Hi divas 🤍

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

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

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

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

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

Leave a comment

Love Brooke x

02 — THE ROOM

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

THE WINS

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

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

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

THE INTRODUCTIONS

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

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

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03 — THE VLOG

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

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

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

04 — THE READ

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

05 — THE DEEP DIVE

Desirability can’t be discounted

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MONDAY

1. Audit your ladder. Write down your cheapest product and ask whether it carries the whole brand or apologises for being cheap. If it’s the second, re-present it before Christmas (packaging, copy, photography) and redesign it in the new year.

2. Protect the hero. The product that defines you never goes on percentage-off, Black Friday included. Volume moves through the entry product, bundles and gifting.

3. Watch traffic, not just revenue. Shopify sessions against conversion if you’re DTC, sell-through if you wholesale. Sessions falling while conversion holds means desire, not price, and no promotion fixes that.

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

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06 — THE DIARY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

07 — CLASSIFIEDS

What a girl wants. What a girl needs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forward this to one girl who’d get it.

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

Love Brooke x

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

@get__moody · getmoody.co · est. 2026

Hi divas 🤍

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

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

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

Love Brooke x

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02 — THE ROOM

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

THE WINS

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

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

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

THE INTRODUCTIONS

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

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

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

THE CHAT

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

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

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

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

03 — THE VLOG

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

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

04 — THE READ

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

05 — THE DEEP DIVE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WHAT TO DO ON MONDAY

1. Build the ladder, not just the army. If you run an open call, an ambassador intake or a creator tier, give people visible rungs (better commission, a repost, a seat at the event) and film the climb. Your applicants are the warmest audience you will ever have.

2. Write the no before the yes. Decide the wording, the date and who sends it, and send it to the person as well as their rep. Five weeks of silence was the whole story.

3. Ask for the second order. Every time you report views, report the number that shows someone chose you: the repeat purchase, the lapsed customer who came back, the waitlist that converted.

   Sources: VS&Co Q2 2026 results · YouTube Official Blog · Glossy · Puck · Fortune · Just Jared, 12 Oct · VS statement via Just Jared, 17 Oct · Fashion Times · Ynet · Daily Beast · W Magazine · VS Fantasy Bra · Rolling Out · Martin Cid

06 — THE DIARY

Here’s where MOODY girls are showing up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

07 — CLASSIFIEDS

What a girl wants. What a girl needs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forward this to one girl who’d get it.

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

Love Brooke x

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

@get__moody · getmoody.co · est. 2026

Hi divas 🤍

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

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

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

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

Brooke x

02 - THE VLOG

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

03 - THE READ

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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04 - THE DIARY

Where we’re showing up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

05 - CLASSIFIEDS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

06 - THE CASE STUDY

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

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

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

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

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

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The five things that set the price

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forward this to one girl who’d get it.

Brooke x

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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Hi divas 🤍

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

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

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

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

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

Love Brooke x

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

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02 - THE VLOG

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

Watch China part two →

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

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

03 - THE READ

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Media & Creator

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Room

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

04 - THE DIARY

Here’s where MOODY girls are showing up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

05 - THE CASE STUDY

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

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

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

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

06 - CLASSIFIEDS

What the girls need.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forward this to one girl who’d get it.

Brooke x

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 🤍

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

Subscribe now

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.

Give a gift subscription

→ 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 →

Share

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.

🔗 Join MOODY →
🔗 Follow MOODY on social →

Leave a comment

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.

Subscribe now

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 →

Leave a comment

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

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.

Subscribe now

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 🤍

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.

Subscribe now

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→

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.

Subscribe now

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.

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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

I’ve spent so much of May and June on planes (Sydney, Thailand, Singapore, Melbourne, Sydney again and again) that I’ve started treating my low-phone days at home like medicine. Genuinely saving my sanity.

Mid-year is my favourite time to go into self-investment mode. It’s never wasted. Usually this means committing to my running routine ahead of Bridge 2 Brissy. But this year I’ve just started professional speaker coaching with the brilliant Sally Prosser and I am SO pumped, after a decade of corporate Australia flattening my voice this feels like taking it back. Put me on a stage and I’m in my element. This is even more impactful if I have something to say that’s not in the corporate messaging guide, I need to get comfy with this.

Clearly the whole room is in build-yourself mode: half of you are quietly deep in Jessi Jean’s Yap Challenge (the one that did a $1.2M launch, yes really). Report back, I want to know how you’re going.

If the thought of yapping on a tiny mic makes you cringe, don’t stress. Getting visible is a pick ‘n’ mix: stages, podcasts, Substack, posting regularly in the group chat, introducing yourself to someone new at drinks. There’s a way to show up for everyone. You just choose the one that feels like you, and go. The key is consistency and a POV that’s uniquely yours.

I’ve also been thinking so much about energy management, mine and ours. I want to build something that lasts, which means I need to scale this properly. Two things I’m calling in: I need city leads to help run events in each capital (more on this to come), and I want to build out our education pillar (you saw the Deep Dives poll, it’s happening). This community deserves both. Aussie women deserve better, and we’re going to build it.

And because I love a hot rec, a few things I’m sick for this month:

→ My new work bag: the Marlow Tote from Reh Studios. I bought it because Jordyn had one (as you do) and the quality for the price point is insane. Aussie brand, all-women team. Sold.

→ The Crown Affair towel. Since getting my K-tip extensions (thank you Stone the Studio) I’ve been obsessed with making the styling actually worth it, and I hate to admit it but Diana Cohen knows exactly what she’s talking about. Worth the $90.

→ Willpowders cherry electrolyte sachets. Got gifted these at Domefest and now I travel with them everywhere. Obsessed.

→ Baked mango from Nibblish. All those months in Asia gave me a thing for nibbly little treats, and these have no nasties. Dangerous in the best way. Thank you Sunday Agency for getting me hooked.

Forward this to one girl in your network who’d get it. Add her to the chat. We’re taking over.

Love Brooke x

Aussie Angels 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.

02 — FROM HQ

A few bits of good news from our side of the room.

→ We tipped over 333 on Instagram. 333. If a number was ever going to feel ANGEL aligned, it’s that one. 🤍

→ Spotify ANZ picked us up. The Process The Pod x Brooke community episode landed in Spotify ANZ’s Podcast Picks of the Week. The one where Arielle and I do nothing but gush about this group for an hour. Iconic that the algorithm and the Spotify ANZ team agrees with us. Listen →

→ I finally said my piece on Vogue Codes. I loved it, and I had notes. I’ve been trying to put my opinions out there more after a decade of corporate Australia flattening them, so this one meant a lot. I loved Vogue Codes, I also have notes →

→ The May Cap Table Report is up. Macro, raises and AI all moved last month. This is the fluff-free version: what actually happened, and the so-what for where you put your money, time and energy. Your brief going into June. Read it →

→ The Aussie Angels Directory is live. You asked for it, so here it is. Spend 60 seconds adding yourself and you’ll be able to search every other angel by what they do, what they’re looking for and what they’re open to being contacted about. Founder, corporate, investor, creative, all of it. The whole community, searchable. No more “wait, who does what again?” Add yourself →

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03 — ANGEL OF THE MONTH

Meet Jemma Sbeg. Host of The Psychology of Your 20s, the podcast talking millions of us through this decade with the research to back it. Now available on Netflix!!

What are you actually building right now? Better habits and muscle. Not particularly sexy, but I’ve been on a real longevity journey this past year after some scary health news. It’s been amazing to see how much the body can adjust and transform on new routines, slowly and then seemingly all at once. I’ve been thinking a lot about myself as a mother and grandmother and how I want to move and feel then, not just look now.

The most unhinged thing you’ve done for your career? Every week I have a ‘shoot your shot’ Wednesday where I send the emails, pitches, articles and DMs to people I’d want to collaborate with in my wildest dreams. I let myself have all the courage and none of the embarrassment for that one day a week, and it’s taught me there’s no shame in asking.

What are you gossiping about right now? Substack. And the people making their BAG from writing and sharing their thoughts online. I have friends making $100–300k on that platform and they never have to sacrifice their voice, pitch themselves to brands or adhere to someone else’s guidelines. I admire them so much.

The thing you’re most embarrassed to admit? I’m really bad with long-term financial planning. I’m so financially cautious and anxious that I don’t always get my money working for me, even though my mum is literally an economist. Something I need to change this year, that’s for sure.

What do you want the angels to find you for? Science-backed evidence for your 20s and for life. Opinions occasionally, but the research and the empirical evidence for why you feel the way you do always comes first.

When did you realise you’d built a community, not just an audience? My first friendship meet-up. We run these occasionally to get likeminded listeners together, and every single person who came was the coolest person I’d ever met. Smart, talented, motivated, kind. It made me shed a few tears of joy.

What’s something ambitious women are spending too much time on right now? Dating. Most men can’t keep up with ambitious women, or simply don’t want to (someone had to say it). Don’t waste any more of your precious time on a man who has to be a special project. The right person will come along.

→ Where to find her? The Psychology of Your 20s wherever you listen, @thatpsychologypodcast and @jemmasbeg on Instagram, and psychologyofyour20s.com.

Want the angel of the month slot? Reply to this email and it’s yours.

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04 — WHAT THE CHAT IS DOING WITH AI

I got on a nine-hour flight, realised it had wifi, and asked the chat for the most unhinged and helpful things they’ve got AI doing for them. The thread did not disappoint.

→ Your own board of advisors. Teodora runs a panel of AI “advisors”, each with a role: a contrarian to challenge the idea, an outside observer asking the dumb-smart questions, a task-doer, an out-of-the-box thinker and a top 1% strategist. Each reviews anonymously, then a “chairman” makes the final call. (Prompt via Mariah Brunner.)

→ A personal assistant named Brick. Ari’s husband built her an AI PA (Brick, as in one brick at a time) that sends her the weather, moon phase, horoscope and calendar each morning, reminds her to drink water, and checks in on her mood and stress.

→ Kirby is basically planning a wedding with it. Designs, mockups, fitness and eating plans, the lot.

→ Rachel Lai has it running as a real assistant on recurring tasks: synthesising her human design, gene keys and astrology into a business plan, running a cost-benefit on DIYing a serum, and turning a week of Slack messages and brand docs into a Notion dashboard.

→ The one I can’t stop thinking about: an angel syncing her Oura data so AI books her pre-period acupuncture automatically. That is the level of automation I want in my life.

→ And Alexie (who runs an AI marketing agency in Paris) teaches founders to actually use Claude day to day, and built her own business-tracking platform in a single day. DM her if you want to learn.

The automation is the next level most of us haven’t unlocked yet. Tell me what you’ve built.

05 — WHAT THE AUSSIE ANGELS ARE MAKING

The girls are SHIPPING and I’m obsessed.

→ Georgie Healy — In The Blink of AI. Her podcast just cracked #46 in business podcasts and passed 10,000 plays on Spotify. Everything you didn’t know you needed to know about AI. If you’re not listening to Georgie yet, fix that. Listen →

→ Annabelle Russell — Substack ANZ. Our angel and Head of Partnerships for Australia & NZ at Substack just launched the next phase of Substack’s native sponsorships program. The inaugural cohort of flagship partners (Yahoo, Whatnot, Granola, Balenciaga, T-Mobile, Polymarket, Uber) is collectively putting millions into Substack creators, who keep full creative control and editorial independence. Real money without selling your voice. This is huge for anyone building here. Annabelle’s Substack → · LinkedIn →

→ BlakCast Network is Australia’s first First Nations-owned and led podcast network, founded by the brilliant Mundanara Bayles (we interviewed her at Domefest, she’s incredible). It’s home to shows like Black Magic Woman and Yarning Up. They’ve launched a Patreon to keep grassroots Indigenous storytelling alive, so rise above the noise and throw your support behind it. BlakCast → · Patreon →

→ Soph Hood — So Topical. The Seoul Tonic founder has launched a new beauty brand, and the move I can’t stop thinking about is the second account. Alongside @sotopical she’s running @sotopicalsociety purely for the behind-the-scenes of building it. Editorial, science-led, a real founder lab in public. “When everyone’s algorithm is the same, where do you find inspiration?” A founder move worth watching. sotopical.com →

→ Sam — Wayfarer Mobility. A medtech startup redesigning mobility aids to actually be beautiful (finally). Sam’s building both the product and the community around it (see her Disability Dinner Club in the diary). This is the good stuff. Sam’s also after brands to contribute products, samples or discount codes for the Disability Dinner Club gift bags. If that’s you, reach out. @wayfarer_mobility →

→ Layla — Dr. Diamond. The elevated jewellery-care brand just launched in Thailand this month, and Layla is packing up her life to take it global. This is the energy. @drdiamonnd →

→ Rosie — Collagenie Wellness Lounge. Rosie wanted to share this one because it’s the community in action: two different Aussie Angels jumped in to help on the day. hree of the Aussie angels came together to run an Event for Collagenie pets on the weekend. At Harry’s in Bondi, over 400 humans and over 150 pets dropped in for matcha, pup cups and editorial protrait photos. A meet and greet with Real Housewives celeb / Vet Dr Kate.

The world’s first certified organic collagen peptides for pets. Because pets deserve to be able to move, and run and play as they get older - just like humans. You can follow Collagenie here. EOFY sale starts on Friday with 30% off @collagenie_pets →

→ Paris — The 194 Collective. An e-commerce shoe brand for wide feet, fit struggles and the genetic stuff nobody designs for: comfortable shoes that actually look good. Waitlist is open (and she built the landing page herself in an afternoon, which is its own flex). Join the waitlist →

→ Rach Tucker — Smooch. Functional beverage to put you in the mood. Presale opens July 1. 💗 smoochdrinks.com →

→ Levina — Karsiyah Beauty. Her Face Polish is live and ready to add to cart now (pre-orders opened 22 June). Treat yourself. @karsiyah.beauty →

→ Sophie — Myrrar goes live. Her beauty AI app hits beta on Monday 29 June and I could not be prouder. Want in on the beta? She’s adding people directly, so DM her to get on the list. @_myrrar →

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And the wins that aren’t launches:

→ The dinner the chat built. What started as a single message turned into 15 of us around a table at Matteo in Double Bay last Friday, pulled together with Genevieve. And the magic was the mix: founders, operators, corporate girls and some epic VC talent all in one room. That’s the whole point. We met Joanna Lawson (Co-Ventures, working alongside VC icon Maxine Minter), just back in Sydney from San Francisco, who’s going to help school us on raising and angel investing. We are lucky to have her. One message to a full table in a week.

→ Maddi Kinchington of Mode Office and OG Aussie Angel got married in Scotland. It looks insane. That’s it. That’s the post. Congratulations angel 🤍

→ Perry Howell packed up and moved to London to scale Pilates Gang. Backing herself, going global. This is the energy. @pilatesgang_ →

→ Jen Garner made Mumbrella for her new role: from SVP of sales operations at Epsilon to GM of Operations at Two Dot AI, a Brisbane AI-agent startup. Leaving a big stable corporate seat to back herself at an early-stage company. Her words: “It feels like I’m coming home.” The leap is the whole point.

Shipped something, hit a milestone? Drop it in the chat. I want to celebrate you.

06 — IN THE DIARY

Where we’re showing up.

First, the one I’m hosting. Girl Dinner: In The Making — Melbourne on 8th July and Sydney on 15 July (The Solo Co x Aussie Angels). I’m doing this with Lizzie Mulherin and I could not be more in. An intimate dinner for early to mid-stage founders riding the highs, the lows and the general chaos of building right now.

Our guest for Melbourne is Anna Mackenzie: startup advisor, ex-Mecca, creator of Anna Mack’s Stack, one of the sharpest thinkers going on portfolio careers and the future of work. Our guest for Sydney is Rebecca Jarvie-Gibbs, Co-founder and COO of We are example an earned led culture agency blowing up the world’s hottest brands (The Australian Open - hello!!) and literally shaping the culture.

You don’t need a certain number of years in business or a financial milestone to earn a seat. You do need to come hungry for the kind of evening that nourishes you the way only dinner with your favourite girls can.

Wednesday 8 July, 6:30–10:00pm, Gracie’s Wine Room, South Yarra.
Wednesday 15th July 6:30-10:00pm, Biblo Wine Bar, Double Bay.

$150 a head, strictly 20 seats. First in, best dressed. This will go fast. RSVP Melbourne → RSVP Sydney

Now the rest of the month:

25 June · Sydney — APEX Founders: Founder Coffee Catch Up. 7:40–8:40am, A.P Bread & Wine, Darlinghurst. APEX is the new founders community from Mahdieh (Madi) . First of four on their calendar. RSVP → · @theapexfounders →

26 June · Sydney — Process Clubhouse: June Meet Up. Round two of the casual Process The Podcast get-togethers with Arielle Thomas. Faces to names, no agenda, just the community in a room. 6:00–8:00pm, Surry Hills (entrance 1 Lacey St). RSVP →

30 June · Brisbane — Aussie Angels Brisbane Meetup. Our own one, Brisbane girls this is for you. After-work drinks at Bar Monte, Newstead, 5:30–8:00pm, with a room full of ambitious women building businesses, careers, side hustles and lives they’re genuinely excited about. Most come solo their first time, and you’ll leave with at least one new friend, contact or group chat. Huge thanks to Jen Garner for pulling this one together 💛 RSVP →

30 June · Melbourne — Disability Dinner Club by Sam Freidin (Wayfarer Mobility). A monthly curated dinner for people living with physical disability or chronic illness who want a great night out with people who get it and zero support-group vibes. Venue TBC. RSVP →

1 July · Melbourne — FoundHer Dinner: Ladies of the Round Table by Veronika (Vee). A curated dinner for 20 women who mean business, every seat placed on purpose. Not networking, just two hours of real conversation over a proper meal with the right people in the right seats. 6:00–9:00pm at Pincho Disco, 59 Cambridge St, Collingwood. $85pp, multi-course (drinks not included). Approval required and already over capacity, so get on the waitlist for this and future dinners (Sydney coming August). Email hello@foundher.world or @foundher_world →

9 July · Sydney — APEX Happy Hour. 5:00–7:00pm, location TBC. APEX events are moving to the Gooday app, so join the waitlist for this one. Waitlist → there’s also a Founder dinner on the 16 July. 6:00–8:00pm, SAX Restaurant & Lounge Bar, Barangaroo. Waitlist →

17 July · Sydney — UNSW Founders Female Founders Showcase. Hosted by angel Wonyoung. A night inspired by women who’ve done it, in a room with people who get it. (Founder pitch/demo EOIs have closed, but go along.) RSVP →

21 July & 30 July · Sydney & Melbourne— Disability Dinner Club by Sam Freidin. Venue TBC. RSVP → The Commons Collective Winter Garden. RSVP →

Date Night by Hayley Westoby (our Issue 03 angel). Her curated female-founder dinner series, running on rotation: Gold Coast in July, Sydney 28 Aug, Melbourne Sept/Oct, Sydney 30 Oct, Sydney 11 Dec. Real connection, no surface networking, Hayley curates the room. The only way to get an invite is her EOI form. @datenight.aus →

On the radar (lock in early):

→ 9 Sept · Online — Women in Digital masterclass, “Elevating Your Digital Career & Personal Brand” with Ashton Tuckerman (GM, TwentyTwo Digital). 12–1pm AEST, $0–$35. Tickets →

→ 5 Nov · Sydney — Techella Fest, billed as Australia’s first tech festival built by women. 300+ women and gender-diverse builders, founders and AI creators in one room, from Brooke Wright. Save the date. techellafest.com →

Coming up: the Deep Dives. A series over the next few months. Less networking, more practical skills, insider knowledge and access to people you’d normally never get an hour with. I put it to a poll, and here’s what you want most:

→ AI technical skills: Claude Code, Codex and agentic workflows (with AWS)
→ Content creation: podcasting, video, newsletters and personal brand growth
→ Sales and pitching: how to influence, negotiate and close, for founders and corporate
→ Personal branding and LinkedIn growth
→ AI co-working: bring your laptop and your biggest bottleneck in biz or life
→ Angel Investing 101: how to get started, sourcing deals, what to look for
→ Raising Capital AMA: hear from VCs and founders who’ve raised in Australia and the US

DM me if you want to be involved in running one, or have a topic we missed.

Next round of Aussie Angels IRL dates dropping soon. Syd, Melb, Bris, Adl, GC. Watch this space.

Running something? We want to know. DM me.

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07 — THE CLASSIFIEDS

The angels need things. The angels have things.

The girls are hiring:

→ No Sunday Blues (Mikhaila Warburton) — recruiting a newly created role at a culture-led, social-first media agency in Sydney. It’s a head-hunt, referral-led, and Mikhaila reckons this community is the place to start. Advert →

→ Missing Perspectives — the media company platforming women’s stories is hiring a junior, freelance/casual, to support editing podcast episodes and clipping for social. missingperspectives.com →

→ Dr. Diamond (Layla) — the elevated jewellery-care brand is growing fast and hiring a part-time Marketing & Content person. Creative, proactive, social-obsessed: think TikTok, Instagram, influencer gifting, content shoots and creative brainstorming. @drdiamonnd →

→ RUME is looking for a co-founder. Kaitie Mulherin launched RUME at the Social Summit last month (you might have caught her flyers around). It’s a live platform connecting creators and brands to make and source social content in real time: create for brands you actually care about, build your portfolio, sharpen your craft. She’s after a growth lead to come on as co-founder and scale it, for equity. If you’re well connected in the influencer and social space and want to build from scratch on a platform that’s already LIVE, this is your seat. Interested? Hit up Kaitie@duopr.com.au rumesocial.com → · @kaitiemulherin →

The AI labs just landed in Sydney. If you’ve been waiting for a sign to shoot your shot at frontier AI, this is it:

→ Anthropic opened a Sydney office, its fourth in Asia-Pacific, and is hiring on the ground. Roles floating around include External Affairs Australia, an ASEAN Account Executive based in Sydney, ANZ Communications and a Data Center Energy Lead. Careers →

→ OpenAI is hiring in Sydney too, mostly technical and go-to-market: Solutions Architect, Solutions Engineer, Model Deployment for Business. Hybrid, with relocation on some roles. Careers →

Asks:

→ Franziska — new to Sydney, eyes open for the right match in tech or startups, would love to hear from anyone who started from scratch here or knows the scene. DM her.

→ Veronika “Vee” Forsyth wants a photographer or content creator to shoot an event in Melbourne in July. In return: exposure to the community, tags across every post including brand partners, referrals to her agency clients, and paid gigs the moment she locks sponsorship. @foundher_world →

→ Pardis is after a great activation or pop-up agency (or person) based in Melbourne. Worked with someone good? Send them her way. @pardismahdavi →

→ Nancy Cao (Muse Circle) is building a social platform connecting small businesses with local freelance talent, and wants a partner to help host IRL events across Sydney, Melbourne and beyond. Could be a lead-gen play if you love hosting. musefunnel →

→ Rach Tucker (Smooch) is hunting a buyer contact at Priceline. Smooch has been invited to pitch a big pharma group for ranging, but Priceline is the dream for brand fit. Got a contact, even a sneaky one? Email rach@smoochdrinks.com. smoochdrinks.com →

→ Sonia is after a product photographer or creative-direction assist in Sydney. @soniakhay →

→ Shreya — Australian Coffee Culture. Premium, plant-based, ready-to-drink cold brews from 100% Australian-grown coffee, fully traceable to the farm. Soft-launched three months ago and already in premium hotels, organic grocers, luxury wellness and corporate. She’s after a social content agency (small budget, be kind), and in return offers a second pair of eyes on anyone’s growth model, account management or sales strategy, plus intros. DM her. australiancoffeeculture.com →

Offers:

→ Content creators for hire. Georgia McFarlane shoots weddings (@thewed.files) and events via her agency (@thecontent.files), captured my wedding, and is doing an Aussie Angels discount. Jess covers weddings up the Byron and southern GC way. Paris (studioblueproductions.com.au ) is running mini content shoots.

→ Need a startup-friendly accountant? The chat rates Coast Accounting and The Integrated CFO (a fractional CFO with a full accounting team, great if you’re scaling and want to be set up properly from the start). coastaccounting.com.au → · theintegratedcfo.com.au →

Capital and the US play:

→ We’re building a US connections channel. So many of you are eyeing the States for funding, expansion or a corporate move, so we’re spinning up a dedicated space, sorted by exactly what you need: investors and angels, events, vendors, industry intros, across health, beauty, tech and consumer. Want in, or sitting on US contacts to share? DM me.

→ A founder house is in the works. Holly is building Build Stateside, a NYC-based founder house for Aussie founders who want to plug into the US ecosystem and raise from US angels and funds. She says A16z, Sequoia and three female-led funds are already in the group. If you’re eyeing a US chapter, add yourself to the list. buildstateside.com → · @hollysanderz →

→ Raising help, US-flavoured. A couple of angels have offered to share what they know on raising in the States: Hailey (fundraising intensives for founders, mostly US contacts) and Caitlin Duryea (just off a US growth chapter, on whether US expansion is even the right move). Reach out if you’re raising and need a sounding board.

Put yourself forward:

→ Forbes 30 Under 30 Australia 2026 nominations are open. Finance, VC, media, entertainment, music, arts, retail, e-commerce, science, social impact, sport, AI and tech. Nominate someone. Nominate yourself. This is your sign. Forbes 30 Under 30 →

Drop your asks in the chat.

08 — JOIN THE CHAT

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

Every city, growing weekly. The chat is approval-only so we keep the spammers out.

🔗 Join the Aussie Angels →

Overheard this month:

→ “The girls are ON.”

→ “This chat really brings a lot of energy into my life right now.” — Franziska, newly in Sydney

→ “Vibes were high, we were too in it.” — Cathy, on the Adelaide girls’ lunch (no photo survived, because Adelaide girls do it better)

That’s the whole point. Forward this to one girl in your life who’d get it. Tell her to join the WhatsApp.

See you in there. 🤍

Brooke x

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On the other side of a honeymoon and a W penthouse with fifty of you in it. We have levelled up.

We hosted three angel meetups (Brissy, Sydney, Sydney again) in the last few weeks and welcomed so many new faces. I am obsessed with this community!! We also dropped merch. If you missed out and want a cap DM me and I’ll see what I can do.

Going fully offline for seven days was just what the doctor ordered. A lot of the much needed brain space was spent dreaming up what’s next for us. That is of course when I wasn’t dreaming of my next pad thai, ordering yet another coconut marg, swimming in the Koh Samui sea, forcing my gorge new husband to make White Lotus tiktoks with me or reading 2 truly fantastic books.

My hot recs for this fornight:

Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke — tradwife influencer wakes up in 1805 and has to actually live the life she’d been performing online. Anne Hathaway is producing the film. The people angry about it are the point. Read it.

Call Girl Confidential by Blue-Eyed Kayla Jade — half memoir, half CEO playbook. Hannah Ferguson wrote the cover quote. I’ve been a fan since the counting-money TikToks. She’s a storyteller like no other.

The Rally is dropping on the app store and this is the workout / mindset shift we all need. A supercharged beat-based daily walk designed for busy girls with busy minds. Our angel Rachel Lai out of Austin, Texas is on the founding team. I've been in on the beta and I’m sick for it. My new fave workout. Oh, did I mention we're a global girl gang?! Aussie Angels is a mindset, location is irrelevant.

Big June. Vogue Codes Summit, 13 June, Sydney — we’re going as a group. Pre-meet coffee details to drop soon. Make sure you have you tickets.

Forward this substack to one girl in your network who’d get it. Add her to the group chat. We’re taking over.

Love Brooke x

Aussie Angels 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.

02 — NOTES FROM THE ROOMS

Spotify’s creator session in Sydney and the Social Summit in Melbourne. Two big rooms. Here’s what you need to know.

→ Community is the new luxury. Australians are spending 2x more on experiences than things. The brands winning aren’t building communities to serve the brand — they’re building for the community, with the community, and protecting that trust like it’s sacred. I will scream that last bit from the rooftop.

→ Reach is losing aura. Likes are underweighted. Shares, saves, watch time, retention are what actually matter — because a share means I’m putting my name on this. Josh Henry Hicks (Insightly Media) hammered this from the stage.

→ Niche + POV beats reach. Take a boring category and make it culturally desirable. Touchland did it for hand sanitiser. Layla at Dr Diamond is doing it next.

→ Independent is the future. Substack-flavoured, boutique-creator-flavoured. Brands scripting podcast ads are killing the medium. Let creators create. Jordyn told podcasters from the Spotify stage to stay independent and know their worth before going to a network.

→ Shoot Your Shot Wednesdays. Anna Mackenzie sends one cold outreach per week. That’s 52 opportunities a year. The math is the math. Pick one and send it this week — I want to hear who you DM’d. I’m reaching out to Anthropic and ShopMy.

→ Squeeze the lemon. Maddison Sullivan Thorpe on production days: if you’re investing in a shoot, bring every camera and every format. Phone, DSLR, tiny mic, your mum, your best friend. Mix lo-fi and hi-fi. One shoot day done right is five months of content. Stop over-producing single moments.

→ Good content beats production value. Shameless Media shoots its podcasts on iPhone. They built a media empire with a tripod and a perspective. You don’t need a production house, you need a take and the discipline to publish.

→ Sam Wood said agencies are dead. I disagree. From the Social Summit stage — Sam Wood saying agencies just spend your money on croissants. Lizzie Waley (Sundae Body), Monica Upton (Veritisi) and Loren Tomlinson (The Social Collective) sat with the take. My read: reckless advice for the scale and enterprise operators I work with. The agency model is changing, not dead. Boutique is where it’s at.

→ Listen-first or get left behind. Josh Henry Hicks again (the man earned his slot): brands need to stop running product-led calendars and start running listening systems. Track cultural signals, feed them into creative fast. The brands still on 6-week creative cycles are losing to the ones moving in 6 hours.

Full debrief on Amy’s 1800 Chatline pod — see Receipts.

03 — ANGEL OF THE FORTNIGHT

Meet Hayley Westoby. Sydney · Founder of Gambit Collective + Date Night + Top of Mind + SpicyBoi.

What are you actually building right now? Gambit Collective — a pay-as-you-go marketing agency specialising in marketing, brand experiences and personal branding. I also recently launched Date Night, an intimate female founder dinner series creating a safe space for women to genuinely connect beyond surface-level networking. I’m continuing to build my podcast Top of Mind — third year, top 10% of video podcasts in AU/NZ for the last two years, and finally entertaining sponsorships. AND I have a crispy chilli oil business called SpicyBoi. Safe to say I’m building a lot.

Most unhinged thing you’ve done for your career? First year of my business — got a Cannes Lions invite with a brand I’d idolised, two weeks notice, had to get myself there. Nine days out, I dropped close to $5k on flights, got a new passport, and got my ass over there.

What are you gossiping about right now? The friendship recession is real and nobody is talking about it loudly enough — women are lonelier than ever while being more “connected” than ever, and that’s actually one of the reasons I started Date Night. Also: cycle syncing as a business strategy. The women who’ve figured this out are operating on a different level and I’m obsessed with it.

The thing you’re most embarrassed to admit you want? Honestly? Nothing anymore. Everything you actually want lives on the other side of embarrassment. I want to build something that genuinely helps great people. Specifically women in business. Turns out when you stop gatekeeping your ambitions they start moving faster.

What do you want the angels to find you for? Founders who need a marketing, brand experience or personal branding partner. Female founders who want to come to Date Night. Anyone needing speakers around personal branding, marketing, women in business.

Where to find her? @hayleywestoby on everything · @datenight.aus · Hayley Westoby on LinkedIn · Top of Mind podcast.

→ Want the angel of the fortnight slot? Reply to this email and pitch me.

04 — WHAT THE AUSSIE ANGELS ARE MAKING

Beyond. You are all doing the most.

→ Remy Tucker — ON THE HOUSE just raised $1.7M Seed AND deployed 50 new machines nationally. Somehow at the same time. Brisbane-based, Purpose Ventures led, with UniQuest Extension Fund and Startmate backing. The product: wall-mounted dispensers in high-foot-traffic bathrooms that give you free organic period products, fully funded by the brand ad on the 32-inch screen above. The numbers are deranged: 94% uplift in brand trust, 76-second average dwell time (the rest of out-of-home gets 4 seconds). 4,300 boxes dispensed, 13,000+ free products, ~3,000 women served. Afterpay, Pillow Talk, Forty Winks and Frontier Touring already on the network. If you’re a CMO with a media budget and a soul, this is the buy. onthehousegroup.com →

→ Rachel — THE RALLY launches publicly and globally on 3 June. Our angel in Austin, Texas is on the founding team building the world’s first supercharged beat-based walk for busy women with busy diaries. Soulcycle energy meets running playlist meets meditation — a workout / brain reset you can actually do on a Tuesday at lunchtime. Life changing. Get on the waitlist. therally.co → · @therally

→ Rosie × Laura — Collagenie x Golf Fore Her. Rosie’s been quietly cooking on Collagenie (yes — collagen peptides for pets, Real Housewives partnership incoming, can’t make it up) for six months. Posted in the chat. Within days, locked into Laura’s Golf Fore Her show bags. Launching this week. The chat literally did this. @collagenie_pets →

→ Michelle / OVA — funded. Telehealth launches July, making women’s health and fertility integrative Chinese medicine accessible to regional Australia navigating IVF. Plus a TGA-listed Chinese herbal capsule for sleep landing later this year that actually works. Michelle applied for the $5k funding round we posted in the chat and got it to support the OVA expansion. This is what it’s all about. @ovaacupuncture

→ Ari — Athlinq launched in March. The app connecting athletes, agents and brands. Some of the biggest names in the country are already on it across AFL, AFLW, NRL, NRLW and cricket — plus beauty brands chasing athletes off the back of the Alyssa Liu Olympic moment. The Aussie women’s sports economy has been waiting for exactly this. joinathlinq.com →

→ Kirby — The Match Deck is officially in beta with clients already searching. Brisbane engineer in Defence by day, building this with me on the side. Matchmaking for founders who need to find their next tech resource, dev or designer without going through six agency intros. thematchdeck.com →

→ Jordyn — hosted Spotify’s creator session in Sydney and I walked out with five things worth tattooing on the back of my hand. They’re up in the notes from the room. Spotify is making moves and Jordyn is the one to watch.

→ Arielle / Process the Podcast (1) — Social Summit Masterclass live cut. Panel: Arielle (Cinema Thom + Process), Lizzie Mulherin (yes — our Lizzie from Solo Co, who also rebranded her cultural reads substack to How We Live by Lizzie (feat. a hot take on Emma Grede’s book this week), and Anna Mackenzie (portfolio career mentor), moderated by Rosie Boccamazzo. Topic: Reverse Engineering Your Creative Career. Spec work to land Mecca and Vogue. Building without burning out. Personal brand as the anchor. Listen →

→ Arielle x me — Process the Podcast (2). Arielle had me on to talk community and the whole episode turned into me gushing about this group. The Butler vs The Leader. The 50% engagement matrix vs traditional media’s 5%. The first 20 in the room before the 650-person waitlist. The entry question that skips surface small talk. Why we never automate community chats. I am in love with this community. The frameworks are mine. The receipts are yours. Listen →

→ Amy / 1800 Chatline — the full Social Summit debrief, with me. Amy Dickinson - the number 1 diva who birthed the summit — had me on for the whole download. The MAFS producer who tried to pitch me onto the show at year twelve of my relationship. The great honour of meeting little dad phil IRL. Fashions on field. And the actual hot takes that didn’t fit in this newsletter. Listen →

→ Sumana — Damn Gina hit market. Australia’s first Ayurvedic-inspired haircare line. Bootstrapped, founder-mum, pushing toward retail next. Needs an intro to anyone with distribution chops in the low–mid range. DM her.

Shipped something? Drop it in the chat.

05 — IN THE DIARY

Where we’re showing up.

3 June · Sydney — The Argonauts Series: The Open Boardroom (CEO Survey 2026 Launch). Havas Village, The Rocks. A real C-suite intel session, opened to the public for one night only. Sophie Auyeung, Paris, Mel, Levina, Izzi and Anne are already in. Email melanie@uagentertainment.com to get added.

3 June · Melbourne — Foundher (EOFY edition). Vee’s incredible-women-of-Melbourne gathering. Founders and leaders from across tech, legal, culture, funding, beauty, sexual wellness and marketing — sharing, connecting, swapping opportunities and having a cheeky vent. No pitches. No panels. No networking that feels like work. This month has a special EOFY add-on to get your house in order before June 30. StandardX hotel. Free. RSVP →

4 June · Sydney — Create Your Lore by Ponnd (Remi and Bella). Anti-networking, networking. An hour of honest conversation on finding your voice, building a brand people actually buy into, and making them stay. Panel: Jessy Wu (founder of Encour, AFR columnist, debut novel with Pan Macmillan), Holly Chapman (ex-Head of Brand at Papier — scaled collabs with The Met, Headspace, Reese’s Book Club). Hosted by Remi Dooley (Ponnd co-founder + CMO) with Kelsey McCormick (Coming Up Roses). 6pm at Ace Hotel Sydney. Early Release $45 / Standard $60 (wine + networking included). RSVP →

6 June · Sydney — Female Entrepreneurs' Wellness Reset by Sophie Auyeung (MYRRAR) and Bridg Tran (DUMP Breathwork). Transformational breathwork, goodie bags, light nibbles, real friendships not surface networking. 12:30–2:30pm at Hot Dog Yoga, Double Bay. $35 MYRRAR Inner Circle / $45 general. RSVP →

Roughly 11–15 June · Sydney — Maeva's BREAD-alum founder dinner. Maeva joined the chat this fortnight and the room went full code blue — founder of BREAD Beauty (sold last year), raised over USD $7M from Imaginary Ventures, Emma Grede, Rachel Zoe and the Harrys fund, locked a Sephora USA contract before product existed. Now she's hosting a curated dinner for physical goods brand founders. Topic shaped by who's in the room. EOI open in the chat.

13 June · Sydney — Vogue Codes Summit. A properly stacked lineup. The collective angel moment of this fortnight — we’re doing coffee beforehand. Reply if you want in. Details →

13 June · Mornington Peninsula — Empowered Her day retreat at the hot springs. Mindset, panels, meditation, sheet masks, hot springs, the women who get it. Built by angel Jess Jackson — go. Details →

17 July · Sydney — UNSW Founders Female Founders Showcase. Hosted by angel Wonyoung. A night inspired by women who’ve done it, in a room with people who get it. RSVP → · EOI open until June 7 for founders who want to pitch, demo, exhibit or collab. Also calling in female DJs, food vendors and creatives to make the night. Interest form →

Next round of Aussie Angels IRL meetup dates dropping soon — Syd, Melb, Bris, Adl, GC? Watch this space.

Running something? We want to know about it. DM me.

06 — THE CLASSIFIEDS

The angels need things. The angels have things.

Asks:

→ Amelia — content buddy in Sydney (lower north shore). Filming solo, losing the inspo. Sophie, Levina, Paris and Hollie are already in. Jump in. @ameliabaweja

→ Polly — Sydney speakers on confidence and personal branding. Used Stef (Fuck Being Humble) and Daisy (The Self Hood) in the UK and is hunting Sydney equivalents. My recs: Andrea Clarke for women’s leadership, Alison Rice for the different angle.

→ Marika at HerHive — wants intros to women in health or finance. DM her.

→ Me — Singapore next week for NRF APAC with the NORA crew. Epic program for the Aussie retailers in town. If you’re heading over, LMK.

Offers:

→ Alycia / Project C Studios (Brisbane). Podcast production house + studio just off James Street — cyclorama wall for product shoots / headshots, plus a boardroom for hire. Mention us when you book. @project.c.studios →

→ Lizzie / Solo Co — free Builder Blueprint diagnostic for early-stage and idea-stage. joinsoloco.com/builderblueprint →

→ Jess Barker — transition coach for women bailing on the corporate gig to build their own service business. 3–6 month partnership, or a long weekend 1:1 retreat in Ibiza.

Capital:

→ Mercy / Zorentia — raising pre-seed via SAFE at $8M cap with a 20% discount. The platform helps founders launch tech startups. Just landed Macquarie University as her first institutional customer, with more universities and schools in the pipeline locally and internationally. Looking for angels writing cheques, or anyone who can warm-intro her to one. One-pager + quick call available. DM Mercy.

Co-founder seats — still open via Jade at Willis Global Family Office:

→ Death-Tech / Legal-Tech — Co-Founder & CTO. Technical, fast-moving, fluent in modern tools, joining a founding team of three. Gold Coast preferred, Syd/Melb/Bris on the table. willis.global →

→ E-commerce Consumer Brand — Co-Founder & CEO. Operator with e-com + China sourcing experience. Fitness-adjacent, not apparel or supplements. willis.global →

Drop your asks in the chat.

07 — JOIN THE CHAT

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

200+ angels, every city, growing weekly. Approval-only now so we keep the spammers out. You know you’ve made it when the JOIN OUR INVESTMENT bots are chasing you. DM me Aussie numbers anytime.

🔗 Join the Aussie Angels →

Overheard this fortnight:

→ “115 glorious angel messages to catch up on this morning — and the content didn’t disappoint.” — Kim Kerton

→ “I am craving female friendships who are into entrepreneurship.” — Sumana

→ “I can’t believe this group exists. It’s great to see a space like this.” — Sofia, newly joined

That’s the whole point. Forward this substack to one girl in your life who’d get it. Tell them to join the WhatsApp.

See you in there. 🤍

Brooke x

Hi angels 🤍

^^ Editors note if you prefer to listen.

You’ve probably noticed it’s taken me a little longer than a fornight to get back in your inbox with the These are the girls who get it newsletter. In the words of Gabbi Whipps, we’ve been going through some things but I am so stoked that we are here now.

Two weekends ago I watched Jemma Sbeg backstage at DomeFest and I don’t have the words for what it feels like to watch an Australian woman operating at that level. And then on stage — Mundanara from Black Magic Woman, Abbie Chatfield, Big Small Talk, Gabbi Whipps, Ebony May from R U O’Cake — every single one of them brought their community into that room and the Hordern Pavillion was completely electric. I’m so honoured to have a played a small part. Chookas to Soph & Bella for pulling it off. So proud. Women who’d found their people, in a room, being absolutely feral about it in the best way.

That’s the whole brief. That’s what we’re building here.

And then while I was still coming down from all of that, some news dropped in the chat. What came back stopped me.

“You built this from the ground up.” “The Australian community wouldn’t exist without you.” “Wherever you go next, we’re following.” Honestly yep, I have very little words. So grateful.

So. Here we are. Aussie Angels — properly ours now. New home, same women, same energy.

You told us what you need: IRL events worth leaving the house for, introductions that actually go somewhere, women in your city doing real things. Getting practical. That’s the brief. That’s what this is.

Speaking of which — Sydney, we’re on. IRL meetup next Tuesday 21st April. RSVP here. I’m itching to see everybody. 🤍

Fortnightly. No fluff. Just us. Let’s go. x

Aussie Angels 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. IRL events, real conversations, and the introductions that actually change things.

These are the girls who get it. And this is where they live.

02 — ANGEL OF THE FORTNIGHT

Meet Sophie Augyen. Sydney · Founder of MYRRAR.

What are you actually building right now? MYRRAR — an AI-powered beauty app that helps women understand their unique facial features and discover the looks, techniques and products that actually suit them. It started from a personal problem: most beauty guidance isn’t personalised, it’s just filtered product recommendations dressed up as advice. MYRRAR is building something genuinely different — real guidance, based on your face.

What’s the most unhinged thing you’ve done for your career / business / a dream? I tend to do things because my gut says it’s a good idea and it’ll work out exactly how I want. Latest example: I decided a makeup touchup station at a club would be interesting. It’s never really been done before. I wanted to do it, so I made it happen.

What are you gossiping about right now? Two things. One: the beauty industry is run by old white men who have no idea what women actually want — so they manufacture unrealistic beauty standards and sell them back to us as aspiration. Two — and I’ll let this one land — pretty privilege doesn’t exist. Under the patriarchy, being pretty is a punishment.

The thing you’re most embarrassed to admit you want? I’ve become pretty shameless throughout this journey, but here it is: my gut tells me MYRRAR will become a multi-billion dollar company that ends up on the NYSE. Said it.

What do you want the angels to find you for? Collabs with beauty brands, and honestly — help growing the email list. If you’re building in beauty, wellness or tech and see a way to work together, I’m here for it.

Where can we find you? @_myrrar · @sophieauyeung_· myrrar.com

Want to be featured? Reply to this email.

03 — WHAT THE AUSSIE ANGELS ARE MAKING

The output from this community right now is not normal.

→ Dr Diamond — Layla left her job at HiSmile to back herself on this one following the kind of serendipity moment you can't manufacture: she slipped the product into Hailey Bieber's hands in Sydney, and now her IG bio reads "as seen in Hailey Bieber's handbag." Iconic. Last week they launched in By Charlotte stores across the country with pop-up events — and if you were at our SXSW Aussie Angels meetup you might have got a sample early. They're currently sold out. I'm hoarding my tube. See the launch →

→ Cat Spanti — the Miu Miu video. Go. Right now. Cat has the best taste on the internet and I say that with full authority — she is the creative director behind KIT, her wedding style business, and she did all of my wedding creative direction and outfits. I am biased. I am also correct. Watch →

→ Cathy Karuga — took Yanneth to New York to launch her Aus made luxury fashion brand and documented the whole trip on TikTok. The kind of content that makes you feel like you’re right there with her — and a reminder that Australian women are building on the world stage, quietly and beautifully. Watch →

→ DomeFest — Sophie Greiner and Bella Filacuridi built Australia’s first podcast festival from nothing and it sold out. The mainstage lineup: It’s A Lot with Abbie Chatfield, Big Small Talk with Hannah Ferguson and Sarah-Jane Adams, The Psychology of Your 20s with Jemma Sbeg, Missing Perspectives, and Momentum with Kat Sasso. I hosted the Conversation Corner — six intimate live shows — and that’s where the real magic happened. And then there was Alison Rice. More on her below. Cannot wait to be back on a stage. DomeFest →

→ Modern Empress — I was in Brisbane and got to Jess Smalley and Andrea Clarke’s Modern Empress event and it recalibrated something in me. Andrea Clarke is a fierce leader and Adapt is the book you need right now — read it. The dinner is 16 women, a private room, a managed conversation about self-leadership, and you leave having made a decision with a commitment to act on it within 24 hours. Melbourne is next. See the diary. → andreaclarke.com.au

→ Kirby — is mentoring for She Codes and building our founder/tech matchmaking platform with me The Match Deck. Watch this space — and if you’re in Brisbane, go to the She Codes+ Showcase. See the diary.

→ Lucinda at Bayly PR — is in NYC for Ad Week. We’re living vicariously and waiting for the hot takes. Today she was in the same room as Emma Grede who said “I’m not a celebrity CEO, I’m a CEO that’s done so well you know my name”. Follow along.

→ Real Fine Studio — Eliza and Elyse are Brissy girls doing big things in LA and they’re back on home turf for a pop-up tour across the country. If you haven’t been following along, now’s the time — and if you need any more convincing, Meghan Markle was recently spotted wearing their signature puffy heart earrings. See the tour →

→ Perry Howell / Pilates Gang — I went to Perry’s event in collab with Spicy Pilates and Bloch Active and I’m obsessed with what she’s building. Fresh from LA where she was Head of Brand for Tinder and Paris Hilton, she’s now in Australia and building a fitness community that actually has energy. Bloch is back in a big way — I remember begging my mum for jazz pants, a wrap top, and those fancy black jazz shoes all the big girls wore. Seeing the brand have this moment is everything. Get to Perry’s events. Watch → · @pilatesgang_

→ Rolodex Conduit Dinner — Mufaro and Jade hosted at Otto in Sydney and I've got the most FOMO. Loved the takeaways they shared online after: women are not given the same grace as men when startups fail. A man fails and it's a learning. A woman fails and it follows her. That reframe, sitting over dinner with the people actively working to change it, is exactly the kind of conversation we need in Australia. Watch what these two are building.

Shipped something? Drop it in the chat. You might end up here.

04 — WHAT WE’RE YAPPING ABOUT

Coachella. Hot take: Traditional Coachella brand activations have been dead for ten years and Coachella 2026 is just the first time I’ve paid enough attention to confirm it. We’re in a global economic crisis. People are anxious. And brands are spending millions on tents in the desert for an $11,000 ticket crowd (yes I know this is the artist pass, but still). The whole thing feels manufactured at exactly the moment when people are craving something real. That’s not a brand strategy problem — it’s a values misalignment problem.

The activations that cut through right now are the ones that feel like they were made by someone who actually thought about it. Skylar Leah Kate’s sunscreen reapplication station. Hot Girl Pickles glow up recreating their ground up success from 2025. Small, considered, specific. Meanwhile Fayt did a Coachella-inspired event in Australia and we liked it infinitely more, because it was built for us.

The format shift worth paying attention to: brands this year moved away from massive influencer houses stuffed with thirty creators who’ve never met and don’t like each other, to something smarter. One anchor creator, they curate the guest list, and you get their actual friend group. Poppi did this with Jake Shane and Micky Gordon. Friend group content is popping off right now because it’s the closest thing to intimacy at scale. You’re not watching an ad, you’re watching people who actually know each other. That’s the direction. We’ll see more of this on social campaigns in 2026.

The Biebers. Justin headlined as “Bieberchella” and the people who were there for it were absolutely there for it. The moment that got me: mid-performance, singing Everything Hallelujah, he looked straight into the camera and called out Hailey and baby Jack. The online critics had thoughts. Hailey was “SO proud” and didn’t elaborate and didn’t need to. Meanwhile Rhode had a full “Rhode World” pop-up on-site and Justin’s SKYLRK brand ran a 10,000-square-foot Oasis activation. The Biebers didn’t just attend Coachella, they owned it from every angle. Rhode x Patrón — odd it wasn’t with 818, right?

Pinterest went offline. Their whole activation was phone-free, guests locked their devices in a secured pouch at the door and spent the time making custom charms, getting beauty touch-ups, building physical junk journals with stickers and lenticular photos. The question everyone’s asking is: when do we see the content? Maybe never. Maybe that’s the point. In a sea of brands paying to be seen, Pinterest paid to actually be remembered. I keep thinking about that.

Emma Grede’s new book. I saw Emma speak at NRF in New York earlier this year and it elevated my obsession with her to a new level. She is genuinely such a weapon — co-founder of SKIMS, founder of Good American, and someone who has built real commercial businesses with real foundations, not just a personal brand with a merch drop attached. The book lands different when you’ve watched her command a room. We’re all reading it. Book club incoming. Watch this space.

The ecommerce number that should change how you’re thinking: Australians spent $82.6 billion online in 2025 — up 14% year on year, with 24% of all retail now happening online. This is exciting, but here’s the context that makes it really interesting: Asian markets have been sitting at close to 80% online for years. Australia was stuck around 12% for a long time — and honestly, that’s still the reality for many of the billion-dollar retail brands I work with. We are finally catching up, and the gap between where consumers are going and where most brands currently operate is your opportunity. The Australia Post eCommerce Report 2026 just dropped and it’s essential reading. Read it →

Alix vs Alex. Not elaborating. You know where to find Soph Greiner on TikTok for a hot take. I’m waiting for Sofia to enter the chat.

05 — THE AI EDIT

Here’s what I’ve actually been doing with AI, because I think it changes things: I’ve connected my email, Slack, Salesforce, Asana and internal knowledge base into one interface - Claude (ok technically I’m using Kiro/Obsidian with a Claude backend, because #WomenInSTEM) - and I am now essentially working out of that single window. It sounds like a small thing until you realise how much of your day is just moving information between tabs. I have my Technical partner’s Claude backend connected to mine, so we have a giant shared brain.

My favourite workflow so far? I send a lot of partner and client emails. Every single one of those used to mean searching for context, drafting then going back into Salesforce afterwards to log it, update the contact, add notes. That’s all automated now. Email sent, CRM updated, done. And last week I sent 96 personalised event invites to Australia’s Retail C-Suite — each one written with context pulled from what I know about that specific client. Not a mail merge. Actually personalised. At scale.

The angels who are building businesses: this is the unlock. Not AI as a concept. AI connected to your actual systems, doing the actual admin, so you can focus on the work only you can do.

→ Arielle Thomas — the Process podcast dropped an episode on making AI actually practical. Bella from Pondd is featured with her pro tips. This episode is exactly what it sounds like: useful, not theoretical. Listen →

We’re going to keep talking about this. What are you building with it? Drop it in the chat.

06 — IN THE DIARY

No excuses. Here’s where we’re showing up:

18 Apr · Sydney — Hayley Westaby’s first female founder dinner and the response since she announced it has been something else — founders globally sliding into her DMs saying this is exactly what they’ve been looking for. 6–8pm in Darlinghurst. Special guest is Grace from @graceexperiments. A few seats left — DM @hayleywestoby to get in.

18 Apr · Sydney — Polly is hosting a private screening of The Drama this Friday via YSO Cinema Club. Devil Wears Prada 2 sold out in five minutes (of course) but she’s adding 30 more tickets this weekend. Tickets →

21 Apr · Melbourne — Networking drinks for women in taboo industries — sextech, femtech and everything in between. Hosted by Laura Blagys. RSVP →

21 Apr · Sydney — Aussie Angels IRL Meetup. We’re on, angels. Next Tuesday. RSVP so I can lock down the venue — coming solo is absolutely how most of us showed up the first time and it’s always worth it. RSVP here →

23 Apr · Melbourne — The Social Summit. A full-day conference for creators, marketers and brands at Rydges Melbourne — and it exists because angel Amy Dickinson willed it into being. Amy built this from scratch: 500 attendees, a genuinely stacked speaker lineup, and a room that brings together the best of social, content and commerce in one place. Angels on stage: Cat Spanti, Jordyn Christensen, Arielle Thomas and yours truly. Use code ANGEL25 for 25% off. Tickets →

27 Apr · Melbourne — LiftWomen Asia-Pacific Female Founders Grant Pitch Night. Two of our own — Rach Tucker and Stella RiceGirl — are pitching live to investors and VCs for non-dilutive equity. Go back them. Tickets →

30 Apr · Sydney — Blackbird’s Sunrise at Carriageworks. Lineup is stacked. Tickets →

8 May · Melbourne — Modern Empress Supper Club. Private dining room at QT Hotel. 16 seats. A dinner for women who want to be more deliberate about their life — you leave having made a decision and committed to acting on it within 24 hours. Book here → · DM @jess.smalley

23 Apr · Brisbane — She Codes+ Showcase. Kirby — one of our own, mentor for She Codes and building the Aussie Angels founder/tech matchmaking platform with me — is part of this graduation showcase celebrating women entering tech. Come support. Use code MENTORLOVE for tickets. Tickets →

13 June · Sydney — Vogue Codes Summit. Angel Maeva — founder of Bread Beauty — is featured, and the speaker lineup includes astronaut Katherine Bennell-Pegg. This one is genuinely special. Details →

Running something? Tell me. If it’s worth the angels’ time, it goes here.

07 — THE CAP TABLE

Co-founder opportunities, investment intel, and capital that’s actually moving.

Female founders: the number worth celebrating. Startups with at least one female founder captured 24% of total capital raised in Australia in 2025 — up from just 15% in 2024. The strongest result in years. The women making it happen right now: Grace Brown at Andromeda ($23M raise), Proseek Bio (Brisbane startup raises $1.5m to commercialise its ovarian cancer detection blood test), Understanding Zoe ($770k raised for AI platform supporting neurodivergent kids) — and plenty more coming. My money is on Grace Toombs and her work in healthcare.

The funding landscape right now: $1.41B raised across 54 equity rounds in Australia so far in 2026 — a 57% increase on the same period last year. Median deal sizes: $1M at Angel/Pre-Seed, $2.5M at Seed, $11M at Series A.

Angels pitching this fortnight: Rach Tucker and Stella RiceGirl at the LiftWomen grant pitch night, April 27, Melbourne. Non-dilutive equity. Live audience of investors and VCs. [Details here →]

Open seats — via Jade at Willis Global Family Office:

→ Death-Tech / Legal-Tech — Co-Founder & CTO — Technical founder to lead product development and own the roadmap. Multiple funding rounds under your belt, fast-moving, fluent in AI and automation. Joining a founding team of three. Gold Coast preferred, open to Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane. → willis.global

→ E-commerce Consumer Brand — Co-Founder & CEO — Ambitious operator with e-commerce and China sourcing experience. Own everything from ops and product sourcing to supply chain and logistics. Fitness-adjacent, not apparel or supplements. Gold Coast preferred, open to Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane. → willis.global

Have a co-founder role, investment opportunity, or funding news to share? Reply to this email.

08 — THE CLASSIFIEDS

The angels need things. The angels have things. Let’s sort it out.

→ Alison Rice has an open EOI for Serve — her mentorship program. I have to say something about this properly. In 2018 I used to walk home from KPMG listening to Alison’s podcast and cry, because I knew I wanted more for myself and I didn’t know how to get there yet. She was the voice in my ear when I was figuring it out. Spending time with her at DomeFest was full circle. If you’re at that point — or even if you’re not and you just want to level up — this is the one. → Expressions of Interest

→ Cheek Media — Partnerships Manager — Australia’s sharpest feminist media brand, and yes — you’d get to work alongside Hannah Ferguson and Soph Greiner. If you know how to build commercial relationships without compromising the editorial, this is the one. (I’m applying in secret. Don’t tell anyone.) → Apply →

→ Two Aussie brands doing cool shit here & in the US are hiring: SIR — Global Wholesale Manager → Apply → and Mode Mischief Studios — Marketing Manager → Apply →

→ Georgia McFarlane / The Content Files — the content editor who has been quietly levelling up video for some of the best creators in the community. If you need video services, she’s your girl. → @thecontent.files

→ Rach Tucker at Smooch — building a prize pack and needs a connection to an Aus-based lube or condoms brand. Spicy, yes. Also a real ask. DM her. @smooch.drinks

Drop your asks in the chat. We’ll make it happen.

09 — JOIN THE CHAT

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

Clarissa said it best: “Industry agnostic — just keen to yap and make friends with others building cool shit.”

200+ angels. Every city. Come find your people.

🔗 Join the Aussie Angels chat →

This fortnight: the serendipity gap is real. The right room, the right introduction, the right moment — Australia has been under-indexed on all of it. That’s what we’re here to fix.

See you in two weeks angels. 🤍

Brooke x

Hi angels 🤍

Not a newsletter. A love letter.

To the ambitious Australian woman who’s been quietly looking for her people - hi, we’re them. You’re not too late. You’re exactly where you need to be.

These are the girls who get it…

And this is the home of the Aussie Angels - born from the Hot Smart Rich community and now very much our own world. 300+ women across every industry, every city, doing the most and loving it.

I’m Brooke. I champion and showcase the women in this community - the things they’re making, the moves they’re shaking, and the events worth actually leaving the house for. Fornightly. No fluff. Just us.

A full re-brand of this Substack is coming, but I decided getting this out into the world was more important than a perfect brand mark. More on this to come.

In this issue you’ll meet Amy, celebrate Bella and the DomeFest moment, and get across everything worth showing up for this month. Let’s go. x

^^ Take a listen to my editor’s note angels.

02 — AUSSIE ANGEL OF THE FORTNIGHT ROUND 1

She’s the reason this community exists. Because I got very excited about this, you actually get to meet 2 angels this fortnight.

Meet Bella Filacuridi. Sydney · Co-founder of Dome and DomeFest, former CX consultant.

What are you actually building right now? Australia’s first podcast fan festival, DomeFest, happening this Sunday at the Hordern Pavilion in Sydney, come hang angels, we’d love to see you there! The whole day is all about connecting like-minded listeners and building new friendships around the shows we love (this community is living proof of that!). 10 podcast live shows with some of the most influential voices in media like Abbie Chatfield, Hannah Ferguson and Mamamia’s You Beauty and Jemma Sbeg’s Psychology Of Your 20s. In between shows think: debriefs over cocktails, DJs, food trucks, giveaways the works!

Specifically for the angels, a lot of us are meeting at 10:30 at the Rella brekkie meetup (for women in media, marketing, brand-building) - a great way to meet other angels & head into the day with a crew!

What’s the most unhinged thing you’ve done for your career /  business / a dream Quitting my consulting job, moving back home & convincing Abbie Chatfield to headline a festival where I have no prior event experience whatsoever x

What are you gossiping about right now? The rise of interest-media over social media, and seeing how IRL communities and intentional third spaces are following this same pattern. People are using interests as a social filter and cultural connector, we’ve designed DomeFest around that same thesis.

The thing you’re most embarrassed to admit you want? Not embarrassed (price of entry baby) but I want to grow my personal brand this year and be very intentional with it. Truthfully, it’s always an afterthought and usually the last thing on my list for the day, but it’s just become so much more apparent how critical it is to have one as a founder!

What do you want the angels to find you for? I’m always up for a spicy marg and a good yap with the girls. This community has been so generous and have backed Soph & I as we take a really big (BIG) swing, so if I can support you and what you’re doing, I’m all ears and love to bounce ideas. If you’re building in a similar space, have a podcast, see a creative way we could partner, don’t hesitate to reach out too!

Where can we find you? @bellafilacuridi, @domefest, @homeofdome

Want to be featured? Reply to this email. Don’t be shy — we want to know what you’re building.

03 — WHAT THE AUSSIE ANGELS ARE MAKING

The output from this community right now is ABSOLUTLEY WILD in the best way.

→ Arielle Thomas — our girl launched The Clubhouse — Australia's first community and event venue built around a podcast. Production studios, event space, brand activations and short-stay accommodation all under one roof in Surry Hills. This is what happens when a creative actually builds the space she wished existed. All styled by McMullin & Co. Genuinely one of the coolest things happening right now.

→ Sophie Hood — Seoul Tonic just landed on Revolve and we are not calm. Sophie founded the brand in 2021 with a third-generation Korean pear farmer and has quietly built it into one of the most interesting wellness brands globally - worn at New York and Paris Fashion Week, stocked across health and fitness, and now on one of the world's biggest fashion platforms. This is what building different looks like.

→ Jade Conner & Mufaro at Rolodex Media — wrote the piece on community that every brand marketer needs to read right now. The difference between audience and community, why most brands get it completely wrong, and - oh - they quoted yours truly in it. Give it a read.

Rolodex Media

Community is a buzz word

Written by Jade Conner…

Read more

8 months ago · 66 likes · 8 comments · Rolodex Media and Jade Conner

→ Lauren Kennedy — our angel has been in the US this week at NVIDIA GTC and Shoptalk, representing Verity AI on the world stage. She’s been sharing the whole thing on her stories and honestly it’s the content we all needed. Cannot wait for the debrief when she’s back. Follow along.

→ Mode Office - the best weekly newsletter in Australia, full stop. Adrianna and Maddi cover everything from boardroom moves to Oscars fashion to OpenAI drama, and this week's issue is extra special. They interviewed Natalie Barbu, founder of Rella, who went from $25k in the bank and two weeks from shutting down to $3M ARR. If you're not already subscribed to Mode Office, fix that immediately.

Mode Office

Boardroom Briefing: New CEOs, Oscars 2026, Another Rate Life

Dome Fest is this weekend. It’s all about bringing podcast communities IRL, creating a space to spend the day with your favourite hosts and a room full of people who just get it…

Read more

7 months ago · 1 like

Shipped something? Drop it in the chat. You might end up here.

04 — IN THE DIARY

No excuses. Here’s where we’re showing up:

27 Mar · Sydney — Trivia Night at The Ace, hosted by the girls at Pondd. Teams are assigned randomly so it's perfect for meeting new people — and if Remi and Bella are involved you already know it's going to be a good time. I went to the last round & it was epic. Free! → Tickets

27 Mar · Sydney — Soleil Soirée, International Women’s Day event hosted by Sophie Augyen of Myraar→ Tickets

29 Mar · Sydney — DomeFest — Australia's first ever podcast festival. 10+ live shows, music, food, community. Sophie Greiner and Bella Filacuridi built this from scratch and it is going to be unreal. Brooke is hosting a stage.

The Rella team are hosting a coffee & pastries meetup at 10am to kick off the day. If you’re in or interested media, marketing, podcasts, startups (Which I think TBH is most of us) this is for you (and if it isn’t you, please come anyway)!

Haven't got your ticket yet? The girls have given us 50% off the next 20 tickets purchased — code DOMEINSIDER → Tickets

23 Apr · Melbourne — The Social Summit. A full day conference for creators, marketers and brands at Rydges Melbourne. 400+ people, panels, presentations and workshops at the intersection of content and commerce. Oh and the speaker lineup? Absolutely stacked with angels — Cat Spanti, Jordyn Christensen, Arielle Thomas and yours truly are all on stage. Use code HSR30 for 30% off tickets (code expires 27 March so get in quick!!) → Tickets

30 Apr · Sydney — Difficult Women Doing Difficult Things. 40 women in a room. Tarot, gin, and real talk about real revenue — no pastel aesthetics, no manifesting without a sales strategy. Angel Gab Burke is one of the hosts so you already know the vibe is unmatched. 6:30–8:30pm at 169 Castlereagh Street. $97 tickets → Tickets

Running something? Tell me. If it’s worth the angels’ time, it goes here.

05 — THE CLASSIFIEDS

The angels need things. The angels have things. Let’s sort it out.

→ Ari at Athlinq just launched on the App Store and is looking for brands to join their Perks Locker — putting your brand directly in front of athletes from pathway talent to Olympic level. A discount code, product seeding or ambassador offer is all it takes. If investing in women's sport is on your radar this is the most genuine way to do it. DM Ari to get involved → @athlinqapp

→ Brooke & Kirby are building a matchmaking portal to connect Aussie angels with SheCodes tech graduates for projects — help us shape this by answering a few quick questions.

→ Coral at Coral & Co. Events is Melbourne's go-to for brand launches, influencer experiences and events that actually feel considered — her clients include Forever New, Glasshouse Fragrances and Kmart. If you've got an event coming up, she's your girl → @coralandcoevents

→ Laura Blagys is building The Baths — Australia's first female pleasure festival. Think Sexpo you'd actually want to attend with your girlfriends. Launching February 2027 and looking for follows, intros and women who get it. @meetmeatthebaths

Drop your asks in the chat. We’ll make it happen.

06 — AUSSIE ANGEL OF THE FORTNIGHT ROUND 2

She’s the reason this community exists. Because I got very excited about this, you actually get to meet 2 angels this fortnight.

Meet Amy Dickinson. Brisbane · Founder of The Social Summit and co-host of the podcast 1800-Chatline.

What are you actually building right now? My main hustle is The Social Summit - a conference for creators, marketers and brands! Our events bring together 500 attendees to learn about everything social media. Our next event takes place on 23 April at The Rydges Hotel and our line-up features names like Rachael Wilde, Sam Wood, Priscilla Hajiantoni, Lizzie Waley, Olivia Molly Rogers and our very own HRS angel Brooke Moody, plus thought leaders from Spotify, YouTube, Shameless Media + more. If you’d like to attend, use code HSR30 for 30% off tickets (ends 27 March!) My side hustle is my TikTok page @amzdicko and podcast @1800chatline

What’s the most unhinged thing you’ve done for your career / business / a dream? When we first launched The Social Summit I created a TikTok series, detailing a story about how I “won’t be attending my best friend’s wedding as she chose to have it on the same day as The Social Summit.” All lies - I just wanted to get the event date out there… and it worked - the post went totally viral with over a million views!

What are you gossiping about right now? MAFS, of course! That’s why I created my podcast 1800 CHAT LINE where my co-host Jayde and I unpack each episode. Also dying over the current Rebel Wilson scandal…

The thing you’re most embarrassed to admit you want? FAME, FORTUNE, AND A BOYFRIEND! If anyone has a hot brother they want to introduce me to, LMK!

What do you want the angels to find you for? Entertainment - follow @amzdicko on TikTok for unhinged dating stories, or listen to 1800 CHAT LINE for MAFS updates

Where can we find you? @thesocialsummit @amzdicko @1800chatline (all on both Instagram and TikTok) ❤️

Want to be featured? Reply to this email. Don’t be shy — we want to know what you’re building.

07 — JOIN THE CHAT

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

“I don’t really have anywhere else to share this, so I thought I’d post it here”

— Katherine, dropping her podcast These Are The Learnings into the group chat at 7pm on a Tuesday. This is exactly why we exist. Go give her a listen.

300ish Aussie angels. All of them doing the most. Come join us.

🔗 HSR global chat

🔗 Aussie angels dedicated chat

See you in two weeks angels. 🤍

Brooke x

Early one morning I typed: “any Aussies here?”

Six women replied. We had dinner. Dumplings, pinot, and the beginnings of something that felt important.

Six months later

Fast forward six meetups and countless late-night voice notes, and last week 50+ women gathered at Bar Tilda in Sydney.

At 8am sharp, flat whites in one hand, croissants in the other, the room buzzed. Founders, corporates, creatives - women scaling startups, climbing ladders, or leaping off them entirely.

There was no networking script. Just real talk. Wins and struggles spilled across the table. Intros turned into collaborations. Plans got made on the spot.

Emily Jean captured it perfectly: “a space that feels like a hug and a power move at the same time.”

And then Madeleine Kinchington floored me: “We couldn’t have done it without Brooke — the ultimate girl’s girl.”

That’s the best compliment I’ve ever had. Maggie built the podcast; I’m scaling the connections locally. I didn’t grow up with a space like this, so I’m making sure it exists for others.

Why it felt different

❤️ No “what do you do?” small talk - just “what are you building and how can I help?”
❤️ Every detail mattered - from the coffee cups to the setting, it felt curated, not corporate.
❤️ Generosity met ambition - zero gatekeeping, just women backing women.

From six at dinner to fifty at breakfast. Seven events. Three cities. Over a hundred women now connected.

This is how community scales.

What’s next

Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide are next - then LA + New York.

The numbers are wild: 1000+ women in the global chat, 150+ in the Aussie one. But the magic isn’t in the stats. It’s in the feeling when you walk into the room: oh, these are my people.

There’s endless opportunities for brands to get onboard and work alongside these types of communities, but above all my mission is clear - fiercely protect the integrity of the community. We’re by the angels, for the angels.

A personal note

If I could have a yap to 24-year-old me, crying in the office bathroom and wondering if she belonged, I’d tell her: one day you’ll walk into a room of fifty women hyping each other up over croissants.

Back then, I thought success meant doing it alone. Now I know better.

You don’t need to go it alone. You need your girlies - the ones who’ll drop a supplier contact in your inbox, DM you an investor intro, or sit next to you at breakfast and whisper: you’ve got this.

That’s the real flex.

👉 Come sit with us. Join the chat here.

This week’s hot recs

Buying: Went straight from Sydney airport to the Intersection Paddington for a quick shop. Picked up another Maiken tank from Henne in black, IYKYK and a pair of relatively skinny jeans which was a surprise to you and me both. I also haven’t stopped thinking about this brown/blue stripped college jersey from One Mile.

Listening to: The Debrief by Business of Fashion on why Gen Z isn’t buying Luxury’s story. With luxury shares tanking, I’ve been thinking a lot about the future of luxury brands. No answers yet but it’s top of mind.

Reading: She’s Always Hungry by Eliza Clark. This is a series of 11 or so short stories, on food, sex, gender and power - each story stranger than the next. The format is great for attention poor girlies. One weird little bed time story each night. I also loved her first novel Boy Parts.

Beauty fave: Acupuncture. For me (hormones/sleep), and my mini dachshund (spinal injury). Health is wealth. Beauty from the inside out, etc etc! Chinese medicine has CHANGED MY LIFE.

Manifesting: Expansive opportunities on my LA trip later in October. Currently seeking all must do LA activities please!

I feel like I need a better content production system so that I can keep myself accountable across all channels, particularly on here. If you have any tips for this please DM me. There has to be a better way!

Toodles,
Brooke x