit.com

Wed 14 Oct, 7pm, online. How To Make AI Your Co-Founder, Cortney and Jami’s free webinar. “Mischief when the Moody gals get in the same room.” RSVP →

Fri 16 Oct, 8am, Sydney. Konnectile Breakfast with Mirela. Luma →

Sat 17 Oct, 11:30am, Melbourne. Cook, Connect & Feast, hands-on Vietnamese cooking with Udoka and Musefunnel, GK Tapas, Moonee Ponds. Pay what you can, 20 places. Luma →

Sat 17 and Sun 18 Oct, 11am, Sydney east. Rosie’s roseyefilm x South Dowling Sandwiches, half-price sandwiches and 35mm photos. @roseyefilm

25 to 27 Oct, Shangri-La Sydney. Kadwood Atelier made-to-measure suits. Eight to twelve weeks’ lead time, so this is the window for anything you’re wearing on a stage in 2027. invitation.kadwood.com

Tue 27 Oct, 7pm, London. Mode Office London launch, The Sloane Club, Chelsea. £60. RSVP →

Wed 4 Nov, Brisbane. The Build x Become Room with Alexis Fenton and Dante Amato, Spicers Balfour, 18 seats, $1,495. Details →

Thu 5 Nov, Sydney. Techella Fest, UTS Underground, from $595, three quarters sold. techellafest.com

Fri 6 Nov, Melbourne. Fashion Law Supper Club. Sold out, waitlist open. Waitlist →

Sat 15 Nov, New York. Female Founder World at Pier Sixty, $249. Abbey’s going, Alison’s buying, Leah’s “not 100%.” Abbey also needs a sublet 13 to 22 Nov. Join the waitlist →

Wed 18 Nov, Sydney. GTM & CRO Summit, Doltone House, $147. Luma →

05 - CLASSIFIEDS

What a girl wants, what a girl needs whatever makes you happy sets you freeeee - to quote the icon Christina.

→ A CRM expert looking for work. Kristen’s asking. Francesca’s already said “Me!!!” but go anyway.

→ A full-time creative director, film and media, for a New York studio. Ro, in the NYC chat.

→ Content creators for an events business. Imogen Marty, Sydney chat.

→ Pilates models, Sydney, around Fri 16 Oct. Half-day shoot, late 20s to 30s. Email Nicole@nikkicolesurfer.com, subject PILATES CASTING, with height, headshot and full-body.

→ A female DJ for an Olivia Dean listening party this month. Polly, @yoursliceof.

→ First hospital pilots for XTRA TIME. Christine’s hospital parking tech needs intros. christine.nikolopoulos@xtratime.com.au

→ Offers: Saskia Mulvihill, commercial lawyer at RedeMont, for contracts, IP and brand protection (saskia.johnson@redemont.com). Pippa Corry’s philo & co for sustainable packaging (pippa@philoand.co). Fern will shoot a fashion event for the cost of travel (hello@ferncawthorne.com). Nicole at SOLVVVED is doing free brand-world audits. @solvvved.atelier

→ Still open: venues and brand partners for the MOODY headshot day and the end-of-year manifesting night. DM me.

06 - THE CASE STUDY

A vitamin brand raised $15 million. It just sold for $1.25 million guaranteed.

Vitable, the personalised vitamin subscription Larah Loutati and Ilyas Anane founded in 2019, agreed last month to sell to an ASX penny stock for a headline $3.5 million. It raised more than $15 million to get here: Global Founders Capital, Rocket Internet, Artesian, BWX, a crowdfund, a media-for-equity deal. In April 2023 it had $14 million of ARR, 13,000 orders a month and a $100 million target. Today it has $5 million of revenue and 7,850 subscribers.

I read the ASX announcement so you don’t have to. The $3.5 million is not $3.5 million.

What the filing says. It’s an asset sale paid entirely in shares of Elixinol Wellness, a hemp company trading under a cent with a market cap of about $3.5 million. The buyer is the same size as the thing it’s buying, and the maximum share issue (476 million) is more than Elixinol has on issue (454 million). Of the $2.5 million base, $1.25 million is unconditional over twelve months. The rest is a two-year earn-out against revenue and EBITDA targets, plus a $1 million kicker that only pays if Elixinol’s market cap passes $20 million. It’s at $3.6 million. So the guaranteed number is $1.25 million in sub-cent scrip: eight cents in the dollar on what was raised.

One more detail. Vitable shareholders led by Ben McHarg’s Brenteca, which led the 2021 Series A, are putting $500,000 into Elixinol and McHarg is “in discussions to advise the board.” Elixinol’s chairman until last December sat on Vitable’s advisory board in 2021. Same people, both sides of the table. Not sinister, that’s small-cap Australia, but it tells you the price was negotiated between friends, not found in a market. The only statement from Vitable has no founder’s name on it.

The five things that set the price

1. Which way revenue is pointing on the day you sell. $14 million to $5 million. Scaled subscription brands get three to four times revenue (Eucalyptus went to Hims & Hers in February at roughly 2.5x). Shrinking ones get one to two, floor around 0.6x. Vitable’s headline is 0.7x, the guaranteed part is 0.25x.

2. Churn, and whether you ever said it out loud. Vitable never disclosed it. The DTC supplement benchmark is 5 to 8% a month, under 4% is top tier. At $50 a month and 70% margin, the gap between 5% and 8% is about $260 of lifetime margin per customer. Across the 100,000 customers they claimed, that’s the gap between a $100 million ambition and a $5 million business.

3. Cash versus paper. When someone offers you a stake in a company smaller than yours, you’re not being bought, you’re being merged into their problems.

4. Guaranteed versus earned. $1.25 million is certain. $2.25 million depends on performance the founders may not control inside someone else’s group. Every earn-out is a bet the buyer is placing on you with your own money.

5. How much you raised. This is the one for the room. Take $15 million and any exit under about $18 million is a loss for everyone. The same business on $2 million would have made its founders life-changing money at this price. The money you raise sets the floor on what counts as winning.

The other side. Care/of sold 70% to Bayer in 2020 at US$225 million; Bayer shut it in 2024. Bioniq went to Herbalife in March for up to US$150 million. Thorne went to P&G for US$3.8 billion in August. The category works. Personalisation on subscription economics, without retail and without a hero product, mostly doesn’t. Which is why Antler’s $60,000 non-dilutive cheques matter in the same month: money that doesn’t set a floor on your exit.

Monday. Work out your real monthly churn, not the one in the deck. Open the cap table and find the exit price where every investor gets their money back, that’s your floor. Then find one grant to apply for this quarter.

Forward this to one girl who’d get it.

Brooke x

This newsletter is the highlight reel. The WhatsApp is where we actually live.

Every city, growing weekly.

tiktok shop isn’t coming to australia

get MOODY — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 03:03:15 GMT

01 - THE MOOD

Hi divas 🤍

I’m writing this on a public holiday Monday from the Gold Coast, in the sun, on what I’m going to call a no-phone day and you’re going to correctly read as a low-phone day. I feel more creative than I have in months. It is so good to get out of the noise. Work, events, the running around, all of it.

I did a podcast detox in January when I was in New York and it took me a week to notice how much of what I thought I wanted was somebody else’s voice. It’s still tempting. Every week there’s a community in the US doing a festival, a founder dinner series, a newsletter that looks the way ours should apparently look, and the pull to copy it is real. Even more fun when the person being put on the pedestal in front of you is an ex-associate, and yes, I saw the chat this week. It’s painful for about a minute. Then you remember that nobody built a thing worth having by being a copy of someone else’s thing, and that the version of this that’s actually yours is the only version that lasts. When in doubt, head out of the phone, feet in the sand, remember who you are and where you’re uniquely going in this life. Aussies do it better anyway.

Which is why week three of the yap challenge has been my favourite so far. I’m watching you find your own voices online, in real time, and none of them sound like each other. That’s the whole point. The prompts were only ever a way in. Keep going.

It was a pinch-me week too. I had the best time at TikTok Takeoff in Sydney, a closed room with two hundred Australian brands and a very clear message that TikTok Shop is not coming here and that it doesn’t matter. Eleven pages of notes. They’re the case study at the bottom.

Two things in the works for the end of the year, and I’m telling you early because I need your help. A MOODY headshot day, and the ultimate end-of-year reflection, a jump start on manifesting 2027. Two incredible brand partners are already in on these. I’m looking for cool venues in each city to host us, and for other partners who want to come on board. If you know someone, send them my way.

Love Brooke x

MOODY weekly is free and it’s staying free. The case study at the bottom is paid: one real problem, the mechanics, what to do about it on Monday. $12 a month or $119 a year, and founding members get first access to everything we’re cooking for 2027. If you want to expense it, here’s the email to send your manager →.

02 - THE VLOG

China, part two. Alibaba, Temu, ByteDance, JD Logistics and Tencent in four days, plus the Family Mart and Pop Mart hauls, the Zara that isn’t like our Zara, and the flight from hell. This ones chaotic, overtired, and definitely not polished. Maddi called it “boots on the ground journalism the ambitious girlies need,” which is going on the business card.

Watch China part two →

Missed part one? Shanghai and the prep for the retail safari. Watch →

Sophie Hood is on the Retail Insights with AWS pod. Scaling Seoul Tonic into 5,500 stores, playing offence on Amazon, and the one job AI doesn’t get. Recorded at NRF in New York, and the write-up is on getmoody.co· Read →

03 - THE READ

The week in consumer, here and everywhere, and what the girls said and did about it.

→ Marketplaces outsold Mecca, Sephora, Adore and Chemist Warehouse combined in Q4. $200m against $199.3m, per Pattern. Amazon alone is 19.9% of online beauty now. If your beauty brand’s Amazon strategy is “not yet,” that’s a strategy, it’s just not a good one. Inside Retail

→ Target is on Uber Eats. 25,000 items, 60 minutes, 120 stores, first Australian fashion retailer to do it. A pair of kids’ school shoes now arrives faster than the pad thai. Ragtrader

→ Shein’s first results as a public company: profit halved. Operating profit down 50% to $538m on revenue of $20bn, up 1%. Shares down 27% since the IPO. Fast fashion at scale is a volume business with a margin problem, and now there’s a quarterly reminder. FashionUnited

→ Adairs CEO Elle Roseby is out after a $39.4m loss and a $63.5m write-down on Focus on Furniture, the acquisition that was meant to be the growth story. Rachel Taylor steps up. Business News Australia

→ The Memo is eight stores. Phoebe Simmonds and Kate Casey opened a 12-month pop-up at Chadstone, mums only, which is the whole point. Same week Nagnata, run by sisters Laura May Gibbs and Hannah Stenmark, got B Corp at 87.8 against an industry average of 50.9. SmartCompany · Ragtrader

→ Beth opened SOOSHY in Melbourne after being made redundant. Jazzie: “I popped in yesterday, when I say it’s seriously good, I mean it. That’s my catering sorted every time.” Beth: “Sooshy empire here we go.”

In our chat: the ecommerce girls rate Ecommerce Equation. Sylvie: “it 3x’d my ecomm brand.” Bec asked the price and nobody answered, so somebody answer.

→ Milk Makeup lost 57% of its revenue in six months. $60.9m to $26.1m. Waldencast, the ex-L’Oréal roll-up that listed in 2021 as a $1.2bn platform, sold Obagi, delisted from the Nasdaq on Friday and is renaming itself after the one brand it has left. The roll-up era in beauty is ending the way roll-ups usually do. Fortune

→ Sephora is opening inside 100 Marks & Spencer stores from spring 2027. The UK beauty market is $7bn and grew 1.2% last year, so this is a share grab, not a growth bet. Watch for the Australian version: a prestige beauty brand inside a supermarket, within two years. Retail Dive

→ The NSW EPA issued stop notices to Mecca, Sephora and ASOS over a dozen scrubs still containing banned microbeads. Fines up to $550,000 plus $55,000 a day. If you make a scrub, check it this week. The Nightly

→ Boots is about to be sold for US$9bn to the Weston family, per the WSJ. Same family that owns Selfridges, Holt Renfrew and, until 2022, David Jones. Reuters

Media & Creator

→ TikTok will pay your brand deals within 30 days, zero commission. TikTok One Pay, for creators over 10,000 followers. Most agencies take 20% and 90 days. The platform just became the best client most creators have. Tubefilter

→ Netflix licensed Chicken Shop Date. The final season of Amelia Dimoldenberg’s show premiered on YouTube and Netflix on the same day, 115 episodes and 12 years in. Tubefilter

→ Instagram’s Edits app now has an AI assistant that reads your retention, shares and comments and tells you what’s working. Which is the yap challenge feedback loop, automated. TechCrunch

→ Yap challenge, week four: receipts. Day 15 passed on Friday and the prompts this week are all about proof. The best advice from the wobble thread, for anyone who’s fallen off: Kayla, skip the prompt if it doesn’t fit and work out your pillars. Ari, film it and send it to the group instead of posting. Brodie, back after four days of procrastinating over a new mic: “clip it from 0:15 to make it more sticky.” Reset call this week, time in the chat.

In our chat: Chiara’s goodbye post flopped on Thursday night and did numbers by Friday morning. My rule: night time here never performs, the window is 9am to 1pm, because that’s when the US and EMEA wake up. Shakas added one on Monday: comments are being cited by AI now, so make your comments on other people’s posts count.

→ Chiara left Amazon after ten years to launch Palm. Amazon employee number one in Australia, launched the store here in 2017 and Singapore in 2019. Palm is a health agent that starts at birth, paediatrics first then the whole family, built on her second mat leave. Twenty hospitals and two hundred paediatricians signed pre-launch, an angel round so oversubscribed it became a pre-seed. Launching in Europe. This is basically Jeff leaving. palmhealth.me

→ ChatGPT can now try clothes on you. Upload a photo, see the garment on your body, save it to a Favourites library. Global, as of Thursday. Your product images are now the fitting room, so shoot them like one. TechCrunch

→ Shopify launched Canvas: build the store by chatting to Sidekick. Same week Meta opened Muse, its AI agent, to small businesses for free, plugged into Shopify, Stripe, Instagram analytics and your ad account. TechCrunch · TechCrunch

→ OpenAI launched Dots: always-on agents you assign a job to and leave running. Each Dot gets its own identity, credentials and tools, works in the background toward a goal, and you message it from Slack or Teams. Pro and Business Premium only for now. Same day OpenAI launched Space, Pages and Slides, an office suite inside ChatGPT where the Dots work on your docs with you. TechCrunch · TechCrunch

In our chat: Bec wants her inbox triaged by AI. Shakas: connect Gmail to Claude, or try Kinso. Lauren Kennedy: schedule it in Claude Cowork, or a Dot. Paige is building an AI platform for PR people, brief in, ranked angles and pitches out, grounded in Australian outlets. Waitlist soon.

→ Oura pulled its IPO two days before pricing. Fifty million shares at $40 to $44, revenue up 90% this year, and it still walked. Jay Ritter, who has studied IPOs for forty years: “Most of the time that a company postpones an IPO, it never returns to the market.” Inc.

→ Firmus’s $7bn ASX float has the fund managers fighting in public. Plato plans to short it, Cadence is sitting out, and the valuation chatter runs from $32bn to US$90bn against $15.5bn in August. Bookbuild Thursday. It would be bigger than Canva on day one. ShareCafe

→ EliseAI raised $350m at a $4bn valuation. Founder and CEO Minna Song, $200m ARR, one in six US apartments. TechCrunch

The Room

In our chat: Rosie showed a male ex-colleague her For You page. He asked, “may I change your algo?”, spent an evening retraining it, and is now building an algo reset toolkit for men. Caitlin’s question for all of us: “If your likes were your investment portfolio, would you be happy with its performance?”.

04 - THE DIARY

Here’s where MOODY girls are showing up.

Wed 7 Oct Brisbane · Mon 12 Oct Sydney. Australian Marketing Summit, Melbourne was today. Sababa has free tickets, ask in the chat. australianmarketingsummit.com

Today, New York. Kayla Moran speaking at AdWeek. State of Mind 2026 →

Wed 7 Oct, 8am, Adelaide. SAFIA Industry Breakfast at Adelaide Fashion Week, Patina Place, $49. The SA Showcase on Thu 8 Oct with Cathy showing Yaneth is sold out. adlfashionweek.com

Thu 8 Oct, Sydney CBD. Emily Elvey’s Gorgias AI agent workshop, build your customer service agent before BFCM. WeWork Castlereagh St, 9 to 4:30, $299, a handful of seats left. Luma →

This week, online. Yap Challenge reset call with Britt and Ari. Time in the yap chat.

Wed 14 Oct, 7pm, online. How To Make AI Your Co-Founder, Cortney and Jami’s free webinar, this room first. RSVP →

Sat 17 Oct, 11:30am, Melbourne. Cook Connect Feast, hands-on Vietnamese cooking with Udoka and Musefunnel at GK Tapas, Moonee Ponds. Pay what you can, 20 places. Luma →

27 Oct, London. Mode Office London launch at The Sloane Club, Chelsea. Doors 7pm, panel 7:30, £60. RSVP →

Wed 4 Nov, Brisbane. The Build x Become Room, a one-day business intensive with Alexis Fenton and Dante Amato at Spicers Balfour, 18 seats, $1,495, plus a dinner. Details →

Thu 5 Nov, Sydney. Techella Fest, Australia’s first tech festival built by women, UTS Underground, from $595, three quarters sold. techellafest.com

Fri 6 Nov, Melbourne. Fashion Law Supper Club, Your Legal Besties x OFF DUTY Society. Sold out, waitlist open. Waitlist →

Sat 15 Nov, New York. Female Founder World at Pier Sixty, $249 GA. Alison’s buying a ticket, who’s going with her. Get yours →

Wed 18 Nov, Sydney. Go-To-Market & CRO Summit, Doltone House, $147, via Mirela at Konnectile. Award nominations open. Luma →

05 - THE CASE STUDY

TikTok Shop isn’t coming to Australia. Here’s what TikTok told us to do instead.

Last Tuesday I sat in a closed room in Sydney with a couple of hundred Australian brand leaders while TikTok ran a day called Takeoff. The theme was where your next chapter of growth comes from. Not one person from TikTok mentioned an Australian launch of TikTok Shop. Not once, not in the Q&A, not in the breakouts.

That’s the answer. The whole day was built around a different idea. Bianca Singh, who runs Shop partnerships globally, said it plainly: “You can actually get started just from your desk in your own city by today. If you’ve already got most of the foundation in place, you can skip the queue and be trading in a new market before Christmas.” The pitch is out, not in.

I took eleven pages of notes. What follows is the operating manual, from the people on stage: HiSmile, Babyboo and Zuru, plus the TikTok Shop team from the US and the founder who built Magic Brief and sold it to Canva. One of them did $50m through Shop this year at break-even, on purpose. One of them ships to 117 countries from Sydney. One of them turned up to New York Fashion Week without an invitation.

06 - CLASSIFIEDS

What the girls need.

→ A US wholesale rep for an Aussie haircare brand. Contract basis, indie boutiques and gift shops. Sumana, DM her in the NYC chat.

→ Free ELEVATE sessions for Melbourne teams to year end. Jacqui’s emotional fitness brand wants intros to HR and People & Culture leads. DM her in the Melbourne chat. elevate-state.com.au

→ Content creators for Veira Boutique. Indian designer outfit hire, Melbourne, ships globally. Srish, DM her in the Melbourne chat.

→ The Clubhouse, Surry Hills. Arielle’s studio is free for accommodation or content shoots from 18 Oct to 25 Nov. DM her in the Sydney chat.

→ Content creation and editing. Udoka has pivoted to services, from shoots to edits. udokaspov.com

→ Testers for Story Forge. AI-assisted branded product ideation for kids, wellness and lifestyle brands. Catherine, DM her.

→ Still open from last week: fractional CMO for a B2B AI company (Jami), designer for a brand platform in exchange for social strategy (Rosie), Christmas gift guide contacts for Bec and Deepa.

Forward this to one girl who’d get it.

Brooke x

This newsletter is the highlight reel. The WhatsApp is where we actually live.

Every city, growing weekly.

sophie hood on scaling seoul tonic into 5,500 stores, playing offence on amazon, and the one job ai doesn't get

get MOODY — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 04:10:34 GMT

Sophie Hood confessed to me in New York that she once spent a full hour on a single TikTok carousel, digging through a feral camera roll and writing every caption herself, then wondered if she’d just wasted a founder’s afternoon. In the same breath she mentioned pitching her brand to 10,000 US wellness retailers in one day using AI.

That combination is the smartest operating model I’ve heard all year: give the machines the grunt work, keep the taste for yourself, and know exactly where the line sits.

Seoul Tonic, if it isn’t in your fridge yet, is a functional wellness brand with two hero recovery tonics rooted in East Asian medicine, made with Mr Park, a third-generation Korean pear farmer with a family extraction method generations in the making. Together they’ve built a category Western retail never had a shelf for.

Shelf space is media

Eight weeks after launching out of her Bondi garage, still working full-time in finance, Sophie was cast on Gordon Ramsay’s Food Stars. The show aired a year later, an NDA kept her in her day job, and by the time Australia saw her on TV she’d quietly gone from two stockists to nearly a thousand. Iconic, no notes.

She’s now in around 5,500 stores across four markets, and 85 to 90 per cent of the business is wholesale. With no budget and no digital background, she worked out that a spot on a shelf was the cheapest marketing she could buy, and her pitch to buyers was flawless: nobody swaps their groceries for a Seoul Tonic, they add one on top. Pure incremental revenue for the store. The founders treating retail as media rather than distribution are lapping everyone else.

Amazon is offence

Amazon US is Seoul Tonic’s best channel, Sophie runs it herself, and she hasn’t spent a dollar marketing it.

“If you’re not showing up on US Amazon, you’re just doing yourself a disservice.”

In New York there are parcels outside every apartment in her building daily, and Sephora brands sit happily on Amazon. Then she asked the question Australian beauty keeps dodging: would you ever see a Mecca product on Amazon here?

The hesitation, she says, comes down to control and the fear of losing the customer journey. Fair, but your customer is shopping there regardless, and if you’re missing she’ll buy whoever showed up. Brands still treating marketplaces as a defensive chore are about to be outplayed by the ones using them to grow.

Let the machiene do the boring bits

For her new beauty brand, Sophie uses a tool that scrapes medical literature so she can fact-check every lab recommendation herself, and she’s testing packaging concepts before a designer opens a file. Her real flex is Overjoy, an AI outreach platform that finds retailers, sends a founder-voiced pitch, chases the follow-ups and links buyers straight to wholesale or Amazon.

She was never going to cold-email a wellness store in rural Georgia, and now those stores are ordering samples.

Last year everyone bolted AI onto old processes. This year the winners are rebuilding the process itself, and Sophie’s sales engine shows what that looks like in a lean team. Her warning for what comes next is hiring, because people willing to kill their darlings and work this way are rare.

Taste is the moat

Back to that carousel. Sophie decided the hour was worth it, because her audience can feel when it’s really her.

“I leave typos in. I make things a little bit messy on purpose... it’s going to be a little badge of if this is human generated or if this is AI generated.”

I agree, human is the new luxury, and the slightly wonky caption from a real founder is the one people trust.

“AI has made me realise how incredible purely creative people are. I think they are going to be the hottest job.”

Even with a folder of AI mockups, her team hired a designer in Spain specifically to tell them where they were wrong.

Her beauty launch skips the manufactured community and builds on the one her co-founder already has, through a private, request-to-join TikTok where members test product and end up on FaceTime with the founders. She’s also the first founder I’ve heard admit that not every brand needs a community, and I’m with her. I don’t need to be in a community for my toothpaste.

Enterprise retailers, take note. Your community is probably already on your shop floor, chatting to your best sales associate, and deserves attention before any shiny new membership program does.

“Consumers more than ever are craving an in-store experience. They want to touch, smell, make decisions on their own in real life because of the rise of all of this AI.”

Sophie’s 2026 prediction is the third space. She misses the laptop-friendly fashion stores and cafés in New York where she’s met half her network, and Australia doesn’t have them yet. Whichever local fashion brand opens a café first gets an acquisition strategy with a flat white attached.

Automate everything that doesn’t need your fingerprints, protect everything that does. So what’s the hour in your week you’d never hand to a machine?

Forward this to one girl who’d get it.

Brooke x

This newsletter is the highlight reel. The WhatsApp is where we actually live.

Every city, growing weekly.

i fell off the reformer and onto my face

get MOODY — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 05:37:01 GMT

"Completely winged it and I refuse to proof read."Britt, launching a Substack, Wednesday 9am

01 - THE MOOD

Hi divas 🤍

I fell off the reformer this week. Not a wobble. Fully off. Landed on my face.

Last weekend was six months since getting married, and six months ago I was in the best shape of my life. The six months since have been the most fun I’ve ever had, and I’ve flogged myself through every one of them. Shanghai, Sydney, Melbourne, Singapore, back again, stages, panels, podcasts, this newsletter. I got home on Sunday and finally stopped. Touched grass. Unpacked three months of suitcases. Went to Pilates and got humbled by a spring.

I know a lot of you are in the same season, because I read the chat. So this is the lesson I keep having to relearn, and I’m saying it to you as much as to me: you can have it all, you just can’t have it all at the same time. Health is the one thing you can’t put down and pick up later, and it’s the first thing I drop. From now until Christmas I’m locking it in. If you’ve got a supplement that actually works (I’m looking at you, Ziish) or a routine that survives a week like mine, reply and tell me. I’m building the list and I’ll share it.

The yap challenge is popping off. Watching your confidence build day by day is the best thing in my week, and I keep thinking, girls, you were always this confident. You just hadn’t filmed it yet. Replay’s up, the kit list is in the chat, office hours with Britt and Ari are Friday.

One more thing, and I want to say it plainly because you’d see through anything else. We’re here for a long time, not just a good time, and I want MOODY to be something that lasts longer than my ability to run on four hours’ sleep. City leads were the first step.

The second starts today: a paid case study at the bottom of every issue, and an expert learning series alongside the events and meetups. We’re not selling out, the divadom is levelling up.

This week - what you need to know to get your brand found on AI search engines like ChatGPT and Claude, straight from the mouths of Amazon, OpenAI and Verity AI on stage at The Social Summit. Get around it!

Love Brooke x

MOODY weekly is free and it’s staying free. We’re levelling up our weekly newsletter and educational resources with case studies and notes from the rooms shaping commerce, technology and brand.

It's $12 a month or $119 a year. If you want to expense it, here’s the email to send your manager or accountant→

02 - THE VLOG

China, part one. Shanghai, and the prep for a retail safari with twenty of Australia’s retail C-suite. Watch it on the train.

Watch China part one →

Missed last week’s vlog? The Sydney launch party, and what I took home from the Spotify x Meta creator session. Watch →

The yap challenge kick-off, in full. Ari filmed it on her DJI, fought the file transfer for two days, and it’s up. Britt on comfort being earned on camera, the front door and the house, and why nobody cares about your morning routine. If you joined late or you’re still at the bottom of the mountain, start here. Watch the replay →

03 - THE READ

The week in consumer/retail, tech/ai, media/creator, business/investing, health/beauty, here and everywhere, and what the girls said and did about it.

→ Dior, Gucci and Chanel have pulled categories out of David Jones after months of friction over slow payment for stock. AFR

→ Showpo passed $100m. Dissh did $153.6m, up 21%, mostly online, $21.4m profit. Sheike hit 231,226 loyalty members nine months early. The Australian fashion numbers going up are all DTC and all founder-led. AFR · Ragtrader

→ Temu and Shein are now a $4bn business in Australia. Shein’s local arm grew 20% to $1.53bn, and the Retail Council’s response this week was a safety campaign, not a price one. Ragtrader

→ The card surcharge ban starts Thursday. Westpac cut its merchant rate from 1.20% to 0.79%, about $80 a month for a small business. Ring your bank. SmartCompany

In our chat: Jessica Duchesne was quoted US$2,214 to air-freight 500 units from China. The ecommerce chat said go sea, and Rebecca Veksler is offering intros to her forwarders of fifteen years.

→ Sephora is on TikTok Shop, 2,300 products. TikTok Shop is now the number four beauty retailer in the US and Sephora held out longer than almost anyone. Glossy

→ Lara Worthington launched Ommage on Tuesday. Three products, $52 to $68, DTC in Australia and the US, plus Dover Street Parfums in Paris. Her first beauty brand since The Base. Retail Beauty

→ SWIISH has to become Ziish. Sally Obermeder lost a trade mark dispute to Swisse, so a decade-old wellness brand is renaming mid-expansion into Boots UK. Mediaweek

→ Vitable sold for $3.5m on $5m revenue and 7,850 subscribers. The same week Mel at Napoleon Perdis sold out a thousand Your Golden Ritual boxes and closed the spring box a month early. Summer presale opens next week, full feature with her soon. Business News Australia · napoleonperdis.com

→ Deepa Mani’s Proud of Colour Beauty won Best Inclusive Makeup Brand and Best Inclusive Makeup Product at the 2026 Beauty Shortlist Awards. @p_o_cbeauty

In our chat: cosmetic acupuncture is the new Botox. Cortney: “I just came off Botox and I’m doing this instead.” Essential Acupuncture in Bronte, Facelines in Surry Hills or my pick is Ova Acupuncture in Brisbane.

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→ Create & Cultivate sold out 4,000 tickets in LA and got compared to Fyre Festival by Wednesday. GA $399, VIP $715, Cardi B closed it. Then Inc. ran the complaints: food ran out, no shade, VIP barely different from GA. Four thousand women showed up, which is the part I keep looking at. MOODY festival, anyone? But seriously. Inc.

→ TikTok videos now have to run over a minute to earn Creator Rewards. Worth knowing if you’re posting 54-second yaps. The Publish Press

→ Ten yaps in. 116 in the chat, replay up, kit list landed with 15% off at Fone King (SOBXMOODY). Amelia Godfrey (Pelvy) took the week one prize. Steph filmed her first ever: “I’m still at the very bottom of cringe mountain.” Office hours with Britt and Ari on Friday.

→ Two Substacks before lunch on Wednesday. Jordyn Christensen opened with a $160m podcast deal. Britt’s is State of Brand, unproofread. Jordyn → · Britt →

In our chat: Leslie started a podcast because founder life was getting romanticised. Levina: most of it is printing labels at midnight. Hailey: “Female founderhood is mostly not even a little bit hot.”

→ An OpenAI agent got into Medicare’s statistics service on 18 June. OpenAI told Canberra on 10 September. Albanese called it “fundamentally unacceptable” and phoned Sam Altman. No personal records, a rapid review, and the guardrails bill now has its case study. ABC

→ 29% of Australians already use AI somewhere in their shopping journey, 63% say they will. One brand in this chat is already getting ChatGPT orders by accident. That’s the 29%. Case study below. The Australian

→ Mastercard has asked Lauren Kennedy (VerityAI) to brief its internal teams on AI commerce fraud next month. If you run a marketplace or have seen a customer use AI to force a refund, she wants your story before she walks in. DM her in the chat.

→ A business born at Book Club. Cortney (White Label Group) and Jami (automation engineer) met on 26 August and are now co-founders. First build is a free webinar, How To Make AI Your Co-Founder, this room first. RSVP →

In our chat: out-of-the-box agents or build your own. Chiara got “absolutely addicted” to Instinct, then deleted it over data security and “now miss it terribly.” Ro rates Town and I’m getting onto it this week. Emma Sharley’s ruling: plan in Claude, let Instinct action it. Lauren’s: opt out of training data. On the build side, see Cortney and Jami.

→ Heidi Health raised $475m at a $1.26bn valuation, Australia’s fourth unicorn this year. Seven startups raised $274.7m that week and none of the founders named were women. Women’s Agenda, same day: 2% of Australian capital goes to all-female-founded businesses. SmartCompany · Women’s Agenda

→ Lacevo is in Target US and every Baby Bunting. Sally Grice’s wearable breast pump brand, founded 2024, grew on intimate events rather than paid ads. B&T

→ Oura filed for a Nasdaq IPO at US$15.6bn, revenue up 74%. The ring is about to be a public company. Reuters

The Room

In our chat: one phone or two. Britt ordered a second phone for eight client accounts and regretted it on arrival, Paris has two and wants a third, Sarah runs two eSIMs and switches the work one off. Thirty-five messages in six minutes, no consensus.

Also new this week: Nadia named the room the divadom. It’s staying.

04 - THE DIARY

Where we’re showing up in October.

Tue 29 Sept, 6pm, New York. Roster Radio LIVE with the founder of Maude on the 1,000-door expansion. 113 Spring St, SoHo, non-alc sparkling and a gift tote. RSVP →

Wed 30 Sept, 5:30pm, Sydney. Morgan’s business-owner drinks at The Dolphin, Surry Hills. Open invite, half the Sydney chat is already in. RSVP in the Sydney chat.

Wed 30 Sept, 5:30pm, Sydney. Mode Office x SABA private styling at SABA QVB. Filled in four days, waitlist only. Waitlist →

Fri 2 Oct, online. Yap Challenge office hours, 30 minutes with Britt on tools and Ari on editing. Time in the yap chat.

Sat 3 Oct, Melbourne. Futuration at The Timber Yard, with Isha on the lineup. Kat: “Can confirm this woman can SING.” 20% off with FUTURE. Tickets →

Mon 5 Oct, New York. Kayla Moran is speaking at AdWeek NYC. If you’re in the city, go and clap.

Mon 5 Oct Melbourne · Wed 7 Oct Brisbane · Mon 12 Oct Sydney. Australian Marketing Summit, 9 to 5. Tickets from $27 and Sababa has free ones, ask her in the chat. australianmarketingsummit.com

Wed 7 Oct, 8am, Adelaide. SAFIA Industry Breakfast at Adelaide Fashion Week, then Thu 8 Oct the SA Showcase with Cathy showing Yaneth. adlfashionweek.com

Thu 8 Oct, Sydney. Emily Elvey’s Ai in a Day, build your customer service agent before BFCM. WeWork Castlereagh St, $299, capped at 20. Luma →

Sat 15 Nov, New York. Female Founder World. Tickets on sale now. Get yours →

05 - CLASSIFIEDS

What the girls need.

→ Fractional CMO, B2B AI tech. Newsletters, campaigns, landing pages, SEO and AEO, webinars. Jami is hiring for a friend, DM her your LinkedIn.

→ Designer wanted, social strategy offered. Rosie Brown needs a brand platform and a Canva template suite and will trade a full social strategy for it. LinkedIn

→ Christmas gift guide contacts. Bec (Fleurac Fragrance) and Deepa (Proud of Colour) both want in. If you’re an editor or know one, DM either.

→ Podcast guests. Leslie’s Off Script, On Brand, “the anti-highlight reel,” is casting next season. Apply →

→ Sponsors for seven talents at F1 Singapore. Priscilla (UAG Entertainment) is taking seven creators VIP and wants brands that want the flights, hospitality and trackside documented. DM her in the chat.

→ An industrial designer for CAD drawings to take to a manufacturer. Holly, DM her in the chat.

→ Men aged 25 to 45, two minutes. Atina is naming her supplement brand and needs the target market to vote. Send it to your brother. Survey →

06 - THE CASE STUDY

You’re already getting orders from ChatGPT. You just haven’t checked.

On Tuesday a founder in this chat (hi Sophie) messaged me. Her brand is already getting orders that trace back to ChatGPT, she hasn’t optimised a single page for it, and she wanted the one-minute version of what I’d said at the end of Social Summit.

I wrote it out in seven minutes, because I’d spent the week before on a stage with Rowena from OpenAI and Lauren Kennedy from VerityAI hearing the same six things from both of them. If one brand in this chat is getting orders from ChatGPT by accident, the rest of you are either showing up in those answers or you’re not, and most of you haven’t checked.

There are six things. One of them is unsponsorable, and Rowena said so on stage, so anyone selling it to you is selling snake oil. One of them is a number about trust that should change your Monday. One of them involves jailbreaking your own terms and conditions.

Subscribe to read the rest. $9 a month or $99 a year. What you get: the weekly case study, regular commerce, tech, investing and business deep dives, first dibs to MOODY events and exclusive merch.

Brooke Moody AWS, Lauren Kennedy VerityAI and Rowena Westphalen OpenAI on stage at The Social Summit. Photo credit: @belle.creative.co

Forward this to one girl who’d get it.

Brooke x

This newsletter is the highlight reel. The WhatsApp is where we actually live.

Every city, growing weekly.

nicole kidman’s bangs have been living in my head rent free

get MOODY — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:55:42 GMT

Lauren is our fashion editor, our culture editor and the other MOODY sister. This is what the MOODY girls are wearing this week, in her words. Shop Lauren’s edit on ShopMy.

Not because I suddenly want a fringe. Although, maybe.

I’m not nostalgic for the 90s. I’m nostalgic for how mysterious everyone looked.

For a version of getting dressed that felt more romantic, more instinctive and a little less explained.

That’s the strange thing about nostalgia. It doesn’t make you want the past back. It makes you miss the feeling of it. Memory is selective like that. You forget what was ordinary and keep the atmosphere. The light in a room. Someone’s perfume. A song playing from another part of the house. A coat someone wore once that somehow stayed with you for years.

The details get blurrier. The feeling gets stronger.

Fashion memories work the same way. Sometimes it’s Nicole Kidman’s fringe. Sometimes it’s a print you were obsessed with, a slip dress you never owned, a pair of boots you can still picture. Something you saw once and filed away forever.

A faded floral that swears it reminds you of something. Worn leather. Old silver. Lace that feels a little haunted. A tiny cardigan. Brown suede. A dress that looks better slightly undone.

Pieces that don’t feel new, even when they are. I think that’s what I’m craving.

Not another perfectly decoded reference. Not knowing immediately what year, trend or aesthetic something belongs to. Just looking at someone and wondering: where did she get that, why does that work, who is she?

There used to be more room for mystery. Before everything was named, explained and turned into a moodboard. Before we got so good at recognising the reference that we forgot to feel it.

So this isn’t a 90s revival. It isn’t really about recreating anything.

It’s about the strange emotional residue clothes leave behind. Romantic, slightly undone, a little witchy, difficult to place. Pieces that feel like they already have a story.

Maybe nostalgia was never about going backwards. Maybe it’s wanting the world to feel that mysterious again.

Lauren x

This newsletter is the highlight reel. The WhatsApp is where we actually live.

Every city, growing weekly.

comfort is earned on camera, not in your notes app

get MOODY — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 01:02:09 GMT

So last Tuesday night, 100 of us got on a call at 6pm after a full workday and started the Yap Challenge. ran a 90 minute workshop on building a personal brand, Ari Ahearne is dropping a prompt into the chat every single day for 30 days, and the rest of us are just doing the reps.

Part 1 of the recording is above. Part 2 is below.

If you only take five things out of it:

→ Comfort is earned on camera, not in your notes app. Britt has been in marketing 18 years, at Apple, Puma and EA Sports, and she still froze on national TV interviewing her own twin brother. You can be excellent at your job and completely useless the second a lens points at you. The only fix is repetition.

→ Speak from scars, not wounds. Share the lesson once you’ve actually processed it. Posting from inside the mess is raw, unteachable, and it costs you more credibility than you think it does.

→ If you know 10% more than someone about a thing, you’re qualified to teach it. Imposter syndrome is not a content strategy.

→ A trend is a rented spot. You want to earn one. Hopping on whatever’s going around might get you views, but it won’t get you remembered, and cheap positioning is very hard to undo later.

→ The reps are the whole product. Ned Brockman ran across the country for charity and built an entire career off the back of it. Three weeks after he finished, another man ran the same route and took the actual world record. Nobody heard a thing about him. Ned showed up every day and let people watch.

One idea, one point, three takes max, under ten minutes, put the phone down. That’s the method.

We’re a week in and the door is still open. Jump into the WhatsApp, tag #YapMood, and post the ugly first one. There are prizes at the end for best yapper and most improved, judged entirely on vibes by me, Britt and Ari.

Britt is also working on some creator tools bundles for us - links & discount code to come!

On the other side of cringe mountain is success. See you up there?

Brooke x

This newsletter is the highlight reel. The WhatsApp is where we actually live.

Every city, growing weekly.

you don’t accidentally end up watching Netflix

get MOODY — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 06:55:38 GMT

When this episode was first pitched to me, my exact words were: “Imagine having Netflix, Spotify and Amazon in one conversation. I will literally drop dead. This is my Super Bowl.”

I did not drop dead, but we did get all three on the same couch. Willie Pang, Managing Director of Amazon Ads ANZ. Zarak Khan, who leads ad sales solutions across APAC for Netflix. Liam Hickey, head of automation for Spotify across JPAC. On paper, these are three companies fighting over the same forty minutes of your evening, and they sat in one studio to talk about why they’ve decided to make each other easier to buy.

If you’re not in ad land, programmatic is the plumbing. Instead of a brand negotiating separately with every streaming service, it buys audiences through one platform that plugs into all of them. Netflix and Spotify have both opened their inventory to the Amazon DSP, so a retailer can now plan Netflix, Spotify and Prime Video side by side, against the same audience, and measure what people went on to buy. That matters more here than almost anywhere. As Willie points out, retail is the biggest advertising category in Australia, at north of $2 billion a year.

New episode is live.

Six reasons to listen.

→ The number that should make every CMO sit up. Willie’s back-of-envelope maths: a 34% improvement in return on ad spend, applied to retail’s $2 billion, is somewhere around $600 to $700 million in efficiency. That’s money you could put back into content, product and the kind of in-store experience people actually talk about. As he puts it, most of us have spent our careers fighting for a 2 or 3% improvement.

→ 1% overlap. Liam shares a UK campaign where a CPG brand ran Prime Video and Spotify together and found only 1% of the audience overlapped. Until recently, reaching those two groups meant two separate buys and two sets of reports that never matched up.

→ “You don’t accidentally end up watching Netflix.” Zarak’s case for attention is that people choose Netflix when they want to properly pay attention, so the attention isn’t rented. His advice for your next media plan is to remember that not all reach is equal. He also brings a Kantar stat worth stealing: brands that attach themselves to culturally relevant moments grow up to six times faster.

→ Audio is still treated as a bolt-on, and Liam isn’t having it. When he joined Spotify in 2018, audio was a test-and-learn line item. Now there are 494 million ad-supported listeners, growing 14% a year, but planners still start with video and commerce and add audio at the end. His advice is to plan around where the audience actually spends its time.

→ Selling a hundred hammers. This is my favourite stretch of the episode. Willie describes a retailer telling the system in plain English that it wants to sell a hundred hammers, and the system working out which Netflix show to put the brand ad in, which podcast should help you choose between hammer A and hammer B, and whether the sale ends up online or in store. For anyone who’s lived through spreadsheets on spreadsheets of retail media planning, that’s the dream.

→ Looking forward instead of backward. Willie makes the point that marketing has always worked in reverse: who bought my thing, and will they buy it again? The shift is towards predicting who is likely to be open to your brand next, using real intent signals (what people watched to the end, what they listened to, what they bought) rather than modelled guesses.

My read: everything in this conversation is about AI taking over the fiddly parts of placing ads. That’s genuinely good news, because it frees marketers to spend their energy on the part no platform can do for them, which is building a brand people are obsessed with. The plumbing is getting solved. Showing up in culture is still your job.

So, if you could hand the whole media plan to the machine tomorrow, would you know what to do with the time you got back?

Thirty-seven minutes. Go listen.

Brooke x

This newsletter is the highlight reel. The WhatsApp is where we actually live.

Every city, growing weekly.

the other side of cringe mountain

get MOODY — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 00:55:18 GMT

01 - THE MOOD

Hi divas 🤍

Oh my god. I have had the most major week of my life and I need to tell someone, so it’s you.

A podcast I made with Netflix and Spotify went live. On Wednesday I hosted at the Amazon Ads Upfront. On Friday I interviewed OpenAI on stage at The Social Summit, and when I looked at the day’s lineup there were seven MOODY women on it. Britt, Arielle, Jordyn, Lauren, Amy, Zeenat and Alycia. Somewhere in the middle of all that I pushed go on a YouTube channel I’d been too scared to start for a month.

I’m not telling you this to flex. Okay, a little bit. I’m telling you because not one of those things came from being the smartest person in the room. Every single one came from being visible. From posting tiny mic videos in hotel corridors before anyone asked me to. From saying yes to a stage before I felt ready. From letting people see what I actually do, again and again, until someone with a room needed exactly that and thought of me.

That’s the whole reason I’m so excited about the yap challenge. Tuesday night’s kick-off, a week of daily reps in the chat since, and I’ve watched you all climb cringe mountain in real time. Ari’s entire team laughed at her first video in a meeting and she posted it anyway. Jessica took 789 takes. Sam’s first yap was a list of excuses for why she hadn’t done one, to camera, which absolutely counts.

The view from the other side is worth it. I’m not saying that from the top. I’m walking up it with you.

If you haven’t started, start today. Post it in the chat. Nobody’s judging, we’re all too busy cringing at our own.

Two things before you scroll.

Episode one of the MOODY vlog is up: the Sydney launch, the SABA shoot and what I learned in the Spotify x Meta room. China is next week. Watch it →

And the yap replay is coming. Ari filmed it on her DJI and we’re getting it to you as fast as we can, along with the kit list. Dropping in the chat ASAP.

02 - THE READ

Notes from the room: the yap challenge kick-off

The most qualified person on the call has spent eighteen years building brands for Apple, Puma and EA. She also once froze interviewing her own twin brother on national television, and she no longer watches her videos back because she can’t stand her own voice. If that’s the expert, the rest of us are fine. A hundred of you, a Tuesday night, 81 minutes, Ari filming it on her DJI because Google wouldn’t let us record. These are the six things that actually hit.

→ Comfort is earned on camera, not in your notes app. Clarity builds recognition and reps build delivery, and they’re different jobs. Every excuse in the chat, no time, need to look ready, must be perfect, don’t know what to say, is a condition you decided you had to meet before you were allowed to start. None of them are content problems.

→ If you can’t say what you want to be known for in one sentence, fix that first. You can’t be everything to everyone or you become nothing to nobody. Own one thing, then layer. Twenty things is credibility in none of them.

→ You are the front door. The house is your brand. People come to the door to meet you and stay for what’s behind it. Never let the door get bigger than the house. I could copy every one of your businesses. The one thing I can’t copy is you and what you have to say.

“Speak from scars, not wounds. If you’re speaking while you’re still in the battle, it’s too raw.”

→ Nobody cares about your morning routine. She said it more bluntly than that. You only need to know ten percent more than the person watching to have something worth teaching, so teach that. Light content is for a Friday. It’s never your hero content.

→ The minimal viable yap. One idea, one setup, phone, window light, normal clothes, three takes, ten minutes, then put the phone down. Stop at three takes. More rarely makes it better, and nobody is looking at your hands or that bit of hair.

→ One pillar, ten angles. Myths, mistakes, how-tos, checklists, before and afters, predictions, FAQs. Re-cut the same video with a different hook. Post the same story again, because most people didn’t see it the first time. Your DMs are a content calendar.

The question most of you asked: founder page or brand page? Personal shows the behind the scenes and the why, brand shows the execution, and keep them separate so the business can stand on its own if you ever want to sell it without selling yourself.

And one from me, since a few of you asked about gear. You need nothing beyond your phone, but if you buy one thing, buy a tiny mic. My corporate colleagues have thoughts about my tiny mic videos. Guess who gets flown around the world.

03 - THE DIARY

Here’s where we’re showing up.

Tonight, 6pm. Arielle, Jordyn and I go live on Calendar Invites on visibility and personal brand, since apparently that’s the month we’re having. @calendarinvites

Mon 21 to Sun 27 Sept, Sydney and across NSW. Spark Festival, Australia’s largest grassroots startup festival, entirely free and community run. Opening night at UTS Great Hall tonight, The AI Reality Check Tuesday, a two-day Startup Growth Lab Wednesday and Thursday, closing Friday. Program

Wed 23 Sept, Melbourne. ELEVATE Taster, now at XFLOS, a florist in Collingwood Yards, after the first venue fell through and the chat found her a new one inside 30 hours. A routine taught step by step, Esin on the decks, 2000s and 2010s pop and house, $45 and every ticket admits two. Tickets

Thu 24 Sept, 12pm, online. Abbey’s free LinkedIn masterclass, Seen, Known, Paid. Sixty minutes on what’s actually working for women founders, from getting paid more to landing speaking gigs and brand deals. Rosie’s review of Abbey is not printable but was enthusiastic. Register

Thu 24 Sept, Drummoyne. Aditi’s Late Night Cafe with Students & Starters, part of Spark. Founders and students at the same table, potluck, house party meets late-night cafe. Already full, so it’s waitlist only. Luma

Fri 25 Sept, London. Clock off with Nice One. Soph’s lighter canned cocktails take over Raye The Store for knock-offs, with a sampling station, a Polaroid and full cans to take home. For the London girls who know the weekend starts the second you clock off.

Sat 26 Sept, Kirribilli. Make Up & Mingle, Pride & Prejudice edition, 60 to 80 women, nibbles, a makeup demo and a raffle. Brands can still get into the goodie bags and activations. Apply via HYVN

Wed 30 Sept, 5:30pm, Sydney. Mode Office x SABA private styling at SABA QVB. Champagne, nibbles, yaps and exclusive discounts. Twenty going, and it filled in four days, so you’re joining the waitlist. Waitlist →

Wed 7 Oct, 8am, Adelaide. SAFIA Industry Breakfast at Adelaide Fashion Week, Kate’s panel on craft to scale, a quarter of tickets gone. Thu 8 Oct, SA Showcase with Cathy showing Yaneth. adlfashionweek.com

Thu 8 Oct, Sydney. Emily Elvey’s Ai in a Day, build your customer service AI agent for BFCM, at WeWork Castlereagh Street, $299, capped at 20. Luma

Thu 8 Oct, New York. Dinner, probably. Lily’s poll is still coming.

Fri 6 Nov, 8am, Melbourne. Chloe’s first ever Fashion Law Supper Club at Gracie’s Wine Room, South Yarra, for fashion founders and the next generation of fashion lawyers. Sold out with 82 on the waitlist before I could even tell you about it, which tells you everything. Waitlist

Sat 15 Nov, New York. Female Founder World. Tickets are on sale now and they will not last. Get yours here →

04 - RECEIPTS

What the girls have been building.

→ Rosie quit her job on Monday without the next one fully signed off, and announced it to the chat with “now that’s MOODY.” It follows the CMO summit a month ago where she asked for mentoring from the stage, out loud, and had the head of brand at 7-Eleven, the CMO of Bakers Delight and Optus come up afterwards to say yes. She’s now the case study for week six’s last prompt, ask for something out loud by name, before we’ve even got there.

→ Deepa Mani launched URVI, the newest shade in Proud of Colour Beauty’s award-winning Lip & Cheek Tint range, a warm terracotta made with melanin-rich skin as the starting point rather than the afterthought, plus a Ritual Kit of scrub, mask and tint. Founder-funded, Australian, and now a complete trio. She also sent me a question I’m going to sit with: is inclusive beauty really inclusive if lighter skin is still the starting point. Watch this space.

→ Jessica Duchesne is launching SaunaVeil, premium sauna haircare, in November, and has started a behind-the-scenes founder series on TikTok in the meantime. She needs a pattern maker and product development help, and Udoka already knows the founder of the brand she’s been benchmarking. Watch the BTS

→ Isabella is in London this week launching Envision Agency UK, and wants coffee with anyone in influencer marketing while she’s there.

→ Phoebe Perring joined us. Co-founder of Balmee Beauty, the first lip balm designed around your microbiome, after fifteen years at MECCA, Vida Glow and as Head of Content and Social at Merivale. She’s just started taking a small number of organic social consulting clients, and Bec’s review is that her insights are excellent. Book her

→ Lauren Moody got the Melbourne girls a friends and family day at the Zimmermann outlet sale before it opened to the public, which is what a fashion editor is for. Sababa’s summary: first the NFL, now this, Melbourne is winning.

→ Francesca and Zehra met at the Melbourne launch and ran into each other at a tech event a week later. Her caption: thanks MOODY for introducing so many fantastic connections. This is the whole product. Everything else is packaging.

→ Amelia converted her personal account to a founder account for Pelvy, and is still the pacesetter, four yaps in and using flowers as stand-ins for anatomy the platforms won’t let her name.

→ Alexandra shipped new features in Sigma Mind, her tool for de-risking AI investments before you commit budget. Building an AI solution shouldn't feel like a black box, so it now walks you through the whole journey, discovery to data to model to documentation, with a progress bar that tells you what's done and how close you are, and it tells you which kind of AI your problem actually needs before you build the wrong one. Every stage spits out a branded scope doc, dashboard and PDF you can put in front of a stakeholder. It's the working version of the three-minute video she posted last week. sigma-mind.com

→ The room rated the AI models on Tuesday morning and it was the most opinionated ten minutes of the week. Simone called Fable fabulous and then said she was burning through credits, Paige said ChatGPT is making a comeback, Jess said once you go Astra you can’t go back, and I confessed to having one of them think for 27 minutes on something that used to take one. Then I showed the room a two-minute video made from a five-second MacBook clip on a ByteDance model in Shanghai, and Paige’s reply was the whole China conversation in four words: the problem is security. The room is loyal to none of them, only to whichever one did the job this morning, which is exactly how your customers feel about you.

→ Also in the room: Brodie Kelly was first out of the gate on day one and filmed day two in front of the Eiffel Tower. Nicole is filming hers in a sauna at Cedar and Salt in Barangaroo, which is there until the 27th if you want to steal the idea. Laura Blagys is yapping about female pleasure while The Baths gets banned by Meta again, and sends solidarity to everyone in a taboo industry. Jazzie is planning a Canton Fair trip and Laura Mehanna, who went in April, dropped the entire logistics playbook in the chat: Qantas via Hong Kong then the fast train, hotel with a shuttle, get Alipay and Didi before you land.

05 - CLASSIFIEDS

What the girls need. All of it fresh this week.

→ Mikhaila has two roles worth a look. A Senior Social Creative and Strategy role, brand new, with an Australian-born, privately held lifestyle brand everyone loves. And a freelance pool of Creative Social Strategists for a global agency that’s just won a major client. Her jobs board

→ Rebecca Veksler needs a graphic designer for an investor pitch deck and branding at Lumie Health, tech experience preferred. Simone wants the same person. Portfolios to rebecca@lumie.health

→ Alex Woolf needs a freelance graphic designer with FMCG experience for a client’s energy bar for runners: visual identity, packaging, website and production guidelines. DM her in the chat.

→ Jordyn Wills wants a sales coach for a small to medium wedding industry team. Her words: this group is so insanely clever. DM her in the chat.

→ Leslie wants a podcast editor to outsource to. Jade has already pointed her at claxon.agency, but she’s still taking names. DM her in the chat.

→ Varenya needs a commercial property lawyer for a retail lease. Nobody has answered her yet and someone in here definitely knows one. DM her in the chat.

→ Caitlin Duryea, former tech COO with ten years in governance and board ops, is building a survey on the founder support ecosystem and wants to talk to anyone setting up governance or moving from an advisory group to a board. DM her in the chat.

→ Emily Hausman at Airwallex will help any digital or tech company expanding to the US: entities, payments, FX, cards. LinkedIn

→ Kristen, Health Lab and ten years in FMCG at Asahi, is offering help to anyone in digital or retail. LinkedIn

→ Alexis is opening The CMO Room, a six-week strategy and growth room for founders who need senior CMO thinking without hiring a CMO. Weekly group calls plus daily WhatsApp. She’s in the General chat, details this week.

→ Fern runs @creativecalloutau, sharing creative callouts daily. Tag her and she’ll reshare yours. Follow

→ Brisbane business owners: the Lord Mayor’s Women in Business Grant is open, up to $5,000 for businesses that are majority women-owned with turnover between $75k and $500k. Closes 4pm, Tuesday 6 October. Guidelines

Forward this to one girl who’d get it.

Brooke x

This newsletter is the highlight reel. The WhatsApp is where we actually live.

Every city, growing weekly.

the math and the magic

get MOODY — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 02:16:27 GMT

Most Upfronts sell you a vision and hope you don’t ask for the numbers. On Wednesday night in Sydney, Amazon did the opposite. They put three brands on stage and made them show the receipts.

That’s the part that made me put my drink down. Because underneath the sizzle reels and the jazz hands, this Upfront was quietly settling the argument every marketer I know has been having for a decade. Brand on one side, performance on the other. Two teams, two budgets, two dashboards that never quite met in the middle. We built the whole industry around that gap and spent our careers trying to reach across it.

On Tuesday, the wall came down. Not “is coming down,” not in a five-years-out, vision-statement way. Three brands, three sets of real numbers, one structural shift underneath all of them.

I had a good seat for it. I was backstage with a mic, interviewing Willie Pang and L’Oréal Groups’s Georgia Hack, and it was a proper night. Luke Hemsworth talking The Terminal List, Teresa Palmer on the submarine thriller she just wrapped on the Gold Coast, Sophie Molineux fresh off captaining the Aussie women to an undefeated T20 World Cup. The slate they teased is stacked too: Fourth Wing, the Rebecca Yarros romantasy the internet has lost its mind over, and Tomb Raider with Sophie Turner as Lara Croft, from Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Great theatre. But the theatre wasn’t the story. The receipts were.

01 — The open internet, in one place

The headline most people will miss because it landed in the last ten minutes: you can now buy Netflix and Spotify through the Amazon DSP.

Sit with that. The trillions of Amazon shopping, streaming and browsing signals now apply across Netflix. Spotify’s Ad Exchange plugs straight in, so you plan audio next to your video and display. Add Disney, HBO Max, Paramount, the Aussie broadcasters, the local audio networks (SCA, ARN, Nova), and a pilot to run ads through ChatGPT via a new OpenAI partnership, and the picture gets clear fast.

→ So what: the thing that made cross-channel advertising a nightmare was never the channels. It was the seams between them. Different targeting, different measurement, different logins. Amazon isn’t adding another screen to your plan. It’s removing the seams. Planned, bought and measured from one place, wherever the audience actually is.

I actually got Netflix, Spotify and Amazon Ads in the same room for a podcast on the back of this. The visual alone tells the story: three ad platforms that used to compete, on one couch, talking about how they now work together. Episode’s linked at the bottom.

02 — L’Oréal proved you don’t have to choose

The L’Oréal Paris x Elle results were revealed on stage for the first time, and Georgia Hack, Chief Digital and Marketing Officer of L’Oréal Group, framed it better than any marketer I’ve heard this year: the math and the magic.

The magic was a 90s beauty integration inside the Legally Blonde prequel. Scrunchies, chihuahuas, nostalgia, an actual product integration built from products that existed in 1995. The math: over a million viewers on Prime Video, a 95% completion rate, 5,000-plus branded searches, 1,600 purchases, and a 25% lift in unaided brand recall.

→ So what: reach or outcomes has always been a false choice we made because the tools forced us to. When the same system that builds the cultural moment also closes the loop on the transaction, you stop trading one for the other. Georgia’s line, “you can actually have both,” isn’t a slogan. It’s a receipt.

03 — You don’t even need to sell on Amazon

The one I keep thinking about is CommBank. An Australian first: Amazon Ads built a bespoke propensity model on AWS and Amazon’s first-party signals to work out who was actually in-market for a credit card, refreshed every 24 hours, served the right card creative in real time.

A bank. Not a product you buy on Amazon. The results were the strongest brand lift Pat Crowley’s team had seen in years, a 2x lift in credit card consideration, and a 15% jump in customers adding a CommBank card to their Amazon wallet.

→ So what: this is the part that reframes everything. If a bank can win here, the “but we don’t sell on Amazon” objection is dead. The signals aren’t about what you sell in the store. They’re about understanding people, and every category gets to use them.

A quick aside, because I promised myself one

The agentic AI stuff is real too, and I don’t say that lightly about anything with “agent” in the name. Willie demoed the Amazon Ads agent doing campaign management by voice. “Lift the bids on campaigns pacing below 75%,” and it does it, no SQL, no manual grind. The MCP server went open beta globally, so whatever you’re building in Claude or ChatGPT plugs straight in.

For everyone who spends their life squeezing two percent out of a campaign, that’s your afternoons back. I’ll believe the fully autonomous version when I see it. But this bit, I saw.

The read

Three brands. Three sets of real numbers. One structural shift underneath all of them. That’s not a coincidence of scheduling, it’s the whole argument.

The wall between brand and performance was never really about strategy. It was about tools that couldn’t talk to each other, so we split the work to match. Once they can talk, the split stops making sense. It’s just a customer, and a system that follows them from the thing they watched to the thing they bought.

So here’s my question for the room. If that wall is actually coming down, the one we’ve organised our teams, our budgets and our entire careers around, what are we still building separately out of habit?

The full podcast with Netflix, Spotify and Amazon Ads is linked here. Go watch three industry heavy hitters share a couch.

Brooke x

This newsletter is the highlight reel. The WhatsApp is where we actually live.

Every city, growing weekly.

the specific grief of a friendship that doesn't get an ending

get MOODY — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 01:11:00 GMT

We monetized it. The friendship, I mean. Over the years, she and I turned the two of us into a product. More than once. A podcast. A business. An account. Ventures I can barely count now, each one built on the same premise: that the two of us together were the thing worth watching.

Commercially? The instinct wasn’t wrong. People are obsessed with a dynamic. A duo is legible in a way a single person never is. The audience doesn’t buy the individuals, it buys the chemistry between them. That’s the entire logic of the double act, and we understood it, and we leaned all the way in.

So here’s the part nobody prepares you for. When the friendship ended, I wasn’t just losing a friend. I was unwinding a brand.

the breakup nobody hands you a script for

Let me back up, because I’ve been sitting on this one for a while and I still don’t fully know that I want to write it. But it’s been living in the back of my head, and the stuff you don’t want to say out loud is usually the stuff worth saying.

I came home from an event the other night, late, shoes in hand, and did the worst possible thing a woman can do at 1am. I opened the old photos. A whole decade of someone I’m no longer friends with. An hour no good decision has ever been made. And then this morning, before I’d even had a coffee, somebody asked me about her. Warmly. With no idea. That’s the part that undid me, more than the photos. Not the ending. The audience.

Because we have a whole language for the romantic kind of breakup. Closure, the last conversation, the box of your things by the door. A friendship breakup gets none of that. No ritual, no week off, no lasagne on the doorstep. The grief researcher Kenneth Doka gave it a name, disenfranchised grief: the grief the world doesn’t quite recognise as grief, so you end up a little ashamed of feeling it at all. Which just doubles the weight. Now add a public to it. Add the accounts, the tagged photos, the people who still file the two of you as a single unit. The grief isn’t just unrecognised. It’s on display.

she was written into the whole chapter

I’ve never been a big-group girl. What I’ve always had, through every era, is a best friend. One significant other outside of my actual significant other. If I’m honest, at times it ran more like a relationship than a friendship. So when it ends, of course it breaks like one. Structurally, that’s what it was.

I’m not going to do the version of this essay that’s all over your feed. The TikTok with the tragic audio where the ex-best-friend was secretly a monster the whole time. Villain, victim, clean timeline, roll credits. Look, we could all make that one. Every one of us could cut our version, cast the other person as the antagonist, and the comments would agree. I get the appeal, at least those girls have a story they can point to. But a decade doesn’t flatten into a villain origin story without losing everything that was true about it. She was not a cartoon. I loved her. It didn’t work. All three get to stay true, and holding all three at once is the whole reason I’m writing this instead of filming it.

Here’s the shape of it, and I’ll only tell it once. She was the first person I told when I got engaged. She came to my first dress fitting, and the second, and every appointment across two years of me standing in front of mirrors with her in the chair beside me. Then, at the last minute, I decided she wasn’t coming to the wedding.

The wedding was never the reason, though. It was just the milestone that made the reason impossible to keep ignoring. A friendship is a give and a take, and there comes a point, after long enough on the wrong side of that ledger, where you stop having the fight in you. Not a blow-up. A quiet running-out. A wedding is simply the day you look around the room at your lifers and clock exactly who’s standing there, and in the middle of the happiest thing you also see the shape of who isn’t. That’s the whole story, and it doesn’t need a scene.

the part the brand strategist in me can’t stop chewing on

So back to the brand, because I can’t leave it alone.

Nobody prepares you for the strange work of decommissioning a partnership that had a public. You build a thing designed to make people care about your closeness, it works, and then the closeness is gone and the caring is still out there, running on a loop with nowhere to land. The person asking about her over coffee this morning is a customer of a brand that quietly went out of business, and I’m the one who has to keep not-quite-answering.

Here’s the lesson I keep turning over, the one I’d give any founder. We are so quick to package intimacy into content. To take the realest thing we have and make it legible, monetizable, a format. Most of the time it’s fine. But you are building a liability onto your softest asset, because a friendship was never a brand. It just wore one for a while. When the underlying thing breaks, the brand doesn’t quietly break with it. It keeps generating impressions. It keeps getting the question at 8am.

the version of me i’m becoming

I’ve been a lot of different people in the last 35 years. I said to my partner yesterday that I think I’m finally becoming who I need to be, and it is the most painful thing I’ve ever done. It’s exhausting and unknown and scary. Every iteration costs you something, and not everyone makes the trip with you.

Some people can love a version of you. Far fewer can love you through all of them. The ones who can are rare, and if you have them, hold them so tightly. The rest love who you were and can’t quite meet who you’re becoming, and that isn’t cruelty, it’s drift. But the drift still grieves like a loss, because it is one.

and then, at exactly the right time, the girls who get it

And then, at exactly the right time, in the last twelve months, I’ve made friendships that went zero to a hundred. Some faster than that. People I now can’t imagine my life without, and I’ve known them barely a year. It’s almost embarrassing how fast, except it isn’t, because the thing that makes it fast is alignment. We’re all hungry. We all want to see each other win, and not in the caption way. In the show-up-at-1am way.

I’ll be honest about the part nobody likes to say out loud. Who you’re in the room with is a signal. The company you keep tells the world something about where you’re going and who you’re becoming while you get there, and anyone claiming they’ve never once clocked that is not being straight with you. Doors open sideways through the people beside you. But underneath the signal is the actual thing, which is that you’ve found people on your exact wavelength who are as invested in your life going well as their own. The optics are a byproduct. The alignment is the point.

That’s the strange gift buried in the grief. You make room, even when you didn’t want to, even when it was taken from you rather than given. The new ones don’t arrive because the old one left. But they arrive into the space, and they meet the person you actually are now instead of the one you were supposed to have stayed. Which begs the question I can’t shake: do we outgrow people, or do we just finally stop shrinking to fit them?

still, though

I’m not going to pretend I’m through it, because I’m not. I made the call and it still didn’t give me closure, and it turns out a decision and closure are not the same thing. The family therapist Pauline Boss, who named this exact species of grief “ambiguous loss,” argues that closure itself is largely a myth: some losses don’t resolve, they just have to be lived with, especially the ones where the person is gone but not gone, still out there, still living a life you used to be in. You can be the one who lets go and still get no ritual for grieving it. Just you at 1am with a decade of photos, and the question again over coffee, and the very odd fact that we are simply not friends anymore.

Maybe that’s the whole thing I wanted to say. You can be genuinely, brilliantly happy with where your life and your people have landed, and still be quietly heartbroken about the one who isn’t in it. Both things. Same girl.

So if you’re in your 30s in the middle of your own quiet version of this, the one nobody threw a party to acknowledge: I see you. It’s real grief. Grieve it properly.

And me? I’m doing it again. New accounts, new group chat, a calendar full of the girls who get it. Building the whole thing over, out loud, in public, knowing exactly what it costs when it breaks. Maybe that’s the most honest thing I can tell you. Not that I learned my lesson. That I’d do it all again, and I am.

Hold your people tight enough that they feel it.

Brooke x

This newsletter is the highlight reel. The WhatsApp is where we actually live.

Every city, growing weekly.

doing the reps is the work

get MOODY — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 07:08:34 GMT

01 - THE MOOD

Hi divas 🤍

Wednesday I was in a Sydney studio at half eight in the morning filming a little podcast with Spotify and Netflix, on a plane by lunch, and walking into the Godby to an event the three Melbourne city leads had built while I was blissfully in the dark on every detail. 180 names on the list. Someone asked if we wrapped at eight. If it ends at 8pm we’re doing it wrong, I said, and it didn’t.

Thursday was the prep run with LSKD. Friday was drag bingo in Carina, where the queens sang the national anthem and I have not fully recovered. Sunday I actually ran the Bridge, 10km in 58 minutes, which I will be mentioning again. We’re over $20k for Small Steps 4 Hannah, the exact number we wrote down in July and did not really believe, and the charity got picked up on 7, Nine and 10 off the back of it.

None of that was the hard part though. The hard part was the months before any of it looked like anything, and nobody claps for those. There is no photo of you sending the fourteenth venue email, or asking a stranger for money, or rewriting the caption for the ninth time, or standing in a room where you know two people.

The week you see is the receipt. It is not the work.

Which is why the yap challenge exists, and why 88 of you signing up is the only number from this week I actually care about. You can be excellent at your job and turn into a completely different person the second a camera comes out. That is a skill gap rather than a character trait, and skill gaps close with reps. Thirty days of them, starting tomorrow.

I want actual replies on this one. What are you competent at in private and cowardly about in public? Speaking, selling, pitching, posting, asking for the raise, naming your price. Tell me which one and I will build something for it. The education pillar is real now and I would rather build what you actually need than what I assume you need.

Two things before you scroll.

Lauren, Sarah and Udoka built Melbourne. Lauren pitched 21 venues and shortlisted five before landing on Godby, Sarah pushed the RSVPs through every network she has, Udoka brought the video, and Lisa got me dressed by Tojah. We stood around eating tiramasu with forks. It was a massive VIBE.

The photos are here → Add yours.

And the full China write-up is coming as its own piece. I have a notebook full of it and the topline is below. Tell me what you actually want reported back and I will make sure it is in there.

02 - THE READ

Notes from the room: China

Four days, two cities, 22 stores, a delegation of Australian retail execs and one very jetlagged me. Here is what I walked out with.

China is booming and China is stalling and both are true, because it runs at two speeds. Exports up 24% in July, retail sales up 0.6%, property new starts down 28%. Macquarie called consumption the anti-AI trade and I cannot improve on it. Over there the apartment is the family balance sheet, so when new starts fall off a cliff, confidence goes with them. → Read any China headline by asking which track it is describing. Most of the contradiction disappears.

The flat number is hiding a bloodbath underneath. Cars down 17% and furniture down 8.8%, while phones are up 20% and cosmetics up 6.8%. She has not stopped shopping, she has stopped shopping for some things entirely: traditional luxury, anything hitched to property, anything that is all story and no use. She reads the ingredient list. She will not pay for your logo. She will absolutely pay for how you make her feel.

→ Which of your categories is running on brand premium alone? That is the one she just walked out of, and we are three years behind her on the same curve, not a different one.

I went for the robots and got humbled by the fundamentals. The robots earning money are the ones nobody films. What took me out was the staffing, personal shoppers as standard rather than a luxury tier, payment engineered out of the way, and the associate adding you on WeChat before you reach the door. Every store, not just the flagships.

“The gap is standard, not capability.” That was the only thing I saw all week with no technology barrier and no capital cost attached to it, and it is the one that stung.

Discovery has also left the search engine. RedNote is doing roughly 300 million searches a day and retailers have largely stopped building apps to trade inside WeChat instead.

→ She is researching you somewhere you do not exist. Turning up is free and absence is not neutral, so if she looks you up and finds nothing, the nothing is doing the damage.

We never asked a single host about culture and it came up in every session anyway. Public personal OKRs, decisions sitting with whoever is closest to the work, one convenience chain telling us its best idea of the year came from a single store owner. Everyone shipped in weeks. Nobody mentioned a steering group.

In our chat: Bec, Sophia and Bianca all want to build something physical, Bianca having already done Yiwu. Then Rebecca, who is actually going to the Canton Fair in late October, asked the question nobody who romanticises this asks first: anyone got lawyers for NDAs over there. Niamh does, across Australia, China and Southeast Asia.

→ The upside is real and the downside is a contract you did not read in a jurisdiction you do not understand. Go and look at your supply side with the energy you bring to your meta account, and take a lawyer.

Reply if you sell physical product, because a group of us going to buy product at Canton Fair is a very different trip to one of us going.

Also this week

Discovery leaving the search engine is not only a China problem. Of two million listings studied, only 1.28% of products ranking in normal search also showed up in Google’s AI Mode the same day, which surfaces about four products where the carousel showed 28. Ad inventory opened inside the assistants the same week. → Your organic shelf shrank by roughly four fifths and the replacement is an auction. Go and look at your ten best sellers in there. It is free and it will ruin your afternoon.

Our own consumer is running a quieter version of the same rotation. Four datasets landed on one Monday and none disagreed: sentiment down to 84.4, mortgage holders down 13% against renters down 0.6%, only 16% calling it a good time to buy anything big, business conditions negative for the first time in six years, and 254 retail insolvencies in the quarter.

→ When the next spending print lands strong, and it will, do not let anyone call it a recovery. Nominal growth on top of grocery inflation is not demand.

The biggest shift in Australian beauty distribution in years went through with no fanfare. Infinity, the largest Priceline franchisee at 91 stores, collapsed owing creditors over $400 million, and seven stores have just been bought personally by the sitting president of the Pharmacy Guild and a former president, with most of the rest going to Chempro.

→ Priceline is where most Australian women actually buy their beauty. If you sell in that channel, your most important door changed owner, buyer and payment terms, and nobody sent you the memo.

03 - THE DIARY

Tomorrow night. The Yap Challenge kicks off with a workshop with Britt from State of Brand, 88 of you registered, then thirty days of daily prompts in the chat. Two prizes at the end, best yapper and most improved, and you have to do all thirty days to be eligible. Free. Amelia is hosting a watch party in New Farm if you want company. RSVP →

Tues 15 Sept through Sunday, Melbourne. Lauren has been busy organisng the Zimmerman outlet sale. She’s dropped the family & friends early access link for the Moody girls. You don’t want to miss this.

Thu 17 Sept, Sydney. Space Bar Run Club, 4km from Cicada Innovations in Redfern, then a drink. Spiral Blue’s crowd, space and deep tech, all paces welcome. Partiful

Thu 17 Sept, Melbourne. Cocktails & Creatives at Monash Caulfield, 6pm. MADASS’s annual night for design, art and architecture students plus industry, and free entry if you come as a professional. contact@madass.club

Thu 17 Sept, Sydney. GPT6 After Dark with Zehra and Amber Main. Zehra still needs a collar mic to borrow, which is the easiest favour on this page.

Fri 18 Sept, Sydney. The Social Summit. I’m on a panel called The customer is no longer human with Lauren from Verity AI and OpenAI. Code MOODY30 for 30% off. Tickets

Wed 23 Sept, Melbourne. ELEVATE Taster at High Note, Northcote, 6.30pm. A routine taught step by step by Emily Zumstein, Esin on the decks, 2000s and 2010s pop and house. Every ticket includes bring-a-friend-for-free and babes in arms are welcome. Jacqui’s pitch: a few hours where nobody needs anything from you. Tickets

Thu 24 Sept. Aditi has something on and has been extremely cool about not telling us what. Luma

Wed 7 Oct, Adelaide. SAFIA Industry Breakfast at Adelaide Fashion Week, 8am, Kate’s panel on craft to scale. A quarter of the tickets have already gone. adlfashionweek.com

Thu 8 Oct, Adelaide. SA Showcase: Threads Between Us, with Cathy showing Yaneth. Kate says not to be missed. adlfashionweek.com

Thu 8 Oct, Sydney. Ai in a Day with Emily Elvey, building your customer service AI agent for BFCM. Capped at 20 so she can actually help everyone, catered, drinks after. She gave us the head start before it goes public. Luma

Thu 8 Oct, New York. Dinner, probably. Lily’s in town until the 30th and put the 8th up, Kayla can do the 7th, Ro wants the 8th, so a poll is coming. Soph is our lead there and is planning a meetup of her own.

November, New York. Alison is putting together a night for women in VC, women trying to break into VC, and female founders. Register your interest

04 - RECEIPTS

What the girls have been building.

→ Emily Hausman started Y-Care of Dementia eighteen months ago as, in her words, a bit of a cry for help. She was caring for her grandmother and found every support service in the country built for spouses over 65. It now has 80+ young carers nationally, meets monthly in Sydney, has reached national media and just landed a grant from Dementia Australia. Building the thing you needed and then refusing to let it stay small is the whole job, and she has done it while being the carer. She wants a sponsor or a venue. ycareofdementia.com.au

→ Jade put willX into the world with a waitlist for the first 100 beta testers. Her line: everything in our lives got smarter, banking, dating, ordering dinner at 11pm, and wills didn’t get the memo, they’re still in a filing cabinet somewhere written once and forgotten. Nobody has modernised that category because nobody wants to sit with the subject long enough, which is exactly why it’s a good business. She’s picking the first beta round now. willx.com.au

→ Fern Zamprogno launched Surf Coast Social a month ago for women in their twenties and thirties across Geelong, the Surf Coast and the Bellarine. Sixty members and every scheduled event at capacity or waitlisted. Capacity is the only community metric I actually trust. A follower count is vanity, a waitlist is demand. @surfcoastsocial

→ Claudia Sullivan’s SEASON is live and rolling out across Australia and New Zealand. Airbnb by Depop for fashion, outfit first, rent and sell. Most of us are sitting on a wardrobe that is the most expensive underused asset we own, and she’s recruiting founding curators, so this is your chance to make it pay rent. season.style

→ Jennica Palecek opened the Founding Members Circle for Sèva, clean beauty with dosed actives, so you can watch the formulation and the testing and the things that don’t work before it’s a brand. Building in public before you have anything to sell is the hardest version of this and the only one that reliably produces buyers who were there first. Join

→ Mia quit her job and went full time on Welloh, taking meditation, breathwork and sound baths into corporate spaces, and relocated Sydney to Melbourne in the same breath. Doing both at once is either brave or unhinged and I suspect it’s both.

→ Alexandra published her first ever self-recorded video, on how to tell the three types of AI project apart and why choosing agents because agents are the hype will cost you. Three weeks of work for under three minutes of footage, which is the ratio nobody warns you about and the reason most people never post the first one. Watch it

→ Lauren Moody is doing her first panel outside of Zimmermann, at HEX in Melbourne, on a bill with the editor-in-chief of The Daily Aus and the grants lead at Blackbird. Rosie had a spare slot and put Lauren’s name forward herself. That is the room working exactly as intended, and all it took was one person deciding to spend their access on someone else.

→ Amelia Godfrey was yapping before the challenge even opened, posting daily for Pelvy on pelvic health, working around what the platforms will let her say and using flowers as stand-ins. A real content constraint solved with actual craft. Holly, Alexis, Cha, Sam, Sophia and Nicole have all put a first one up too.

→ Sharon has quietly become the group’s best critic. Her note that you should be doing something while you talk, making a smoothie, gardening, anything, is the most useful feedback anyone gave anyone this week.

→ Also in the room: Ro published a Sastain piece timed to New York Fashion Week, then offered intros across APAC, the US and EMEA plus interview prep and resume reviews in exchange for engaging with it, which is how you ask for a favour. Sharon posted her first ever partnered content. Christie finally got the brand footage she’d been chasing, out of Nicole, @nikkicolesurfer. And Nancy Cao shipped Musefunnel fixes live in the middle of a thread about her own product, in front of everyone.

05 - CLASSIFIEDS

What the girls need. All of it fresh this week.

→ Laura needs a mid-level copywriter, four-week contract at a Sydney agency, BAU plus some conceptual briefs, starting asap, four days a week in Pyrmont. She’s in the Sydney chat.

→ Bree has a spread of roles open at Rallee People across retail, wellness, agency and ecomm, including some strong BDM and sales ones. brianna@ralleepeople.com

→ Caitlyn Watson needs a freelance video editor for Archie + Fox, across Premiere, Adobe and DaVinci. Her client list runs to Under Armour US, Mecca and Rationale. caitlyn@archieandfox.com.au

→ Solar’s client is hiring an in-house marketing and ecommerce assistant. On-site, not remote, and Solar runs the ads externally so you’d be working alongside her. glow@sascha-martini.com

→ Abbey is building a freelance bench at Bold Mood for client briefs across design, copy, content, social, photo and video, motion, web, illustration, PR and ops. The broadest single door on this page. Sign up →

→ Persephone needs a Sydney photographer and videographer for a wine brand launch, elevated product and lifestyle, stills and video for site, social and launch. Vivi and Paris have both already put their hands up, so this is a shortlist rather than a cold start. hello@bellecreativeco.com · itsstudioblueproductions@gmail.com

→ Kari opens several free brand and social strategy slots every quarter for founders and creators. She’s a fractional social strategist for eight-figure brands in New York and soon Sydney, so this is the most valuable free thing here. karikaranikos.com/work, then DM her.

→ Leslie is testing a half-day content shoot where she follows you through an actual working day, almost paparazzi-style, and you come out with a pile of strategic iPhone video plus a handful of polished brand images. Shot list, outfits and locations planned in advance. Thumbs up in the chat for Melbourne, plane for Sydney.

→ Niamh can help with legal in Australia, China and Southeast Asia, which given how many of you spent this week thinking about manufacturing is better timed than she knows. She’s in the General chat.

→ Zehra needs a collar mic to borrow by Thursday for GPT6 After Dark. Easiest favour on this page. She’s in the Sydney chat.

→ Alice needs five minutes on a survey. She’s validating a tool for choosing a Sydney suburb and is offering to return the favour to anyone else validating something. alice@onthehousegroup.com

→ Luci wants to talk to founders publishing on Substack about what’s working and what’s not. Sydney, virtual or in person, and she’ll trade you her content marketing brain for the conversation. She’s in the General chat.

Forward this to one girl who’d get it.

Brooke x

Still time to throw a few dollars at Small Steps 4 Hannah →

This newsletter is the highlight reel. The WhatsApp is where we actually live.

Every city, growing weekly.

i can film 35 videos at an event and zero at home

get MOODY — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 07:50:46 GMT

Hi divas 🤍

Put me at an event with a lanyard on and I will happily pump out thirty five videos in a day. I don’t think about it, I don’t rehearse it, I just talk. Yapping publicly on LinkedIn has become genuinely easy for me, to the point where it’s now a professional part of my job.

Then I sit at my kitchen table on a normal Tuesday, think “I should film something today,” and it does not happen. Not once. The camera stays in my pocket and the thought quietly dies.

If it’s that hard for me, and this is literally part of what I get paid to do, then it’s hard for everyone. So this one is for the every girl, and I’m doing the reps right alongside you.

That’s the whole idea behind the Yap Challenge. Thirty days, one challenge a day, you film yourself yapping and post it in the group chat for feedback or on your socials if you’re feeling brave. You might never post a single one publicly. Completely allowed. The reps are what make you better, not the posting.

I’ve paid for a version of this before. A few hundred dollars for a challenge that was, in the end, information pointed at me in one direction. No way to share a rough take, no one to tell me the first thirty seconds were dead weight, no room to actually get better. I didn’t finish it. Of course I didn’t.

So we built ours differently, and free. The workshop, the daily prompts, the group, all of it, no cost. The WhatsApp channel is going to be absolute chaos and that is exactly the point. Chaos means people are actually filming. It means real commentary, real feedback, and a room full of women helping each other tune a message instead of guessing alone.

Two thank yous. Britt from State of Brand, who put her hand up to run the kick-off personal branding workshop and get us clear on our message before we start yapping into the void. And Ari from Athlinq, who came up with the whole idea in the chat, which is the magic of that chat. Someone says a thing at 9pm and three weeks later it’s a program.

We kick off Tuesday 15 September, 6pm, with Britt’s 90 minute workshop, then straight into the thirty days.

You need no equipment. Your phone is fine. If you want to spend twenty dollars on a tiny lapel mic it will make your audio noticeably better, and I’ll drop links in the chat for the ones I use.

So, what would you actually say about your work if you weren’t performing it?

Let’s go, girls.

Brooke x

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