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

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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.

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 →

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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.

Forward this to one girl who’d get it.

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.

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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.

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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.

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

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.

🔗 Join MOODY →

🔗 Follow MOODY on social→

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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.

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

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.

🔗 Join MOODY →

🔗 Follow MOODY on social→

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.

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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

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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.

🔗 Join MOODY →

🔗 Follow MOODY on social→

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.

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02 - THE READ

Notes from the room: the yap challenge kick-off

→ 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.

→ 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.

03 - THE DIARY

Here’s where we’re showing up.

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 →

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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.

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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

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.

🔗 Join MOODY →

🔗 Follow MOODY on social →

Subscribe now

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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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.

🔗 Join MOODY →

🔗 Follow MOODY on social →

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.

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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.

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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?

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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

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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.

🔗 Join MOODY →

🔗 Follow MOODY on social →

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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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.

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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 →

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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.

🔗 Join MOODY →

🔗 Follow MOODY on social →

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.

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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?

Sign up on Luma for the workshop, join the yap challenge channel in the MOODY WhatsApp for the daily prompts.

Let’s go, girls.

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.

🔗 Join MOODY →

🔗 Follow MOODY on social→

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Hi divas 🤍

I’m writing this from Shanghai.

I flew out on Saturday with Georgia to spend a week walking stores and going behind the scenes of the full consumer lifecyle, which is the part of my job I would do for free. Ten hours a day on foot, looking at how things are merchandised and priced and who is actually buying.

Before anyone pictures glamour: we were not at the pointy end of the plane. We’re middle seats on China Eastern becasue I couldn’t work out seat selection on the app. Add business class to the vision board.

I got one event in before I left: coffee, matcha and croissants on the Gold Coast on Tuesday morning hosted by Georgia. Then, in the days I was packing, this community ran three more without me. Twenty in London with Caitlin, Emma and Jess. Fifteen in Adelaide with Cathy. Another twenty at the first Business Book Club in Sydney with Sylvie, on a night I had to pull out of because I was eyeballs deep in a board pack.

I wasn’t in a single one of those rooms. The girls just went ahead anyway.

Last week I wrote about the shoes being too small and not knowing which pair comes next. Here’s the part nobody tells you: some of the transition isn’t about becoming a bigger version of yourself. Some of it is about becoming less necessary.

And that’s harder than it sounds, because being needed feels exactly like being valuable. Every time someone asks a question only you can answer, it’s a small hit of proof that you matter. Designing yourself out of that is the least instinctive thing you will ever do, and it’s the only way anything you build survives your own calendar.

So if you’re the bottleneck in your own business right now, and most of us are somewhere: what’s the one thing you’d have to teach someone this month to stop being the person who has to be in the room?

Caitlin, Emma, Jess, Georgia, Cathy, Sylvie. You didn't cover for me. You made me optional, which is the nicest thing anyone has done for me this year and also the entire point.

Two things before you scroll.

The MOODY Yap Challenge is happening in September. Thirty days of showing up, a virtual workshop to kick it off, and daily prompts dropped in the chat so you actually film something. The part that makes it ours rather than a rerun of someone else’s: we audit each other’s accounts and give real notes, instead of doing it alone in the dark. Built with Ari and Britt, invented on the fly, because MOODY girls get shit done. Join the channel →

And tell me what you want to know about China. I’m in stores here all week with a notebook and I’m thrilled to go digging on your behalf. What do you actually want reported back? How they merchandise beauty, what’s on shelf that isn’t here yet, what live selling really looks like, how much of it is already agentic. Reply to this and I’ll bring back whatever you ask for.

02 - THE READ

Last week I hosted a room on the future of retail, consumer behaviour and commerce with McKinsey, Macquarie and Amazon Ads. Firms, not names. Here’s what I walked out with.

The consumers are ahead and the businesses are behind. Roughly a quarter of consumers already use AI search to discover products. Fewer than one in twenty companies has a real agentic commerce strategy. That is the widest gap between customer behaviour and business readiness I have seen, and gaps like that close violently, not gently.

Three separate things get called agentic commerce, and conflating them is why most strategies go nowhere. Inbound is discovery: ChatGPT and Gemini as the front door, so when someone asks for the best moisturiser for her skin, are you in the answer or invisible? On-site is the assistant on your own property. Outbound is the autonomous agent shopping across other people’s sites for your customer.

“You must be part of the answer.”

That was the line of the day, and it is the entire inbound strategy in six words.

But it is early, and one number tells you how early. When OpenAI opened up shopping, roughly three thousand retailers were listed. Eight actually transacted through it. Three thousand to eight. → Being listed is not being live. If you are counting yourself as agent-ready because you appear somewhere, check whether anything has ever actually been bought.

The line I’ve repeated every day since: agents don’t browse pages, they query data. If your product information isn’t rich, structured and accessible, you’re not badly ranked. You’re absent. Most brands are still optimising a page a machine will never look at.

The Australian numbers finally exist. CBA has banked $200 million in AI benefit and expects it to double. Walmart is holding headcount flat at 2.1 million for three years and retraining everyone instead of cutting. Set that against Qantas, Coles and Woolworths all announcing reductions this year and you have two opposite bets on one technology. → The investor question isn’t whether you use AI. It’s whether the market believes your story enough to value you like a tech business instead of a retailer. Guzman y Gomez is trading north of a hundred times earnings. It sells burritos. That gap is the whole prize, and it gets earned by quantifying the benefit in public the way CBA just did.

Not every category is equally exposed. The more research a purchase takes, the higher the disintermediation risk. Consumer electronics, health and beauty, home improvement are the vulnerable ones. Groceries least. If your customer does an hour of reading before she buys, an agent is about to do that hour for her.

Retail media has quietly become the most profitable thing in retail. Grocery runs around 2% net margin. Specialty retail, eight to ten. Retail media runs at 70 to 80, because the data is already sitting there and all you’re adding is the tech to make it addressable. → Loyalty is the connector. Not the points, the unique ID. Without it you can’t tell that Tuesday’s customer and Friday’s customer are the same woman, and then you have transactions instead of a business.

And we have more room to run than we think. Australia does about 20% of retail online. China does closer to 50%.

Two things to act on. Reddit and increasingly LinkedIn are among the biggest sources feeding what an LLM recommends, so showing up in a community has quietly become distribution. And then the closing advice, which covers everything above:

“It needs to be useful. It needs to be valid. So you want to get it right.”

A result that isn’t relevant doesn’t just annoy someone, it erodes their trust in the whole platform. Getting found is worth nothing if what they find is wrong.

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Also this week

AI is making your laptop more expensive. Wholesale PC costs are up more than 50% on AI-driven memory shortages, because the chips in a laptop are the chips in a data centre and the data centres are winning. JB Hi-Fi posted $11.06 billion in sales, profit up 6% to $489.9 million and a dividend up 22.5%, and the shares still fell 12.3%. → Record year, punished anyway. If your product has silicon in it, your input costs are now set by a bidding war you are not part of.

The reporting week put numbers under all of it. Woolworths did $71.5 billion, up 3.6%, net profit up 18.1%, e-commerce up almost 16%. Coles did $41.5 billion in supermarkets, up 3.7%. Both into a market running at two speeds: value shoppers trading down and waiting for the promotion, and a wealthier cohort still spending freely. → There is no such thing as “the Australian consumer” right now. Build for the average of those two and you get a product neither wants.

And Woolworths credited Ooshies with roughly 1.5 to 2 percentage points of sales acceleration. A plastic toy moved one and a half points at a seventy-one billion dollar company. People don’t collect points. They collect things. What they’re really collecting is cultural capital, the thing you can put on the bench and have someone else recognise.

03 - THE EDIT

Lauren is our fashion editor, our music editor and the other MOODY sister. Kicking off september, in her words.

I’m listening to Jigitz, 50 Ballerinas, I’m wearing TIG 008 and I’m dancing like Adela. Only badly.

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about something Jigitz said about their new album: ballet as a metaphor for obsession. Wanting something so badly you build your whole life around it. Knowing it might fuck you up and wanting it anyway.

Unfortunately, I get it.

I’ve always had a soft spot for the slightly irrational pursuit. A career move that would be much easier not to make. An idea you can’t leave alone. And, on a far less consequential level, the piece of clothing you absolutely do not need but have mentally styled seventeen different ways before you’ve left the store.

What stuck with me was the bigger parallel. Careers, ideas, goals. The thing you keep coming back to even when the sensible version of your life would be easier. The opportunity that scares you because saying yes might rearrange everything. The slightly unhinged belief that if you want something badly enough, you’ll find a way.

I’ve never been very good at wanting things casually.

Maybe that’s why I keep coming back to the ballerina right now. Not the bows and slippers, the obsession underneath it. 50 Ballerinas is on repeat, and so is Adela’s Prima, because the baddest bitches ain’t in LA.

And TIG 008 is giving me the wardrobe: lace, washed-out pastels, sheer layers, elongated silhouettes and femininity with something a little stranger underneath. TIG feels like if Chloé and Ed Hardy had a gothic baby in Brazil whose hobbies include partying and surfing.

I said what I said.

What I love is that it never feels too resolved. Always something contradictory, a little chaotic, slightly off. Romantic without being precious, sexy without being obvious, a little bit wrong in exactly the right way.

Consider yourselves introduced.

And that became the starting point for this edit. Not ballet. Obsession. The pieces I can’t stop looking at, the designers I want you to know and the things that make absolutely no sense together until suddenly they do.

Lace with leather. Pretty things with a mean streak. A power suit because apparently we have jobs. Zebra wedges because apparently we also make bad decisions.

Not balletcore. Please don’t make me call it balletcore.

Just the current mood.

Lauren x

The September fashion edit→

The MOODY girl September playlist →

04 - THE DIARY

We needed a bigger boat. The Melbourne launch party has moved to Godby Hotel because the response broke the old venue. Same date, same time, more room. Wednesday 9 September, 6pm. RSVP →

Tue 1 Sept, closing. Startmate’s First Believer applications shut today. Last call.

Tue 1 Sept, virtual. Business Book Club round two with Sylvie. Virtual this time, so it doesn’t matter where you are. Be on this one.

Tue 1 Sept, Sydney. Nicole is running a content day and street interviews and wants a few more girls in it. @nikkicolesurfer.

Wed 2 Sept, New York. Ana is hosting an event with Emma Grede’s team for her book. NY girls, this is your room. RSVP

Tue 15 Sept, London. Canva’s AI Vision. Panels on AI, creativity and marketing. Hollie works there and has a 50% off code for us, so message her in the London chat. Her words: let’s fill the place with women so it stops being a boy topic.

Fri 18 Sept, Sydney. The Social Summit, Manly Pacific. I’m on stage with Lauren from Verity AI and Rowena from OpenAI for a session called The customer is no longer human. Code MOODY30. Tickets

Fri 18 Sept, Adelaide. The Dinner Club by Étoile, FARINA00 Goodwood, 7pm, $75. Every ticket puts a menstrual kit in the hands of a girl in South Australia.

Sat 19 Sept, Los Angeles. Pickleball and Prosecco for the LA crew. Details

The Yap Challenge kicks off in September. Details up top, channel is open, workshop date locked this week.

05 - RECEIPTS

What the girls have been building.

→ Leonie launches The Nested App today at midday. Built by qualified teachers for parents of 0 to 5s, it takes the mental load out of working out what to do with your kid when you have nothing left. thenestedapp.com. If you know a parent in the trenches, send it today.

→ The book club authors sent champagne. Two bottles waiting on the table when twenty women walked in to discuss From The Ground Up, plus a video message from Jess and Bree that Sylvie played to the room. The reveal that got everyone: Frank Body started as a case study for the founders’ copywriting agency. Not a brand plan. A demo.

→ Sylvie then manifested her way onto Add to Cart. Read the book, wrote it down, invited last week, records Friday. The book was Manifest. It’s also the next book club pick.

→ Cathy ran Adelaide. Caitlin, Emma and Jess ran London. First time for both, and neither needed me in the country. Cathy’s summary: one group shot and “some action wine shots.”

→ Kirby decided on Wednesday to run a meetup on Thursday. Coffee, a croissant and a yap at A.P Quay, purely because she was in Sydney for a few days. Nobody asked her to.

→ Karen Barr, who Rosie recommended in last week’s issue, has joined us. Twenty years in, just launched her own conveyancing practice. Recommended in issue one, a member by issue two.

→ Erin Core is done being a best-kept secret. MD of Veracity Research, five years in, freshly ISO 20252 accredited, and scaling through reputation instead of sales pressure.

→ Alexandra shipped Sigma Mind 1.0.2, and the best thing in it isn’t the AI. It’s the bit that asks whether your problem needs a model at all or whether plain automation would do.

→ Also new in the room: Lucy Hay, co-founder and CMO of CLUTCH Glue. Sharon, founder of OPILLAR and host of Beyond Wellness. Ano, building a beauty-tech platform on top of a day job putting AI into engineering teams.

06 - CLASSIFIEDS

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

→ Anthropic is hiring a Partnerships Lead for ANZ. If you have ever wanted to be the person in the room where those deals get done, this is it. Apply →

→ Atina wants a content person, or a small content team, for her personal brand. Short-form video editing, hook ideas, trend research, and someone with their finger genuinely on the pulse. Worth knowing who you’d be working with: she built and sold a shoe brand, grew a personal account to 75k, and used to be a strategy consultant. She’s starting a new account from scratch and wants someone who will tell her when a hook is weak. She’s in the Melbourne chat.

→ Kat runs People and Experience at PAL and has offered to talk to anyone here about hiring, recruitment, culture or Meta ads. Ex Big Four, Geelong based. @palaccounting_

→ Hollie has a 50% off code for Canva’s AI Vision on 15 September and is happy for you to use it to bring a friend. She’s in the London chat.

→ Nina is shooting TFP in Sydney and will do a complimentary shoot for any September launch or event. @nina.from.nowhere

→ Hailey is offering fundraising sessions to founders for the next little while. US advisory, Australia based, previously built a funding marketplace for female founders. She’s in the Investing chat.

→ Sababa needs a developer who has worked with the Meta API for Instagram. She’s a solo technical founder building Studio Crew, an AI operating system that gives a content creator their own virtual production crew. Currently at MVP on YouTube. She’s in Tech + AI.

→ Tanu is a product and website designer in Melbourne looking for women with an idea that needs building.

→ Ano is looking for a mentor, someone a few steps ahead who has built a tech or a beauty business. She’s in Tech + AI and Melbourne.

→ Sharon is looking for podcast hosts to collaborate with. OPILLAR · Beyond Wellness Podcast

Forward this to one girl who’d get it.

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.

🔗 Join MOODY →

🔗 Follow MOODY on social→

It’s a great line. It’s also the kind of line that’s very easy to say on a stage and very hard to back up.

So in January I was in New York for NRF, recording for AWS. If you’re not in retail, NRF is the industry’s Big Week: the National Retail Federation’s annual show at the Javits Center, 40,000 people, every major retailer and every vendor on earth, and roughly nine hundred conversations about the same three topics. This year those topics were AI, AI and AI.

I got Mandeep in a room, read his own line back to him, and asked him to show his working.

And he did. New episode is finally live.

We talked about agentic commerce for twenty-six minutes. Not the buzzword version. The what-are-you-actually-doing-on-a-Tuesday version.

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First, a confession.

This was recorded in January and I’m posting it in August.

Rewatching it was a genuinely strange experience. There are questions I’d ask completely differently now. There are follow-ups I can see myself not taking. Eight months ago I was still finding the shape of these conversations, and it shows in places.

I said as much to a friend recently, who is currently posting a video series she filmed last year and having the exact same quiet crisis about it. Genuinely the most reassuring conversation I’ve had in a while. Turns out a lot of us are sitting on good work from twelve months ago, negotiating with ourselves about whether it’s still allowed to be published.

So I’ve decided that’s the good bit, not the embarrassing bit. 2026 has moved at an absolutely insane pace, and having a tape of how I was thinking in January is a gift. You don’t often get to measure your own growth that precisely. So here it is, slightly awkward edges and all.

Six reasons to watch.

→ The receipts on that opening line. Augmented product data lifting discoverability, lifting conversion. The result: single-digit percentage gains in both conversion and incremental traffic. Not a moonshot. Just money that was sitting on the floor because a bag was described in the wrong words.

→ The best agentic AI story in the episode is about a playlist. Tapestry built a small internal app with AWS. Store associates send feedback, AI clusters it into themes, an agent routes them upstairs. The first real signal it surfaced was that the music in the stores was bad, so they changed it. A later theme was customers asking for an extra zipper, and that went into the product design. Two people built the thing. No eight figure budget. The most honest picture of agentic AI in retail I’ve seen is a playlist and a zipper.

→ The Pillow Tabby is a “puffy bag.” That’s what customers type. Coach calls it something else entirely. Tapestry’s team went through the product data and translated it out of merchant speak into consumer speak, which sounds like admin and is quietly one of the highest-leverage things a retailer can do right now. Get it wrong and you’re invisible to the model, no matter how good the bag is.

→ Defend, extend, append. The readiness framework he runs on, and he’s quick to say he didn’t invent it. Defend means if everyone else is discoverable and you aren’t, you’re losing ground. Extend means take a journey you already do well and stretch it into the new surface. Append means build something that didn’t exist. Three words, and it’ll organise your entire roadmap conversation.

→ The agent-to-agent hype gets a refreshingly unbothered take. Agents buying from agents won’t be huge any time soon, in his view. Build for it regardless, because when a customer is ready to buy there should be nothing standing in front of them. Most will still come to site or store. Some won’t. Don’t make those ones work for it.

→ “Think about new ways of doing the work, not your org chart.” My favourite thing he said, and there’s a story attached. A marketing ops lead at Coach got excited about the technology, saw customer insights sitting in a database, and built herself an agent to surface them. Not asking permission. Just going. That’s not a technology story, it’s a permission story, and permission is the actual constraint in most buildings.

Which is why my favourite moment is the one Mandeep almost throws away at the end. Everyone asks what’s going to change, he says. Almost nobody asks what isn’t.

His answer to that is the whole episode.

Twenty-six minutes. Go watch.

Brooke x

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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.

🔗 Join MOODY →

🔗 Follow MOODY on social→

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I asked Rach Tucker why she chose beverage. Of all the things a brand strategist with a full-time job could build, why the category with the worst odds, the ugliest working capital and the meanest shelf in the country.

“Naivety? Hahahaha! I wanted to build a brand I was proud of and a product I’d genuinely reach for. I’ve always been fascinated by pleasure, sexual wellness and beverage, and I saw a gap for something that sat between functional wellness and social ritual. Nothing was really owning mood, intimacy and connection. So naturally, I made 20,000 cans.”

So naturally.

Twenty thousand cans. Imported actives, manufacturing, packaging, freight, all of it paid up front and sitting in a warehouse while she goes to her day job. Say that out loud and it sounds like a leap. Spend an hour on how she’s actually built this and it stops sounding like one.

Smooch is a social soda made with functional actives and aphrodisiac herbs. Sultry, moody, magnetic. A sip that brings the spark. Rach calls it “a functional drink, but also a ritual and a tool for connection”, and I want to spend this whole piece on why that second half of the sentence is the entire business.

Before any of the analysis, though, I should tell you how I know her.

Six months later we were celebrating her launch at our Sydney launch party. We could not have been prouder.

If you want to know what a MOODY girl looks like in practice, that’s it. Not the launch. The turning up in between, for months, while it’s still just an idea and a spreadsheet.

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01 — she killed her own best headline

Smooch didn’t start as a mood drink. It started as an arousal drink, which is a spicier, more clippable, more press-friendly thing to be. Rach walked away from it herself:

“Arousal was too tricky a promise. Every body is different, and there is no silver bullet. Smooch was always about creating the conditions for desire to spark. Mood is a clearer promise and a bigger opportunity. Smooch is about helping shift the energy. Feeling more present, playful, sexy and connected.”

Read that as a founder rather than a consumer. She had the louder claim in her hand and traded it for one she can actually deliver, before a single journalist made her.

That’s not a marketing decision. That’s a repeat-purchase decision, and repeat purchase is the whole game. NielsenIQ’s own BASES team went through more than 60,000 product innovations across five countries and found that just 52% of new items reaching national distribution are still growing sales in year two. Drop the distribution threshold to include everything launched and it falls to 33%. Two in three new products are already going backwards by their second birthday.

Which tells you what the buyer is actually watching. Not doors. Velocity. How fast the cans leave each fridge. They give you the shelf on a story and take it back on a number, usually inside one review cycle.

So the promise on the can has to survive contact with a real person on a real Tuesday night. Overclaim and you’ll sell the first one, because the first one is sold by the marketing. You only ever sell the second one if the drink did what you said it would.

02 — the graveyard and the gold rush, at the same time

Let’s not be precious. Beverage is brutal.

It isn’t a small-brand problem either. Alex Cooper’s Unwell Beverages is winding up this month, less than two years after launching in partnership with Nestlé and with Target out front, while the day before that news broke the wider Unwell business took investment from Patrick Whitesell at a $500 million valuation. So this is not a company that ran out of money. This is a company with every advantage available looking at beverage and deciding it wasn’t worth the fridge space. I don’t read that as a failure of ambition. I read it as the category telling the truth about itself, loudly, in public.

Now the other half, because it’s why smart people keep doing this anyway.

PepsiCo acquired Poppi in 2025 for $1.95 billion, or $1.65 billion net of anticipated tax benefits, plus an earnout. A prebiotic soda. Olipop hit a $1.85 billion valuation in a Series C last February, having doubled sales to $400 million and turned profitable. Coca-Cola chose to build rather than buy and launched Simply Pop, its first prebiotic soda, into the same fight.

The no-and-low side is just as loud. Asahi has committed to a 20% sales composition ratio of non- and low-alcohol adult beverages within its major alcohol products by 2030. Diageo took a majority stake in Seedlip in 2019, fully acquired Ritual Zero Proof in 2024, and put €25 million into a dedicated Guinness 0.0 facility at St James’s Gate. Moët Hennessy took a minority stake in French Bloom. Molson Coors partnered with Naked Life, Australia’s biggest non-alc RTD cocktail brand, to take it into the US.

At home, IBISWorld has functional beverage production at $1.0 billion in 2025-26, up 12.3% in a single year, across 117 businesses.

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03 — everyone built the substitute. rach built the occasion.

The Australian numbers are not subtle. AIHW has alcohol available for consumption at 9.8 litres of pure alcohol per person aged 15 and over in 2023-24, down from 10.5 the year before. That’s the biggest single-year drop since the collection started in 1960-61.

It’s generational, not a blip. Flinders University analysed more than two decades of data from over 23,000 Australians and found Gen Z are nearly twenty times more likely to choose not to drink than Baby Boomers, even after adjusting for sociodemographic factors. Circana has the share of Australians buying zero-alcohol versions more than doubling since August 2020, and non-alcoholic drinks adding $1.8 billion in sales over the past two years.

Almost everybody read that and built a substitute. Fake beer. Fake gin. The apology version of the thing you used to order, priced like the real one, drunk with a faint sense of loss.

Rach read it as an occasion:

“Drinking is inherently social and ritualistic. Whether it’s wine at dinner, tea and gossip, or a soda with someone you fancy. Smooch is powerful because it is built around that moment of connection, but one that is sexy, sultry, magnetic, a little moody. When people buy Smooch, they’re not just buying a drink. They’re buying into the idea that feeling good, feeling sexy and making space for connection is worth prioritising.”

That’s not a substitute, it’s a category. Hydration, where Unwell went, is the most crowded, most price-compared, most brand-agnostic shelf in the store. Mood, intimacy and connection has no incumbent, no giant defending it and no obvious Coca-Cola line extension waiting to squash it.

She also refuses to do the beachy sunny thing, which I love. Every functional drink in this country looks like a Bondi morning. Smooch looks like 9pm. When you’re the smallest brand in the fridge, distinctiveness is a distribution strategy.

04 — cash flow, and the two buyers who decide

I asked what a fortnight in had taught her that no amount of planning prepared her for.

“Cash flow. What the fuck.”

Correct. Beverage has the working capital profile of a mining project and the margin profile of a snack. You pay for all of it up front, then wait for a warehouse to slowly turn back into money.

The Australian shelf makes that harder. In its February 2025 supermarkets inquiry, the ACCC put Woolworths at 38% of national supermarket grocery sales and Coles at 29%, together roughly 67% of supermarket industry revenue, and called it “an oligopolistic market structure in which Coles and Woolworths have limited incentive to compete vigorously with each other on price.” Two buyers, two-thirds of the market. If both say no, there is no third door at scale, and a founder with 20,000 cans and a term of trade cannot wait out a category review.

So when Rach says the plan is independent grocers, hotels, bars and restaurants, that isn’t a cute starter strategy. It’s the only door in the building, and for a drink selling an occasion it’s the better one anyway. You want someone’s first Smooch to happen at a table with a person they fancy, not under fluorescent lighting next to the Powerade.

Right now it’s smoochdrinks.com and a select few Sydney stockists. Next is more doors, more fridges, more hands.

Ask most founders what they’re chasing and you get an adjective. Ask Rach and you get this:

“2,000 followers, 15 retail doors and 250 online orders by Summer.”

Three numbers and a deadline. That’s not a vibe, that’s a target you can be held to, and she said it out loud in public, which is the part most people won’t do.

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rapid fire with rach

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

What’s the mood right now? “Hustle mood. We’re early, there’s momentum, and I’m determined not to waste it.” Pace, adrenaline, opportunity, figuring it out as she goes. Her word for it: “slightly addictive.”

Most unhinged thing you’ve done for the business? “Lie about my age and wear a ring on my ring finger. Sorrrrry, but sometimes you’ve gotta fake it to be taken seriously.”

What are ambitious women doing too much of, and not enough of? “We need to spend less time building in AI, and more time building in real life. AI can make us faster, but relationships take us further. Go to the lunch. Show up to the drinks. Meet the person. Trust is still the ultimate career accelerator, and you can’t prompt engineer it.”

Advice to yourself five years ago? “Success is infinite. Someone else winning doesn’t mean there’s less left for you. They rise, you rise.”

What do you want the MOODY girls to find you for? Brand strategy, creative thinking, and “the very unglamorous realities of building a CPG brand from scratch.” Selfishly, collaborations: pop-ups, events, creative partnerships, PR, retail introductions. “If our brands could make something more fun together, I want to hear about it.”

The one intro that changes your next 90 days? “Distributors. I’m looking for partners with strong relationships across both retail and foodservice who can help open the right doors. If you know one, send them my way.”

Where can we find you? Rach on LinkedIn. Smooch at @smooch.drinks and smoochdrinks.com.

so here’s where i’ve landed

The received wisdom is that beverage is won on reach. Get famous, get seen, get stocked. Reach is also the single easiest input in the whole model to buy, which is exactly why it decides nothing.

What can’t be bought is an occasion nobody owns and a promise you can actually keep. Rach has both, and she got them by making the unglamorous choice at every fork: kill the louder claim, take the harder doors, say the number out loud.

There’s a line of hers I keep coming back to. Less time building in AI, more time building in real life. You can’t prompt engineer trust. She’s selling a can designed to get two people to sit down together, which means the belief and the product are the same object. That is rarer than it sounds, and it’s usually the difference between a company and a range of flavours.

Twenty thousand cans is a terrifying amount of conviction for a woman doing this around a full-time job. It’s also the good kind of terrifying. She’s already ordered. Now she just has to be right, and she’s building like someone who intends to be.

In February she told a room she was going to do this. By August it existed. That’s the whole point of the room.

Go buy a can. They’re delicious. Better yet, send her a distributor.

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.

🔗 Join MOODY →

🔗 Follow MOODY on social→

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Hi divas 🤍

Arielle, Jordyn and I were talking last week about the death of self in order to become the next version.

Dramatic. Using it anyway. When you’re building something, there’s a stretch where the version of you everyone already knows has to die before the version you’re becoming turns up. Nobody warns you that the gap between those two women is where you spend most of your time. You’re not who you were. You’re not yet who you’re going for. You’re just in it, making decisions nobody claps for, explaining yourself at dinners, quietly wondering whether this is conviction or delusion.

I’ve been in it myself lately. It’s like my shoes have gotten too small. I know I’m getting new ones, I just don’t know which pair yet, so I keep trying them on. Too small. Too big. Too shiny. Not the right style.

And I keep having to remind myself that the trying on is the work. It’s reps. A thousand of them before you’re good at anything, and not one of them is worth posting. The reps you do in private are the only thing that builds the muscle. In business, in creativity, in life.

It’s also not lost on me that I reached for shoes. Fashion is where I’ve worked a lot of this out, because trying on versions of yourself is so much easier when it’s literally clothes, and considerably more fun.

Which is not a small thing in my family. Mum was Miss Australia in the eighties, my sister Lauren modelled professionally for a decade, and I had a brief, extremely 2013 stint in fashion PR launching Net-a-Porter and Country Road Home here. So I have never thought about how we dress as decoration. It’s what decides the energy you carry into a room, and it counts for most in exactly the transitions I’m describing.

Three women have done that for me this year. Cat Spanti got me through the wedding and found my bride personality, which turned out to be confident and loud with permission to be soft and a little silly. Shannen Thomas at Désordre has styled me for everything from Domefest to our launch party, including that 6kg bedazzled dress and helped me find my hosting identity. And I always come back to Lauren, the other MOODY sister who has the most complete sense of self in how she dresses of anyone I know.

Which is why she is now our fashion editor. More from her below.

Two weeks ago we put 150 of the most ambitious women in this country in one room in Sydney. What I felt, standing in the middle of it, was that nearly every person there was in that exact chapter. Different businesses, different cities, same gap. All of them further into the discomfort than they’d ever admit online.

And it isn’t a big-room thing. This weekend twenty of us sat down for coffee and croissants in Brisbane and it was exactly the same feeling, just quieter.

That’s the whole thing. That’s why this exists. You don’t get out of the lonely chapter by being tougher. You get out of it by standing in a room where nobody needs it explained to them.

I love us. I’m so fucking proud of us.

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02 - THE READ

CONSUMER & RETAIL

Australians say they’re broke. Retail just hit $40 billion a month.

On Monday JB Hi-Fi fell 13%, closing at $71.65 from an $81.72 open, comparable sales down 1.4% in the first four weeks of the financial year. eToro’s read: three rate hikes, the consumer is under pressure. Every headline in the country ran with it.

Three days later, Roy Morgan forecast Australian retail past $40 billion in a single month for the first time in history. Up 6% year on year. Household goods up 8.8%.

Both true, same week. The money didn’t leave, it moved. And JB’s problem is a supply problem as much as a demand one, because chipmakers are prioritising AI infrastructure, so tech stock got scarcer and dearer at exactly the moment shoppers went hunting for value.

Your bank wants to be your loyalty program. CommBank expanded Yello across home loans, savings, cards and insurance. → Which is why I keep saying don’t build a loyalty program. The bank has your entire financial life. You cannot out-point them.

Spotify and Depop are collaborating. Music discovery meets secondhand fashion discovery. → Nobody is selling a product here, they’re selling the same taste in two places. If your customer’s taste travels across categories, your collab list is longer than you think.

BUSINESS & INVESTING

Blackbird closed a billion dollars. Fund six, targeting $1.2bn. Their 2022 fund was the biggest VC raise in Australian history. → A closed fund is a deployment schedule, not a vibe. And in the same week they went hiring a brand storytelling and community lead, which tells you what they think creates deal flow.

BÉIS sold for $210 million. Alex Cooper’s Unwell is shutting down. Same week, same question: can an audience be turned into a brand? Shay Mitchell’s answer was yes. Alex Cooper’s was no, and Cooper has the bigger audience of the two, so size isn’t the variable. → The variable is in the multiple. BÉIS made around $210m in a year and sold for around $210m, so roughly one times revenue. Hailey Bieber’s Rhode, doing comparable revenue in skincare, was valued at a billion. You buy skincare every six weeks and luggage every five years, and that one fact is the entire gap. Category choice is a valuation decision, not a passion one. → Separately, count the coverage the Unwell shutdown got against everything Cooper has actually built. We are so much faster to report an ending.

→ We back what we understand, and we understand what we work in. Concentration risk is the quiet one.

TECH & AI

Canva lost $11 billion. Blackbird and Airtree cut their mark 17%, employee shares cut 20%, growth forecast down from 30% to 20%. Melanie Perkins: the cost of serving an AI task was too high. → Everyone called it AI beating Canva. It’s a margin story wearing an AI story’s coat, and every one of you shipping an AI feature is running the same equation at a smaller scale.

→ Every one of them introduced themselves by what they’re building, not what they do. That’s the difference between a channel and a room.

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HEALTH & BEAUTY

Three of these are the same story: how fast this category is monetising, and how slowly the rules are catching up.

A free TikTok trend is now a $59.99 product. EZZ launched a daily powder off the viral cortisol cocktail. → The demand gen was done for nothing by women on TikTok. If people are copying your format uninvited, someone is eventually going to put a barcode on it.

Kim Kardashian is selling broccoli. Partnered with Broc Shot. → Ingestibles are where beauty margin went. Lower regulatory bar than skincare, higher repeat purchase, claims you never quite have to prove.

Sunscreen gate isn’t over. Ultra Violette has sent customers another update. The TGA investigation is still live. → And here’s the bill for the two stories above it. When a category sells faster than it can substantiate, the regulator eventually turns up. Trust never shows on a balance sheet, which is why brands only find out what it was worth after they’ve spent it.

Postpartum care is going national. Senator Marielle Smith wants an inquiry covering birth trauma, mental health, breastfeeding and allied health access. → An inquiry is a market signal as much as a policy one. It documents the gaps in public, with evidence, for free.

MEDIA & THE CREATOR ECONOMY

Sophia Begg fronts Glassons’ premium collection You may better know her as Sopha Dopha. A creator getting a campaign is old news. A mass retailer using one to sell up is not. → Creators carry aspiration now, and aspiration is the expensive part.

In our chat: Rachel shared a piece on keeping things private and Kayla landed it: a personal brand doesn’t have to be every waking moment of your life. → The market is paying more for creators than it ever has. The price of admission is climbing at the same rate and nobody prints that number.

Influencer weddings are a marketing platform. Paige Paul and Acquired Style both in the past fortnight. → The only content format with a guaranteed audience, a fixed date and unlimited brand slots. Of course it got productised. Slightly grim. Extremely smart.

Earle Meets World. The trailer landed this week, Netflix drops it 4 September. Alix Earle, 13 million followers, a reality series about a content creator making content. → The old path was influencer to sponsorships. The new one is influencer to media asset, and Netflix is now buying audiences instead of building them. Alix gets the platform and the cheque. Netflix gets 13 million people it didn’t have to earn. Decide which of those you’d rather own.

03 - THE STYLE EDIT

Shop the MOODY GIRL edit →

Hi divas, I’m Lauren. Among many other things, your MOODY fashion editor.

I’m a chronic overdresser, an obsessive outfit researcher and deeply susceptible to beautiful things, weird things and things that make absolutely no practical sense but somehow make perfect emotional sense.

I’m not interested in finding one neat aesthetic and sticking to it, and that probably traces back to spending my most formative years modelling, living as someone else’s creative canvas. A chameleon. I was dressed as a hundred different women before I’d worked out who I was, so I’m not especially interested in being told which one I’m supposed to be now.

Those years also taught me how much I love the hunt. Alone in foreign cities between castings, digging through consignment stores, vintage basements and the IYKYK places you only find because someone whispered the address to you. Learning to look properly. To spot the thing with history, the thing everyone else missed, the thing worth carrying home in an already-overweight suitcase. I want to build an archive, not a perfect wardrobe.

So that’s the energy I’m bringing. Taste over trends. Curiosity over rules. Discovery over consumption. Not just what to buy, but how to notice.

MOODY launches, packed calendars, late nights and very little interest in dressing appropriately for any of it. I want my tailoring sharp, my lace a little indecent and absolutely nothing sensible. We’re wearing sheer in daylight, suits that mean business and pieces that make people stop and ask questions.

Obviously, we don’t gatekeep here. No must-haves. No trend forecast. No fucking capsule wardrobes.

Only lust-haves and vibes. Take it or leave it, divas. Fashion is a choice, not a crisis. Make it fun.

Shop the MOODY GIRL edit →

Lauren is available for personal styling, whether you have an event or big meeting coming up or need a full wardrobe refresh. lauren@getmoody.co

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04 - THE DIARY

Six cities this week, and on Friday we’re in two of them at once on opposite sides of the planet, and I’m running neither. That’s the part I want you to notice.

First, the big one. Wed 9 Sept, the MOODY Melbourne launch party. Our biggest night of the year. Co-hosted with Melbourne city leads Lauren, Sarah and Udoka. Nearly 100 of you are registered and there is a capacity number I am going to hit. Get your name down, sort the logistics later. Register →

Tue 25 Aug, Gold Coast. MOODY Gold Coast at Bam Bam Bakehouse, Mermaid Beach. Coffee, matcha, bagels, no panels, no pitches. Georgia and me. RSVP

Wed 26 Aug, Sydney. MOODY Business Book Club, first ever session, 7pm at Four In Hand, Paddington. Sylvie of Unicorn Cart hosting, reading From The Ground Up by Bree Johnson and Jess Hatzis. Full, but the waitlist moves. Waitlist

Thurs 27 Aug, London. MOODY London at Nancy’s, London Bridge. Your city leads Caitlin, Emma and Jess. Drinks and a yap, that’s the format. RSVP

Fri 28 Aug, Adelaide. MOODY Adelaide, 5:30pm at Honeydripper, 11 Frome St. Your city lead Cathy Karuga is running it. No panels, no pitches, come on your own if you want to. RSVP

Sat 29 Aug, Sydney. Build A Personal Brand Bigger Than Your Business, QT Sydney, taught by Teodora Ivin. Standard $89, networking-only tickets still available. Tickets

Mon 1 Sept, closing. Startmate’s First Believer applications shut. You learn the early-stage framework, review 800+ real applications, interview founders. Lisa did it two years ago and rates it.

Fri 18 Sept, Sydney. The Social Summit, Manly Pacific. I’m on stage with Lauren from Verity AI and Rowena from OpenAI for a session called The customer is no longer human, which is the conversation I have been waiting to have out loud in front of a room. Arielle and Jordyn are speaking too, and the three of us went from knowing each other to being a trio at this event, so walking back in together is not something I’m going to be normal about. Code MOODY30. Tickets

Dates landing next week: the Melbourne golf day, the Étoile dinner in Adelaide and pickleball in LA.

05 - RECEIPTS

What you’ve been building. A month’s worth, because I’ve been hoarding.

→ Amelia Godfrey has 6,500 patients on Pelvy. 125 clinics, seven countries, eight months since launch. Bootstrapped, built while working part time as a pelvic health physio, and funded with her house deposit and her car fund. She’s also offered to talk anyone here through launching on a budget, which she has more authority on than almost anyone I know.

→ Codie ordered the samples. Pilates socks. Two years of thinking about it, talking herself out of it, coming back to it. The fear was still there and she went anyway, and she credited this group for the push. That’s the chapter I was talking about up top, and what got her through it was other women saying do it.

→ Nancy Cao and Udoka are running two events together. Saturday’s personal branding workshop and a Vietnamese cooking night in October, both seeded in here. Two women met in this chat and are now producing events with me nowhere in the middle. That isn’t a nice story. That’s the product working.

→ Melissa Drennan, MD of Napoleon Perdis, launched a subscription. The Golden Ritual: quarterly box, 40+ full-size products, no sample sizes, around $2 a day. Love seeing an iconic Aussie brand in this good a pair of hands, trying something new.

→ PARQ Sport is making golf a female space. The brainchild of Sarah, Viktoria, Woods and Jen from Dissh. Sarah floated a MOODY x PARQ golf day in the Melbourne chat and had seven women in within the hour, most of whom have never played. Women’s sport has never been hotter. We’re planning a collab, watch this space.

→ London is becoming its own thing. Liv is launching a bridal and occasion ready-to-wear label and came into the chat looking for PR contacts. Soph is bringing Nice One, Aussie-style canned cocktails, and wants a satellite. Neither of them knows anyone there yet. Friday fixes that.

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06 - CLASSIFIEDS

→ Hiring for a Brand Storytelling & Community Lead, Blackbird. The fund that just closed a billion is hiring exactly one storyteller, working with Joel Connolly and the art department across the brand, the community programs including Sunrise and Spring Camp, and the Foundation. Erin vouched for Joel personally: “12/10 recommend any opportunity to work with him.” I can’t think of a community job in Australian tech with more leverage in it. Apply →

→ Hiring for a Corporate Partnership Advisor, SYNC Health. Founding-level seat on the leadership team of a personalised telehealth company, with real upside as they scale. A “your network is the product” role. If you’ve spent a decade building relationships and watching other people monetise them, read it twice. Amelia’s in the LA chat.

→ Hiring for a Digital Marketing Manager + Social & Content Manager, Burleigh. Two roles, one brand, and Sylvie knows the founder directly. She’s not a recruiter, which makes this the good kind of introduction. Gold Coast girls.

→ Brand designer, food supplement brand, looking for a freelancer. Full visual identity and packaging, possibly ongoing. Must understand the regulatory limits on supplement claims. Worth knowing before you pitch: Atina built and sold a consumer brand before this one, so she’ll brief properly and pay on time.

→ Pelvy is raising. Amelia is after $300k pre-seed, closing November. Numbers above. She’s in this chat and she is not going to chase you.

→ Nina is offering MOODY girls a complimentary shoot for any event or launch in September. ninafromnowhere.com or producedbynina@gmail.com

→ Holly built funds.wiki, a database of investor leads, then offered to add hundreds more from her own investor calls. For free. In a group chat.

→ Kate needs a contract lawyer who knows Chinese manufacturers and the fashion industry. Rebecca wants the same rec.

→ Sophia is building a community plan for a podcast that’s already doing well and wants to know what actually moved the needle. @sophiafromtmrw

→ Karen Barr is the best for conveyancing. Rosie: “she talked me off a cliff.” She picks up the phone and the contracts are chic. karelba.com.au or @karelba.convey

→ Bree is offering career coaching, and runs a recruitment and people growth agency.

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.

🔗 Join MOODY →

🔗 Follow MOODY on social→

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Last week I sat in a room with Australia’s biggest podcasters and watched two platform execs describe an internet that has stopped paying for being liked.

Jordyn Christensen and Kirsty Wilson put the room together. Jordyn runs podcast partnerships at Spotify, Kirsty is Global Partnerships at Meta ANZ. Toni Lodge and Ryan Jon keynoted, and if you don’t know them: five episodes a week on their show Toni & Ryan, over a million downloads a month, built out of rude jokes that went viral on TikTok.

I debriefed with Jordyn afterwards and we did not stop talking for an hour. This is that conversation, with receipts.

It starts where everything started that week. Tate McRae picked up a makeup wipe and the whole creator economy fell out of it.

You’ve seen the video. Private jet to Lollapalooza, post show routine, more than eighteen million views, and the wipe never touched her face. Not once. It hovered.

The internet went feral, obviously. But nobody’s talking about what happened eleven days later. Neutrogena posted a reply voiced by an animated makeup wipe, asking everyone to please respect its privacy as it adjusts to fame. Iconic, no notes. A marketing academic told the New York Times the episode probably grew awareness, on the basis that nobody was otherwise going to be discussing makeup wipes in the Times.

So read the ledger. She paid in credibility. They collected in reach. Then they got a bonus round for the trouble.

This isn’t a Tate McRae problem. She was just the one holding the wipe when the model stopped working for creators.

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A rate card is not a business

The generalist influencer was never a business. It was a rental agreement.

You rent reach from a platform monthly. You sell it on to a brand at a discount. The second either party changes the terms, you own nothing. No authority, no niche, no list, no feed. A rate card and a good week.

Jordyn’s version:

I’d already felt it land in my inbox. A brand sent me a brief last month and the first page was a list of things they didn’t want. No day in my life. No morning routine. Nothing beauty led. What they wanted was the teardown, the how does this actually work version. They were paying for the part of me that knows things and had specifically ruled out the part of me that turns up looking fine.

Five years ago that brief was the exact opposite document. Same category, same money, reverse polarity.

Now the less flattering half, because I’m not standing outside this. Most deals I sign carry an exclusivity clause. Standard, priced accordingly, everybody does it. It is also, said out loud, a brand paying me not to be an expert on anything else in that category for a set number of months.

I sign them. I’d sign the next one. But I’ve stopped reading exclusivity as a premium and started reading it as a price, because every category I sell out of is a category I’ve agreed not to be trusted in.

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Brands didn’t grow a conscience

They moved the budget.

Influencer spend used to sit in the brand bucket, where the job was awareness and nobody had to prove very much. It’s been quietly reclassified as performance, and performance budgets have always been measured to death. Every line gets judged on cost per acquisition and average order value like any other media buy.

So the attribution was always there. Nobody was pointing it at us.

Being liked was free money right up until somebody started counting. Likeability stopped being a line item. You cannot attribute a vibe. You can attribute an expert who moves a category.

Rachel Lai made the same case this week from the buying side, and better than I just did. She’d just onboarded a client and committed tens of thousands to partnerships, and none of the top affiliates driving those sales are making get ready with me content. What those creators charge reflects their authority, their expertise, and the trust their audience places in them.

Cat Spanti is the clearest version of this. You go to her because she’s a known authority on one thing, not because she surfaced in your feed on a Tuesday. She also moves product, and her ShopMy is the proof. Measurable, which is the entire point.

The platforms are building for the same shift. Instagram is testing Series, which groups your reels into a titled hub with a watch next button. Its VP of Product Tessa Lyons said the quiet part out loud at the Scaleable Summit: the platform wants to be part of creators’ long form strategy now, not just the short form one.

Meta spent five years training all of us to make things fifteen seconds long. It has now built a channel guide.

Taste is a mood. Expertise is a position you can be held to.

Toni put it in one line: “When you try to be relevant to everyone, you’re relevant to no one.”

Authority needs room

The same market that started paying for expertise also started rewarding length. Not a coincidence.

A reel can make a claim. Only long form shows the thinking underneath it, and the thinking is what’s being bought. Which means the expert shift and the long form shift are one shift, and we’ve spent three years reading the top of the funnel like it’s the bottom of it.

TikTok is where that error lives, and it’s still the best discovery machine ever built. It let in a whole generation of creators who’d never have been allowed in the room otherwise. Toni and Ryan are the proof, and Toni is unsentimental about it: “The short form videos for us is literally what began this whole thing, and we wouldn’t be here if we hadn’t taken a chance on posting it.”

But discovery is a job, not a destination. Jordyn:

Her read on why the audience moved is the part I keep repeating, because it isn’t about attention spans at all. Gen Z want things that feel a bit media. Educational, inspirational, made with intent. Not five seconds of something.

A million views on something nobody can find again isn’t a business. It’s a party trick.

Kirsty put the same point from inside the building, about the grid everybody agonises over. Nobody comes to your grid as much as you do. Vanity metric, her words.

Then the local number nobody is using. Edison’s Infinite Dial Australia 2026 has fifty five per cent of Australians consuming podcasts monthly, up from fifty two per cent last year. Buried in the same report: TikTok weekly usage, down a percentage point year on year.

Same market. Same twelve months. One up, one down.

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Own the thing nobody can switch off

Long form has a second advantage: it’s the only format that lives somewhere you control. Nobody has an RSS feed of your reels.

Here’s the test I run on everything now. If the algorithm changed its mind tomorrow, would this still exist?

MOODY passes. Five hundred plus women in a WhatsApp community and a calendar of events, with no feed sitting between me and them. Nobody can throttle it. Nobody can deprecate it. We’re growing it across channels but the list is the asset.

Long form expert content and education is the natural next expansion and I’ll be honest, we’re still working out what that looks like for the community. But the direction isn’t in question. Jordyn:

The numbers back it.

Platforms only cut the entry bar when they need supply. Read that as a hiring ad, not a favour.

The money has moved to retention, not reach. Kirsty walked us through two pieces of content from the same podcast, and the longer one that actually held people paid out double.

None of this is new, which is the funny part. Subscriptions and AdSense are the OG revenue streams. We’re not inventing the future. We’re going back to charging people for something good, after a decade of asking advertisers to cover it.

The advertiser model makes the creator the product. The subscription model makes the work the product.

Only one of those survives a bad week.

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Everyone wants a village

Toni and Ryan solved the ownership problem years ago, while everyone else was still arguing about it. They refuse to send anyone anywhere.

Their private Facebook group of a hundred and fifty thousand has never carried a sponsored post. Deliberately. They answer their own comments and their own DMs.

Which sounds like the opposite of owning an audience, right up until you notice where their money is.

It’s Patreon. It converts precisely because the free tiers were never a funnel.

Ryan’s reasoning is the least complicated thing in this article: “If you want someone to comment on your stuff, the least you can do is read it.” Then the line I’m never going to beat: everyone wants a village, but nobody wants to be a villager.

If you’re on the brand side

Two things follow from all of this, and neither of them is a content calendar.

The first is who you brief. Stop buying reach and start buying authority in your actual category. A creator with a defined niche and a measurable audience will move product in a way a general lifestyle name will not, and you’ll be able to prove it, which is the part your CFO cares about.

The second is what you make. If audiences have moved to long form, your brand needs a long form answer, and most don’t have one. A podcast, a series, an owned newsletter, something with room in it. Right now nearly everyone is still buying fifteen second placements inside somebody else’s feed and calling it a strategy.

The read

Tate McRae spent her audience relationship on a wipe she never used and the brand kept the change. Toni and Ryan spend nothing and charge for the trust directly. Same asset, opposite directions.

Which brings me back to that brief. A brand paid a premium for the version of me that knows something, and specifically didn’t want the version that shows up looking fine. That’s not a category quirk. That’s the market repricing, and the creators who’ve spent five years being pleasant about everything are about to find out what pleasant is worth.

Twelve things we learnt in that room

Before the tactics, the four that actually matter. Name the one thing you want to be called about, and make it one. Move your best thinking somewhere it can breathe. Build one line of contact with no algorithm sitting in the middle of it. Price exclusivity as what it costs you, not what they’re offering.

Now the toolkit.

→ 2/3 of your reels go to strangers. reels are for reach, carousels and stories are where you actually keep people

→ only slides 1 and 2 of a carousel get served, so stop saving the good stuff for slide six

→ you can reorder a carousel after posting. your best slide is data now, not a guess

→ add audio to a carousel and it gets served in the reels tab. same post, new audience

→ “new ep out now” was the worst performing content across the top 100 pods. announcing is not marketing

→ one personal moment outperforms a hundred polished clips. the polish was never the point

→ jump on every new feature the week it launches. meta gives its own products extra visibility and early movers get the growth

→ shares are the metric for entertainment, saves are the metric for education. know which one you’re making

→ write the clip before you record. if you’re cutting after the fact you’re already too late

→ threads is 500m people and australia is asleep. that’s not a risk, that’s a gap

→ facebook pays from 10 seconds. everything shorter is unpaid labour

→ don’t be the girl begging meta for help when you get hacked. turn on 2fa!!!

Brooke x

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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.

🔗 Join MOODY →

🔗 Follow MOODY on social→

Last Thursday I stood in a kitchen in Bellevue Hill and watched a woman buy a blender without touching anything.

Her name is Keira. She was mid-demo, hosting a room full of creators, and somewhere between the puff pastry and the cake ingredients she decided she needed a new blender. So she asked for one. Out loud. To the air.

Alexa+ came back with options. Keira narrowed it to Ninja. Asked which suited a power user. Asked the price. Two hundred and sixty nine dollars. Then she said the sentence I haven’t stopped thinking about since:

Done. Price watch set. Somewhere in the next few weeks that blender will drop, and Keira will get a ping asking one question: go ahead? One yes, from wherever she happens to be standing, and it’s bought.

Nobody in the room gasped. That’s the part that got me. The entire shop, the research, the comparison, the choosing, the waiting for the price, just walked out of a human’s hands and into an assistant’s. The human kept one word of the process: yes. And the room nodded along like she’d checked the weather.

The fluff-free version below.

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01 — Answering was never buying

We’ve been promised voice shopping for a decade, and you know why it never showed up. You’ve lived it. You asked your speaker for dishwasher tablets and that was the entire relationship. Anything needing actual judgement, two jackets, a foundation shade, went back to your phone. In 2018, analysts predicted US voice shopping would hit $40 billion by 2022. Four years past the deadline, the whole US market is barely half that. The speaker could answer. It couldn’t finish the job.

What launched last week acts. She researches, compares, decides inside your rules, and completes the checkout on your go-ahead. And you just talk to her: no wake word every five seconds, no robot phrasing, and she keeps up when you change your mind mid-sentence. The industry calls it agentic commerce, a terrible phrase for a simple idea. You delegate the shopping. The agent does it.

And when the agent does it, conversion gets spicy. Adobe tracked over a trillion retail visits: shoppers arriving via AI convert 42% better than everyone else, a full reversal from a year earlier when AI traffic converted worse. Of course it does. The agent doesn’t browse. Doesn’t get distracted by the sale rack. Arrives already decided.

Amazon has watched the same thing inside its own walls. Shoppers who use Rufus are 60% more likely to buy, 250 million people used it this year, and Andy Jassy told investors it’s pacing past $10 billion in incremental sales. Ten billion dollars of “actually, just help me decide.”

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02 — You’d let her reorder the tablets. You would not let her pick your foundation.

Be honest. That’s where your trust line sits, and the whole country agrees. Adyen’s 2026 Australian index found the funniest gap in commerce right now: 100% of surveyed enterprise retailers are using AI, and 64% of Australians don’t want it completing a purchase. Everyone’s building the thing. Two thirds of customers won’t let it finish.

I’ll out myself: until Thursday, I was one of the 64%.

Ridiculous, because this is my job. I’ve seen the demos at NRF, in New York, in Singapore. I interviewed the US Alexa+ team in May and left thinking what I always think: all of the pieces, none of the ties. You cannot delegate your shopping to a roadmap.

Thursday tied them. Watching her check whether an outfit worked. Watching someone hold something up mid-recipe, will this work as a substitute, and get an answer with quantities. A menu adjusted because she remembered a guest’s dietary needs. None of it a party trick. All of it Tuesday-night useful. And my trust moved, in real time, exactly the way I write about.

So no, the 64% isn’t a problem. It’s a map. If the insider only just crossed the line, the country isn’t behind. They’re right on time, waiting for the product to earn it.

Trust gets extended one small yes at a time. First the reorder, who cares, it’s dishwasher tablets. Then the price watch, because she caught the sale you’d have missed. (Already proven: in the US, Rufus users running price alerts are saving an average of 20% per purchase. Keira’s blender wasn’t a demo trick. It’s a behaviour with a savings rate.) Then the booking. Then one day, without ceremony, “just handle it.” And notice the design: she asks before she buys. The go-ahead stays yours. The product is built for exactly the trust ladder the 64% are standing on, which tells you Amazon read the same map.

Every yes is a brand getting saved into a household. Uncle Chris is gluten free. Mum loves lavender. We buy this coffee.

And nobody re-decides a default. When did you last reconsider which toothpaste is “yours”? The agent turns that lazy human habit into infrastructure.

03 — The pool room, and why TikTok still hasn’t shown up

Permission to make this personal, because I have skin in this game.

Siri notoriously cannot understand me. One of my toxic traits is voice-texting from the car, and what arrives on the other end is modern poetry. Garbled, unhinged, occasionally sent anyway. I was born in Nambour, and if you’re Australian you just nodded. If you’re not: regional Queensland, back of the Sunshine Coast, an accent that American voice assistants have been personally victimised by for a decade. These things were trained to understand a woman in California. I am not her.

(The humiliating part: at least twice a week someone asks if I’m from LA, because my phone voice is a completely different woman. Posher, slower, my nervous “please take me seriously” register. Both women live in me. Neither is understood by Siri.)

So “built for Australia” is not an abstract claim to me. It’s the difference between a tool I can use and a decade of shouting “NO. DELETE” at my dashboard.

Which brings me to my favourite moment of the launch. Keira, the woman with the blender, spent six years as custodian of Alexa’s Australian personality. The dad jokes, the puns, her department. At the end of her demo she thanked Alexa and said she was “going straight to the pool room.”

Alexa got it. Answered like she’d seen The Castle at a drive-in.

Everyone laughed, and I stood there thinking: that joke was expensive. One of the engineers explained why, the most honest thing said all day: AI models are trained mostly on American material, so left alone they think American, reason American, recommend American. Making one that knows “not bad” is a compliment and a flat white is not a latte isn’t a translation job. It took a Sydney team years. It took Keira six.

And the detail I keep replaying, as the Queensland girl: the longer she lives with you, the more she learns your voice. Your shorthand, your slang. Team members who’d spent a week with her said she was already picking up how they specifically talk. Not Australian-in-general. Them. For anyone whose accent has been a decade-long comprehension problem, that’s not a feature. That’s the point.

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Now hold that against the platform that famously hasn’t arrived. TikTok Shop is live in the US, the UK, most of Europe, Japan. Australia? No confirmed plans. Full stop. Their own ANZ boss said so on stage in March. Not because Australians won’t shop on TikTok. Obviously we would, we’re not well. Because launching commerce in a country means building the boring stuff, local payments, logistics, seller support, and doing it for 26 million people while your US business grows 120% a year is a maths problem that keeps losing.

Same equation, two answers. Making commerce properly local is expensive. Amazon paid full price for Australia. TikTok hasn’t. Yet.

(Meanwhile, in the-girls-find-a-way news, Aussie brands led by HiSmile just sell through TikTok Shop US and UK instead; HiSmile did US$2.67 million that way last year. Iconic, no notes.)

04 — The audit

First, an observation that should surprise nobody in this community. When OpenAI announced you could buy things inside ChatGPT, the brands it chose to name-check were SKIMS, Glossier and Spanx. Emma Grede, Emily Weiss, Sara Blakely. And the Aussie brand doing millions through TikTok Shop’s back door is HiSmile, built on community and content, the exact playbook the women reading this run every day. The agent era supposedly rewards cold, structured data. The early winners have cult communities and immaculate product truth. Both things. Same brands. The girls got there first, and it’s not a coincidence: community tells the agent what to recommend by name. Clean data lets it close the sale.

So, whether you’re a founder with a Shopify store or the marketer who needs a take for Monday’s meeting, the whole strategy is one uncomfortable question:

If an agent shopped your category tomorrow, with your customer’s preferences and a budget cap, would it find you? Pick you? Pick you the second time?

Four things decide it.

→ Can the agent read you? Agents don’t admire your website, they read your product data. “Gorgeous knit in seasonal tones” instead of the fibre, fit, sizes and shipping cutoff makes you illegible to the fastest-growing shopper on the internet. The early winners won on tidy, complete, honest product information. Unsexy. Decisive. If you own a catalogue, this is your highest-leverage weekend project of the year.

→ Can the agent reach you? If you’re on Shopify, you may already be plugged in: Shopify switched on Agentic Storefronts in March, syndicating millions of catalogues into ChatGPT, Copilot, Google AI Mode and Gemini by default for eligible merchants. You don’t need to understand the protocols. You need your listings looking right where agents shop, because eligibility is the new visibility. And know where each agent’s source data lives, because every agent shops its home catalogue first. ChatGPT runs on its merchant integrations. Google runs on its shopping graph. Alexa+? She pulls from the Amazon catalogue. If you’re a small Australian brand that wants to be surfaced, recommended and reordered, get on amazon.com.au, third party at minimum, first party if you can. (Yes, I work at Amazon. Also yes, it’s simply true: the agent recommends from the shelf it can see.) The rule scales to every agent from here: find its source, look excellent there.

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→ Do you deserve the first yes? Remember the 64%. Trust is won with deeply boring things: returns policies a machine can parse, sizing data that makes the first delegated order land right. The brand that nails somebody’s first agent purchase gets the second automatically. The brand that fumbles it gets deleted from the default and never finds out.

→ Are you worth asking for by name? 71% of marketing leaders say agents have already weakened their direct customer connection. When the transaction disappears into the AI layer, the only thing left to own is the reason someone says your name instead of “whatever’s good.” Community. Taste. Trust. The stuff that was always the real brand, now with a scoreboard.

05 — The bit where I tell you what happened

The news itself: Alexa+ started rolling out in Australia last week. Early Access from 6 August with a new eligible Echo, or register at amazon.com.au/newalexa; after Early Access she’s included with Prime. Australians already talk to Alexa two billion times a year, mostly to set timers and fight about music. In the US, more than 76% of what people do with the new version are things the old one simply couldn’t. The new behaviour isn’t the novelty. It’s the majority.

She runs the house off half-sentences now (someone said they were cold and she just fixed it; 600 million smart home requests happened here last year on the version that needed perfect instructions). In one afternoon I watched her book a pub lunch for five, remember that somebody’s Uncle Chris is gluten free, and set a price watch on a blender so the sale never gets missed again.

The assistant stopped answering and started doing. Everyone’s going to talk about how she sounds.

Watch what she buys.

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.

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“Reformer is dead.”

That is how Vic opens our conversation. Sitting inside her own reformer studio. Having just removed a third of her machines. Voluntarily.

I’ve been obsessed with Vic and what she’s built at Vicalates for a long time, and I wanted her as the first guest in this series because of that exact sentence. Because while every operator in the country is cramming more beds into more rooms, Vic went from 12 reformers to 8. She shrank her class capacity by a third, lifted her casual rate to $50, and rebuilt the whole studio around what she calls pods: a reformer, a chair, a mat, and a basket of misc (her words, and the best product description I’ve heard all year).

To understand how brave that is, look at the water she’s swimming in. It’s soup. Australia now has 3,823 Pilates and yoga studios, per IBISWorld, and the count is still climbing. Pilates was the most-booked workout on ClassPass for the third year running, with bookings up 66% and the word “Pilates” searched 27 million times on the app in a single year, per the 2025 ClassPass Look Back Report. KX passed 100 studios back in 2023. Strong Pilates, Australian-born, announced this week it’s at 120+ studios across 15 countries with another 200 confirmed. I’ve walked into mega studios with 28 machines in a class. Twenty-eight. You look around and everyone is just flailing.

So the category is booming and every studio in it is fighting for the same new customer. The instinct in that moment is to defend share: go bigger, add beds, discount the intro pack.

Vic did the opposite, and she said the thing I haven’t stopped thinking about since:

That’s the thesis. Now the mechanics, because everyone romanticises niching down and almost nobody shows you the spreadsheet.

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01 — The maths of going smaller

Here’s what Vic’s numbers were telling her. Retention was fine. Her members had stayed for years. The problem was conversion: with this much choice in the market and a premium price on the door, new customers couldn’t see why Vicalates over the studio two blocks away. When your category commoditises, “good” stops being a differentiator, because good is now the baseline everywhere.

Her answer wasn’t to discount. It was to build something you literally cannot get anywhere else: the original Pilates system, all apparatus, eight people, an instructor who actually knows your name and your dodgy left hip. Fewer spots per class, more classes on the timetable, and the unit economics lift because the product justifies the price.

The casual rate for the new classes is $50. Fifty. “We’ve had so many booked in the last week or two, and no one’s batted an eyelid.”

And the scarcity is doing quiet work too. When classes are full and hard to get into, people book more diligently and the perceived value climbs. Not exclusivity as a velvet rope. Exclusivity because it’s popular.

02 — The customer you have to fire

This is the part nobody wants to say out loud, so Vic said it immediately.

“The wrong customer is always the wrong customer. You can never convert.”

The shopper bouncing between studios on a class pass, hunting the cheapest intro offer, was never going to become a member. Building for her means diluting the product for the people who actually pay your bills. So part of the redesign was being genuinely ready to say goodbye to that customer. In Vic’s words: the girls who get it, and the girls who don’t. Go somewhere else.”

That’s the terrifying bit of niching down. It doesn’t feel like strategy, it feels like turning away revenue. But a niche is defined just as much by who it’s not for as who it is. And the customer you lose was costing you the positioning that wins the customer you want.

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03 — The moat is capability

Here’s my favourite part of the whole model. To teach in Vic’s pods, an instructor has to be comprehensively trained across the full system. Mat, reformer, chair, tower, all of it. Not, as she puts it, a two-day course on the weekend. They have to program across every apparatus and deliver real feedback, class after class.

And this is where Vic’s story collided with mine. She told me everything new she launched this year got copied within months. Girl. Same. My content formats get lifted weekly, and tech companies have started doing tiny mics at conferences. It’s annoying for about a day, and then you remember: being copied is the tax you pay for leading. The only real response is to keep moving onto ground that’s expensive to follow you onto. A vibe can be copied by Thursday. A comprehensively trained team, a decade of craft, a founder with an actual point of view? That takes years, and most competitors won’t pay that price.

04 — The direction of travel says she’s right

One number from the research made me sit up. On ClassPass, reformer bookings grew 71% last year. Mat Pilates grew 114%. The original, machine-optional, fundamentals-first version of the method is now outgrowing the machine that made the boom. The market is already drifting back towards exactly what Vic rebuilt her studio around.

Which reframes the whole eight-pod decision. Being seen and corrected by a skilled human, in a room small enough that she actually can, is not a nostalgic throwback. At eight people, personalisation is real. At twenty-eight, it’s theatre.

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Rapid fire with Vic

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

What are we wearing to work out? Vic, that day: an 80s thong body set over red tights. Navy and red. Her read: the matching set era is fading. “We’re coming into texture. We want layers. Things that don’t look like workout gear.” She reckons even Lululemon is working on a whole “away from body” direction, soft and off the silhouette.

Accessories? “Obnoxious.” We are working out in your boyfriend’s Rolex. I’m wearing mine to her class because mom, I am a rich man. This is binding.

Most unhinged thing you’ve done for the studio? “I have faked some things till I’ve made it. And no one noticed. We’re here now.”

What are ambitious women doing too much of, and not enough of? “Way too much listening and talking to other people, and not enough going into their own head and doing what they want to do. Consult people you actually care about. Listen to them. But their journey is not your journey.”

What’s next in wellness? Rest. Sleep, downtime, low-key breaks. Cold plunge out, human connection in.

Where can we find you? Vicalates on IG, website to book classes in Brisbane or virtually and access our app. Personal IG.

Her rapid fire answers and her business strategy are the same answer. Everyone else’s journey is not your journey. She stopped watching what the other studios were doing and went deeper into the thing only she could do.

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.

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July was a big one - a record cheque week, Canberra suddenly acting like it invented AI, and a rebrand (ours, iconic). This is the fluff-free version: what actually happened, and the so what for where you put your money. Here’s your brief going into August.

01 — THE MACRO

A confession from my own July: I’ve been shopping for a car loan. The dealer quoted me 11%, and before that, tried not to tell me the rate at all. Shady. A five-minute phone call of standing my ground later: 7.8%. A bit of research after that: another dealer at 6.4%, the majors at 6.4%. Same girl, same car, same credit score. The only variable was whether I pushed. (I have since also spoken to the dealership owner and extracted charging cables, a servicing package and a discount on the ceramic coating, because if we’re negotiating, we’re negotiating.)

Did they look at a young-ish woman and assume she wouldn’t check? I reckon so. Did they pick the wrong one? Absolutely. The first rate you’re quoted is not the price. It’s a test.

And the same test turns up in much bigger rooms than car dealerships. I’ve just sat it again with promotions and pay rises. More on that when the dust settles.

Because money is expensive right now, and here’s where it’s heading. Inflation blinked first. Annual CPI eased to 3.8% in June, under the 4% everyone expected and the softest read since February. Jim Chalmers practically skipped to the podium (the RBA had forecast 4.8%, so this is his version of a soft launch going viral). Underlying inflation is still 3.6%, above the RBA’s comfort zone, so nobody at Martin Place is popping anything. But all four big banks have now called the end of rate hikes for 2026, with Westpac’s chief economist conceding “we took no pleasure in our prior hawkish view.” Girl. Neither did our mortgages. The RBA meets 11 August and, for the first time all year, the vibe is hold.

Over to you: what’s the best rate (or freebie) you’ve ever negotiated just by asking? The chat wants receipts.

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02 — THE CHEQUE-IN

The half-year scoreboard landed and on paper she’s thriving: $3.5 billion raised by Australian startups in H1, the second-strongest start to a year behind 2022. Now read the fine print, because the fine print is doing a lot of work. Cut Through Venture’s Q2 report shows $1.7 billion across just 64 deals, with Firmus ($725m) and Airwallex ($460m) taking close to 70% of the quarter between them. Two companies. Seventy percent.

The shape of the market got clearer too. When startups do get funded, the cheques are the biggest on record at every stage: a typical seed round is now $4m, a typical Series A $18.6m. And AI took roughly 75 cents of every dollar invested this quarter. It’s in 81% of seed pitches. AI is not a differentiator anymore, angels. It’s the cover charge.

Then July showed off. One mid-month week alone did $606.5m across seven rounds, the biggest week since December 2025:

→ AdvanCell raised $450m (US$315m) in a Series D for targeted alpha therapy in prostate cancer. A Brisbane biotech. A record round.

→ Cover Genius took US$100m from Vista Credit Partners for embedded insurance.

→ Down the stack: VXB’s $5.72m seed for space hardware design, Syngenis’ $4m pre-IPO, BlueNexus’ $2m for no-code AI agents, Early Bird’s $2m for a hangover-prevention capsule (built by ex-Eucalyptus people, funded by C-suites who apparently share our Sunday problem), Rentsy’s $800k and ESGAgent.ai’s $725k.

Notice the shape: in that record week there wasn’t a single round between $6m and $143m. The middle of the market is thin. Elsewhere in the money: PsiQuantum landed a US$125m DARPA contract, its biggest US government award yet, equity crowdfunding quietly raised $40.6m in FY26, up 40%, and female founders took roughly 33% of Q2 capital and 26% of deals.

One caution flag: R&D lender Radium Capital has paused new lending, sending startups hunting for alternatives.

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The full Cut Through report is 40 pages of charts. You have a life, so here are the five that matter:

→ The 33% is a mirage. A third of this quarter’s money went to companies with women founders, the best headline in years. Here’s the catch: almost all of it was two giant cheques to two already-huge companies (Airwallex and Liquid Instruments). For the everygirl raising her first round, the odds barely moved. Celebrate the wins. Don’t retire the argument.

→ “For everyone” is out. “For her industry” is in. Investors were asked whether they prefer software built for one specific industry (tools for tradies, for clinics, for salons) or software that tries to serve everybody. 72% said specific. Zero percent said everybody. If your pitch says “it’s for everyone,” investors hear “it’s for no one.”

→ This is a ten-year relationship. The typical journey from first cheque to a big growth round has stretched to about a decade. Longer than most marriages. If you’re building, set up your life, your equity and your expectations for the long game, not the two-year sprint the movies promised.

→ The angels’ opening. Small rounds are at their quietest in years, which means less of a scramble to get into good early deals. And investors have stopped telling their companies to just survive: 70% are now advising a proper raise, up from rescue-round territory. Confidence is coming back from the bottom up. If you’ve been waiting to write your first small cheque, the queue is shorter than it’s been in years.

03 — THE GIRLS WHO ARE BUILDING

→ Melanie Perkins launched the Global Goals Platform, pointing Canva’s user-feedback playbook at democracy itself. Wollongong’s 220,000 residents got first access on 24 July. When the woman who built a $40b company decides her next product is democracy (as in, the concept), pay attention.

→ Giant Leap partner Rachel Yang called time on “fixing the founder”, arguing women-founder programs keep teaching founders to navigate a broken system when it’s the VC process that needs redesigning, with public pipeline reporting to match. Loudest thing said in venture this month.

→ NSW’s MVP Ventures grants put just over $1m into 22 startups, with roughly half the funding going to women-led, Indigenous and regional businesses. From 322 applicants. The odds were long; the girls delivered.

→ Main Sequence promoted Alejandra Romero to principal to lead semiconductor, quantum and AI hardware investing at the $1b deep tech fund. More women holding the pen on frontier-tech cheques, please.

→ And squeaking in just before the July bell: Dr Ariella Heffernan-Marks closed a $4m seed for Ovum, building the first longitudinal dataset for women’s health, valuation tripled, Medibank already signed.

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04 — THE MARKETING NOTES

Three to clip and save:

1. AI visibility is the new SEO. Tracksuit acquired Hall, the Sydney startup tracking how brands get described inside ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. Your customers are asking a chatbot about you and you have no idea what it’s saying. That’s now a measurable, buyable problem.

2. You can’t buy this. Tadej Pogačar wore Geelong brand Dopamine Lab’s yellow nasal strip, completely unsponsored, during his Stage 14 Tour de France win, then again the next day. Co-founders Nick Allitt and Daisy McCulloch’s strip reached him via a teammate who bought a pack at a Geelong race in January. European orders are now flooding in. Product good enough that athletes use it uninvited beats any ambassador deal ever signed.

3. Taste is the moat. Canva shipped Code 2.0, generating sites 75% faster and betting its design pedigree can save businesses from the generic vibe-coded look. When everyone can ship a website in an afternoon, looking like everyone else is the real cost.

05 — THE AI CORNER

Canberra ended its hands-off era in one week. A new Office of AI inside the PM’s department (now headed by Fergus Hanson), rules forcing large data centres to add as much power to the grid as they use, and world-first copyright rules giving artists control and payment. Anthropic is pressing from the other side, tying a potential US$15b Australian investment, 1.4GW of data centre capacity, to copyright clarity. Victoria went further, moving to ban employers using AI to track worker behaviour or read emotions from biometric data.

Meanwhile the rest of us kept using the stuff: Australia now ranks first in the world for Claude usage per capita. The world’s biggest AI girlies, officially, per capita. And Melbourne’s Heidi became the sole ambient-AI supplier for up to 70,000 NHS clinicians, the largest procurement of its kind in NHS history. A Melbourne startup, taking the notes for the British health system. Casual.

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06 — THE MONTH, WRAPPED

July, by the numbers: inflation down to 3.8%, $606.5m raised in a single week, a $450m record round out of Brisbane, AI taking 75 cents of every VC dollar, a third of Q2’s capital going to female founders, and US$15b riding on one copyright decision. A barbell market, a regulating government, and women quietly taking the frontier seats.

See you in the chat 🤍 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.

From Sydney to London. Every city, growing weekly.

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Meet Nina Khoury. Nearly five years at SKIMS, the brand that rebuilt an entire category, and she’s just walked away from it to start her own: Sportiv, a brand for women who train, starting in supplements and aiming much, much bigger. Oh, and her wedding was in Vogue Australia this month. Casual.

Full disclosure: Nina and I have only ever met over video call. Doesn’t matter. Obsessed. We were introduced by my gorgeous friend Shannen Thomas of Désordre Boutique in Sydney, our mutual stylist and a fellow superconnector, who knew exactly what she was doing putting us together. Manufacturing serendipity in action, girls.

She’s our first girl of the week under the new name, and I could not have picked a better one. New roof, same format: one woman we all need to know, in her own words.

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What are you building right now? After nearly five years at SKIMS, I’ve left to build Sportiv, a brand for women who train. We’re starting in supplements, but the ambition is much bigger: to bring product, science, and an iconic brand to a category that has felt clinical, confusing, or not really built for us. I am this consumer. So we’re building it in real life, with the women we’re building for. Train for life.

The most unhinged thing you’ve done for your career? Nothing too unhinged yet, but I’m still warming up ;) There are a few people I would love around Sportiv in some way, shape or form, purely because I think they’re brilliant, cool, and culturally very right. Emily Oberg is one. I love what she’s built with Sporty & Rich, the brand is so strong. And RÜFÜS DU SOL, because they are iconic Australians with incredible music and I would love them at an event or two one day. So nothing too unhinged yet. “Yet” being the key word.

What’s the mood right now? Muscle tone is the new status symbol. Not in a body-check way. More because it shows reps. Time. Discipline. Consistency. Probably a good trainer. Definitely a bit of effort. For so long, skinny was the thing. I think we’re moving into an era where strong looks expensive. Muscle is the new flex.

The thing you’re almost embarrassed to admit you want? I’m not really embarrassed to admit what I want. I want full financial freedom. To do what I want, when I want, where I want, with the people I want to do it with. I’m driven by building something big. I’m driven by money. I’m driven by that freedom!

When did you realise you were building a community, not just a brand? Pretty early. Sportiv is built for women who train. Women who lift, run, do Pilates, but also work big jobs, travel, have lives, relationships, and are genuinely trying to figure out what actually works for their body. These women already exist. They’re already doing the work. But they’re piecing it all together themselves: podcasts, group chats, AI, screenshots from friends. That’s where I think Sportiv can be the connective tissue. Products that work for her body. Science tested on her body. A room full of women training for life. That’s why it’s a community. Not just a brand.

What’s something ambitious women are spending too much time on? And not enough time on? Too much time caring what everyone thinks. I think a lot of women are taught very early to be good, but not too good. Strong, but not too strong. Smart, but not too smart. Ambitious, but not intimidating. It’s exhausting. And then I think not enough time alone. Thinking. Creating. Getting clear on what we actually want and how we’re going to build it. Sometimes I say no to things because I need space to think.

One piece of advice for the version of you from five years ago? Be patient. Progress compounds. Show up. Do a great job. Do it again. Do it again when no one is clapping. Do it again when it feels boring. Every successful person I know and respect has built over time. The boring reps work.

What do you want the angels to find you for? Sportiv, always. We’re building a brand for women who train, starting in supplements, with the ambition to become the number one fueling brand for women. So investors, operators, trainers, athletes, scientists, creators, women who train: come find me. And honestly, I’d also love to hear what you want me to talk about more. Building? Training? SKIMS lessons? Founder life? Sportiv? Money? Ambition? Tell me what you want to hear from me!

→ Where to find her? @ninackhoury on Instagram, Nina Khoury on LinkedIn, and @sportivlabs for everything Sportiv.

Who should we feature next? Reply to this email and nominate a girl we all need to know about.

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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.

From Sydney to London. Every city, growing weekly.

🔗 Join MOODY group chat→

🔗 Follow MOODY on social→

Hi angels 🤍

Big one today. This community has a new name.

Welcome to MOODY.

Her whole life, “you’re in a mood” was a warning. Something to apologise for. Something to fix before the meeting. It’s what gets said about us when we’re too direct, too ambitious, too much. We’re keeping it. Yes, we’re in a mood. A founding mood. A raising mood. A corporate mood. A plotting-her-next-move mood. A big mood.

Here’s why now. Last week, London, LA and New York chats went live and filled themselves before I’d even finished writing the welcome messages. Caitlin is leading the charge in London. Cecilia has LA absolutely firing. NYC didn’t wait for an invitation, which is the most NYC thing I’ve ever heard. Hands went up for Zurich and Queenstown before I’d even asked.

And let me be clear about what that means, because it is not “we’re leaving”. Australia is the whole point. Always will be. But Australian women are too ambitious to be an afterthought of the rest of the world, and to reach our ambition, Australia has to be connected to it. In America, serendipity is infrastructure: the right intro at the right dinner, the network that catches you before you fall. We never had that luxury, so we’re building it ourselves. Now the build has time zones.

And while we’re being honest about names: we’ve outgrown the podcast fan chat we started in (where Angels originated), and “Aussie Angels” kept getting us mistaken for the well-known Aussie investing syndicate of the same name. Lovely people. Different thing. Time for a name that’s unmistakably ours.

So, MOODY. Australia’s network for ambitious women, and one house for everything: the community, this newsletter, the Substack, the events, and every room we build next. (If you clocked that the Social Summit code has been MOODY20 for a week, yes. That was the soft launch. Well spotted.

→ Watch the new branding come to life on IG. Huge chookas to Remi, Bella from Ponnd & Georgia from The Content Files for bringing the brand vision to life!!

Before anyone panics: you are still angels. That’s not branding, that’s just what you are. The chats don’t change, the events don’t change, and the point doesn’t change: founders, operators, corporates and creatives ending up in the same group chat.

New name, same ambitious women. I hope you love it and that I’ve done us justice in creating an identity that will carry us into the next expansive chapter.

These are the girls who get it, and we’re in a MOOD.

Brooke x

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02 — YAPPING

A few things I need to get off my chest this month.

→ Phia, and why vibes aren’t diligence. If you missed the group chat on the day the Phia story broke, I’m sorry, because it was us at our best. I wrote the full teardown on Substack (The UX was the tell) but the short version: a celebrity cap table is a marketing asset, not a diligence process. Ice Spice, Jessica Alba and Alix Earle on the raise announcement tells you who said yes to an email. It tells you nothing about the product. Levina put it perfectly in her piece: it’s a Coachella lineup, not a board. My read: the more famous the cap table, the harder you should look at the product. Fame fills rooms. It doesn’t ship features.

→ Your side hustle is not a crime. Kristen asked the chat about side-hustle clauses in employment contracts and it turned into the best advice thread of the month. The consensus: get the clause narrowed to direct competitors only, disclose smart, and remember that any employer who wants high-performing staff cannot also expect you to have zero ambition outside your 9 to 5 (thank you Rach for saying it plainly). And if they demand full detail of your cute little side project and get weird about it? That’s not a clause problem. That’s a culture tell.

→ You are undercharging. Yes, you. Lilly asked whether $800 for a full day of UGC (8 hours, up to 12 deliverables, raw footage included) was too much after a client pushed back. The chat’s verdict was unanimous and it should be printed on a poster: that’s not expensive, that’s dirt cheap. $500 for one video is a normal market rate. Price the outcome, not the hours. And a spicy adjacent insight from Rosie: brands are quietly shifting budget from UGC creators to nano influencers because polished UGC now reads “too addy”. The so what: if content is your business, your rate card and your positioning both need a mid-year review. Do it this week.

03 — THE AI EDIT

What I’ve actually been doing with AI this month, no theory, just receipts:

→ Full disclosure, Claude helped me put this issue together. I pointed it at a month of our group chats and said “find the gold”. It found the gold. (It also once gave me an answer so enthusiastic I had to screenshot it to the chat with “why is Claude giving MLM right now ⚠️”. We’re working on its tone.)

→ How it actually got access: I connected Beeper to Claude, which gives it a native connector for WhatsApp. No more me trawling the chat at 11pm for that thing someone posted three weeks ago. Your group chats are a database. Treat them like one.

→ Free week of Claude Pro going if you want to play: Rosie shared referral links in the chat, along with LinkedIn Premium Career links that expire 31 July. Cecily also had Claude Cowork invites. Search the chat, first in best dressed.

04 — RECEIPTS

The girls have been BUSY. What actually shipped this month, and what it’s really telling us.

→ Cats out of the bag: I’m speaking at The Social Summit, Friday 18 September at Manly Pacific, Sydney, all about AI in retail. And the part I’m actually giddy about: Arielle and Jordyn are speaking too. All three of us, same stage, same day. The Social Summit is where the three of us went from knowing each other to being a trio, so walking back in as speakers together is about as full-circle as it gets. Code MOODY20 for an early bird discount until 7 August, and the first 250 registrations get VIP merch by Merch Girls. Come say hi to the tiny mic.

→ And we launched Calendar Invites. Me, Arielle and Jordyn, on the record about the highs, lows and hilarity of navigating life, careers and friendships in your 30s. It started as a group chat. It’s now a weekly show. And a strategist note on why we’re all obsessed with friend content right now: the dynamic between real friends is the one thing AI can’t replicate. You can generate a script. You can’t generate chemistry.

→ Cathy Karuga got her FIRST byline, in Who What Wear no less. The summer hats chic women are actually wearing. A US masthead on your first go. This is what happens when the girls back themselves. Go read it, then go follow @cathykaruga_.

→ Two cities. Two sold-out rooms. 50 ambitious early-stage founders. The Solo Co x Aussie Angels girl dinners ran in Sydney and Melbourne this month, co-hosted with the wonderful (and increasingly pregnant, her words) Lizzie Mulherin of The Solo Co, with special guests Anna Mackenzie in Melbourne and Rebecca Jarvie-Gibbs in Sydney being ridiculously generous with their time and expertise. Such a VIBE. What made me proudest though was Bree’s write-up after: there are plenty of events for the girls already running their empires, and almost none for the girls still figuring it out. That was this room. Both nights ended with us being kicked out because the venue was closing, which is the only event metric I trust.

→ Kayla Moran got quoted in Bloomberg Law on brands quietly using contract clauses to alter influencer content with AI. Bloomberg. Law. If you create content for brands, the “we can edit your content” clause now means something very different in 2026. Read it, then read your contracts, and follow her for the creator-side breakdown she has coming. And a personal note: I love this girl. She’s been a rock for me these past six months.

→ Perry Howell took Pilates Gang to London. Born in Bondi, built on run-club energy (inclusive, social, zero gatekeeping), and the first London event ran on the 16th. Aussie community exports are officially a category, and Perry is proof. Follow @pilatesgang_ for what’s coming up in London AND Sydney.

→ Jade launched willX: wills that evolve as your life does, real lawyers in the loop. The waitlist for the first 100 beta testers is live. Everything else in our lives got smarter. Wills finally got the memo.

→ Amelia Godfrey’s Pelvy is quietly becoming a monster: launched in December, already in 111 clinics across 6 countries with 5,000+ patients, now raising a pre-seed. Traction first, raise second. That’s the order. If you know early-stage digital health investors, she wants the intro.

→ Sam Freidin is building Wayfarer: mobility aids engineered like medtech, designed like a fashion label. Prototype in patent stage, dinner club already running. Building the community before the product ships is not a delay. It’s the moat. I got to spend proper time with Sam at Online Retailer last week and she’s amazing. If you’re in medtech or health investment, or you have contacts at major pharma, call her.

→ Bianca Le Page dropped her Q2 Australian Beauty Industry Report: a free quarterly deep dive from 13 years in beauty marketing. If you’re in beauty and you’re not reading it, your competitors are.

→ Rach Tucker’s Smooch finished its first production run. Sexy soda is real and code ANGEL gets you free shipping. I’ve already ordered.

→ Amanda launched ENESA: a pocket stylist with an actual celebrity stylist answering your styling questions within 48 hours. Access, productised. And I’ll say it plainly: I want every single piece. It’s such a good collection for the business girl.

→ Lauren Wootton launched Website Design Day: your whole site designed in a day by De Marque Studio. Tested quietly, now public, and code ANGEL10%OFF works on projects over $2k. Productising your service into a fixed-scope, fixed-price day is the smartest pricing move a studio can make. Steal the model.

→ Sumana posted on LinkedIn for the first time in a year (the Damn Gina origin story) and the chat rallied like it was a grand final. This is the energy. Visibility is a muscle, and watching the girls spot each other is my favourite thing we do.

→ And our Angel Directory keeps growing: add yourself here so the girls can find you (and so I can link you properly in this section, hint hint).

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05 — CALLING ALL CITY LEADS

The city leads program is officially LAUNCHING.

Here’s the pitch. Brisbane just had the most epic dinner with 20 angels, and it happened because our Brisbane city lead Jen put her hand up and made it happen. Adelaide’s Loz did the same with a lunch recently. That’s the whole model: one girl who decides her city deserves the energy.

The shape of it: you host one meetup every 8 to 12 weeks, roughly 2 to 3 events between now and the end of the year. We bring the brand kit, the marketing, the Luma and the support. You bring the energy and the local girls. Low lift, high serendipity.

And the hands are already going up. Perth, Adelaide, Brisbane and the Gold Coast are forming. Since I floated this in the chat (from a plane, chaotically), volunteers have appeared for Sydney, Melbourne, Gold Coast, Canberra, Hobart, LA, Zurich and Queenstown. Yes, Queenstown. NZ is ON. If your city isn’t on that list, that’s a gap in the market and you should take it. DM me.

Your city’s group chat is waiting for someone to be the reason it meets IRL.

06 — THE ANGELS BUSINESS BOOK CLUB

Hot new thing. Sylvie and I were scheming over a cheap wine at a corporate event (how all the best things start) and the Moody Business Book Club was born.

Book one: From The Ground Up by Bree Johnson and Jess Hatzis, the founders of Frank Body. Two Melbourne girls who turned coffee grounds into a global brand, which is exactly the energy we’re bringing to this.

First meet is Sydney in August, date landing in the chat, and we’re looking at a Zoom session so the interstate and international girls can play too. Grab the book, start reading, and come with opinions. Strong ones, loosely held.

07 — DIARY

Here’s where we’re showing up. And from this issue the guide is global, so send me what’s on in your city.

→ Tue 28 Jul — Sydney: Breathe & Expand, female founder breathwork with Tara Gallagher, Bondi, 6:30pm. Get out of the doing for one evening and expand the capacity for the vision.

→ Tue 28 Jul — Los Angeles: Women of SaaS networking, Pasadena. Cecilia’s your girl, DM her in the LA chat.

→ Wed 29 Jul — Sydney: Apex Founders coffee catch-up. RSVP via gooday.com.au.

→ Thu 30 Jul — Melbourne: Wayfarer dinner club, Sam’s dinner for people living with disability or chronic illness who cringe at the traditional support group vibe.

→ Thu 30 Jul — Sydney: Vercel Ship at The Machine Hall. Where the people building the AI-powered web show what’s next. If you’re founding, funding or marketing anything with AI in it (so, all of us), this is worth your Thursday. Request a ticket.

→ This week — New York: Co Ventures x Aussie Founders in NYC. Our first ever NYC listing, and it’s a good one: Jo Lawson is running it, and one of the founders in the room built Mimi’s, the froyo spot with Anne Hathaway and Meryl Streep queuing around the block. NYC girls, go represent.

→ Fri 31 Jul — Sydney: Create Your Own Stage, 5:30pm to 9pm. Manuela’s hands-on AI + personal branding workshop for female founders with Brooke Wright. Bring your laptop; the link has 30% off baked in.

→ Sun 2 Aug — Sydney: From Burnout to Freedom, Jess’s workshop at Bondi Pavilion, 10am to 1pm. Ex corporate lawyer turned coach, and she moves to Ibiza in a fortnight, so this is your window.

→ Mon 11 Aug — Sydney: Perth angel Grace Peris is in town and keen to see the girls. Watch the chat for drinks plans.

→ Sat 15 Aug — Sydney: The Vision Reset, Becca’s breathwork at Hot Dog Yoga, Double Bay.

→ Sun 16 Aug — Blue Mountains: actually touch grass, 10am to 2pm. Georgie Healy’s guided nature walk with ConserVentures. Yes, a tech girl is making you go outside. Go.

→ Wed 19 Aug — Sydney: Canva’s AI Vision, 3pm to 8pm. Last year’s sold the room out, and marketers, founders and creative girls belong in that room as much as the engineers do. Register now.

→ Thu 20 Aug — Sydney: Trivia at Miss Double Bay, hosted by Claudia. Book here. Come for the trivia, stay for the girls.

→ Thu 20 Aug — Sydney: House Party by ON THE HOUSE GROUP, Surry Hills, 6pm to 8pm. Drinks, nibbles and a DJ for senior marketing and advertising divas. Dress code: all black. Password: housekey. (Yes, same night as trivia. It wraps at 8. Do both.)

→ Sat 22 Aug — Sydney: She is Me, Becca’s second breathwork session, IM Studios, Crows Nest.

→ Fri 18 Sep — Sydney: The Social Summit, Manly Pacific. All three of us on stage (see Receipts). Code MOODY20 until 7 Aug.

→ Oct — Melbourne: Big Beauty School: Recess, for beauty and CPG founders and operators. Waitlist open. (Foundher’s August Melbourne meetup is also open for registration.)

→ Nov — TBC: SMM Live, Taylor (She’s Making Millions) is building a women-in-business conference where the community votes on everything. Join the waitlist and have a say.

→ Ongoing — wherever you are: Caitlin’s fortnightly Meus coworking call. Why build alone when you can build together? US and Europe friendly timezones.

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08 — CLASSIFIEDS

The girls are hiring, casting and asking. If one of these is you, don’t sit on it. DM the named angel unless there’s a link.

Hiring

→ Rallee has roles on across the country. Bree (Brianna Hardie) is the people-growth partner for founder-led brands, and the recruiter in your corner if you’re the one looking. On her desk right now: a national account manager for one of Australia’s fastest-growing haircare brands (Melbourne, FMCG, grocery + pharmacy experience); a mid-weight graphic designer at Bardot (Melbourne, every touchpoint from social to retail); a BD manager for a design-led retail activation agency (Sydney, genuine hunter energy, build the book from scratch); and a senior BD manager in health & wellness (Brisbane, own-the-region build-it role). Seen one that’s you? ralleepeople.com or CV to hello@ralleepeople.com.

→ RX Group is hiring a right hand to the founder/MD. Not an internship, not a grad role: a genuine right-hand seat keeping a small remote team on deadline, content on track and events running properly. 2+ years in marketing, coordination or ops, strong written comms, organised enough to follow up unasked. Part time (10 hrs/week to start, room to grow), mostly remote, ideally Auckland-based. Apply here.

→ Cecilia is leading several hiring searches for a SaaS company. All US-based, so you’ll need to be stateside. She also works with US brands looking for content creators, so if brand collaborations are your thing, that door’s open too. Connect with her on LinkedIn for either.

→ Sam Freidin (Milkshake) is after a mid-weight graphic designer and a motion designer/video editor.

→ BAYLY PR is hiring twice over in Brisbane: a talent manager and a senior account manager.

→ Sydney marketing manager role going via one of the girls’ networks.

→ Paige is hiring a founding software engineer. She’s building an AI-powered comms platform for Australian PR practitioners, and it’s the real thing: multi-agent architecture, category expertise baked into the prompts, expert review workflow built in. Bootstrap-funded and validating the prototype with senior PR professionals right now. She wants someone who’s shipped production LLM applications, not wrappers around APIs: 5+ years engineering, hands-on Claude or GPT in production, prompt engineering as a first-class discipline, retrieval, cost and latency instincts, and enough product sense to push back when a technical call doesn’t serve the user. Based anywhere, AU timezone overlap preferred. Founding seats on products this considered don’t come up often. Email Paige at Paige.milton92@gmail.com.

Paid ops

→ Fashion creators: Holly is casting a paid reel for Our Place’s window launch at David Jones Sydney. Bold and theatrical. DM her.

Offers

→ Sarah Macdonald is giving away 5x 20% Squarespace discounts. Building or refreshing a site this quarter? There are five, and they will go. DM her.

Asks

→ Clarissa needs a freelance web designer/developer for a simple brochure site, budget $3-5k.

→ Sarah Hall (Cymbal) is filling her black book of AU/NZ photographers, videographers and lo-fi content creators ahead of Christmas and BFCM. Get in it.

→ Layla is taking Dr Diamond GLOBAL. She’s heading to the US to make it happen, and she’s building her contact list now. If you have US contacts in her world, DM her. This is exactly what the network is for.

09 — JOIN THE CHAT

Forward this to one girl in your network who’d get it. Then add her:

→ The General chat

→ London chat

→ LA chat

→ NYC chat

We’re taking over. In multiple time zones now.

Love Brooke x

In 2026, the biggest beauty brand in the world didn’t buy the ad break. It bought into the story itself, and the campaign wrapped around Prime Video’s Legally Blonde prequel is the most complete picture I’ve seen of what replaces the wedge. Not an ad next to the culture. A brand written into the culture, with a checkout attached.

Quick disclosure, because you know I do this: I hosted the Sydney launch, retail media is part of my day job, and yes, I interviewed a chihuahua named Bruiser Woods in a professional capacity. Park all three. The campaign is the story, and it would be even if I’d watched from the cheap seats.

The anatomy of the thing

The script layer. L’Oréal Paris products appear inside the episodes: Colour Riche Lipstick, Voluminous Mascara, True Match foundation. The detail that separates craft from clutter: all three were genuinely on shelves in 1995, when the show is set. A teenage Elle Woods reaching for Voluminous is period-accurate production design, not a paste job. L’Oréal Paris CMO Georgia Hack calls authenticity “our primary filter: if an integration feels like a commercial interruption, the modern consumer immediately tunes out.” That’s the bar now: survive the fandom’s scrutiny.

The casting layer. Lexi Minetree, the lead, is a L’Oréal Paris ambassador in real life. Character, actress and brand share a spine, and you cannot media-plan your way into that. Proof she was always the right call: her audition. The open call asked for two scenes and a 30-second slate. Instead: “It just kind of hit me that I had to recreate her Harvard admissions video, because I was like, what’s the most extra thing I could do? That’s what Elle Woods would do. She would make this a whole event.” She shot it at home, her mum reluctantly assisting, and Reese Witherspoon delivered the yes in person, so deadpan Lexi briefly thought she was being rejected. A girl who understood, before she even had the job, that the content IS the pitch. Of course she’s the face of this campaign.

The money layer. Around the show sits the machinery: co-branded pre-rolls, tune-in ads, custom TVCs and shoppable formats inside Prime Video, one creative world across ten markets, all of it able to land a viewer on a branded L’Oréal Paris store on Amazon. Fall for the character, want the lipstick, buy the lipstick, never leave the building. The distance between a feeling and a purchase, which advertising has spent a century trying to shorten, is now a few clicks inside one platform, and every step reports back. Swisse bought the local version for their Ultivite multivitamins, proof the machinery scales down as well as up.

The culture layer. Off-platform, Maximum Effort (yes, Ryan Reynolds’ agency) built the US campaign around Elle Woods as “the original GRWM girl”, era-appropriate video diaries and all. In Sydney, our version of that thesis was the get-ready-with-me suite I hosted at the Ivy Penthouse: a room full of creators being styled hours before the party, every chair filming. The launch didn’t have content. The launch was content.

And my favourite object of the year: retro Elle VHS tapes with L’Oréal Paris products hidden inside. A VHS tape. As an activation. In 2026. Half the room needed the format explained to them. I would die for that tape.

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This is structural, not a stunt

If Elle were an isolated experiment, it would be a cute case study. It isn’t. Two months earlier, the same playbook ran on The Devil Wears Prada 2: a L’Oréal Paris campaign with Kendall Jenner and Simone Ashley, a staffer handing Jenner a Colour Riche lipstick with the line “make yourself presentable.” Hack has named the whole strategy “Beautytainment” and describes deals like this as a way to “acquire equity in a cultural IP.” Business of Fashion is asking whether Elle is the new blueprint for product placement. Wrong tense. It’s the blueprint’s second print run.

The rest of the market is sprinting the same direction with less grace. Emily in Paris scripted placements now go for 500,000 to a million euros each. Jake from State Farm just appeared as an actual character in a Netflix series. Brands aren’t buying adjacency to stories anymore. They’re auditioning for roles in them, and the difference between the clumsy version and the Elle version is the difference between renting culture and being cast in it.

Now the number that should stop every Australian marketer mid-scroll. Retail media is the fastest-growing ad channel in this country, hitting $2.3 billion in 2026, and WPP forecasts it will overtake ALL of television advertising here by 2028. Television. Seventy years of the industry’s main event, about to be outspent by the shelf. Amazon alone is tracking toward roughly $85 billion in ad revenue this year, with 315 million people now watching ad-supported Prime Video globally, more than 5 million of them here every month. And the show doing the heavy lifting? Number one on Prime Video worldwide, number two in the US within a day, season two ordered before episode one aired.

I put the why to the two people who built the local execution. Willie Pang, who runs Amazon Ads ANZ, points to the fandom math: Amazon’s research shows passionate fans are 55% more likely to recall brand presence than disengaged viewers. Fandom isn’t a soft metric. It’s the multiplier. “That emotional connection between fans and content is precisely what drives commercial outcomes for brands,” he told Inside Retail.

His framing is the cleanest summary of this whole piece: “The most powerful brand connections happen when you meet audiences in an authentic and natural way. From cultural storytelling to shoppable moments, brands can now move audiences seamlessly from inspiration to action.”

Then there’s Chris Wilson, Head of Brand Innovation ANZ, whose Brand Innovation Lab dreamed up the VHS tapes and the whole creative world of the launch. From the outside, a deal like this looks like it fell out of the sky fully formed. I asked him where it actually began.

“It all starts with audience signals. We can see what people are browsing, buying, and of course watching. And we could see that L’Oréal Paris’s audience would love to be a part of this. So we brought them in.” The fit everyone calls iconic wasn’t a hunch. It was in the data before it was on a rooftop.

His placement-versus-storytelling distinction is the line I’ll be repeating in meetings all year: “Brand storytelling starts when we’re actually adding something to the story. A brand shouldn’t come in and just be an ad placement. It should actually be adding to the experience.” That’s why L’Oréal Paris makeup artists were working the room instead of a logo wall. His creative lesson from the whole campaign, after formally acknowledging that bringing team fluffy and chihuahuas together is always perfect (Bruiser was in attendance, this is journalism): “Really start with those audiences. Once we had that, everything else starts to naturally come together.”

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Steal this, at any budget

The Elle campaign is a hundred-million-dollar machine, but the logic works at every size. Three moves.

Buy alignment, not interruptions. An ambassador who genuinely uses your product beats a celebrity renting your logo, whether that’s Lexi Minetree or a micro-creator with 8,000 followers who already loves what you make. The fandom data above is why: aligned attention compounds.

Shorten the distance between the feeling and the checkout. When someone falls for your brand in your content, at your event, in the group chat, count the steps to purchase. Every step is leakage.

Build the measurement in from day one. “We can’t track brand” is officially a dead excuse. If a mascara in a 1995-set dramedy can be attributed through to a conversion, so can your pop-up, your podcast and your newsletter.

And because this community shares its cheat codes: the machinery has a front door. The Brand Innovation Lab Chris leads exists to dream these partnerships up with brands, and his advice for Aussie brands wanting in: “Reach out to your sales rep. Reach out to us, and let’s start talking about it.” The audience signals already exist. The question is whether your brand is in the conversation.

Advertising isn’t a thing that happens between the content anymore. It IS the content, with a receipt.

So, one question for every founder and marketer reading this: in five years, when the ad break is a museum piece, what role will your brand have earned in the stories your customer actually cares about? Background extra, lead, or not cast at all?

Brooke x

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