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

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

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

the breakup nobody hands you a script for

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

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

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

Subscribe now

she was written into the whole chapter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Share

the version of me i’m becoming

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now

still, though

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

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

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

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

Hold your people tight enough that they feel it.

Brooke x

Leave a comment

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

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

Every city, growing weekly.

🔗 Join MOODY →

🔗 Follow MOODY on social →

Hi divas 🤍

Put me at an event with a lanyard on and I will happily pump out thirty five videos in a day. I don’t think about it, I don’t rehearse it, I just talk. Yapping publicly on LinkedIn has become genuinely easy for me, to the point where it’s now a professional part of my job.

Then I sit at my kitchen table on a normal Tuesday, think “I should film something today,” and it does not happen. Not once. The camera stays in my pocket and the thought quietly dies.

If it’s that hard for me, and this is literally part of what I get paid to do, then it’s hard for everyone. So this one is for the every girl, and I’m doing the reps right alongside you.

That’s the whole idea behind the Yap Challenge. Thirty days, one challenge a day, you film yourself yapping and post it in the group chat for feedback or on your socials if you’re feeling brave. You might never post a single one publicly. Completely allowed. The reps are what make you better, not the posting.

Subscribe now

I’ve paid for a version of this before. A few hundred dollars for a challenge that was, in the end, information pointed at me in one direction. No way to share a rough take, no one to tell me the first thirty seconds were dead weight, no room to actually get better. I didn’t finish it. Of course I didn’t.

So we built ours differently, and free. The workshop, the daily prompts, the group, all of it, no cost. The WhatsApp channel is going to be absolute chaos and that is exactly the point. Chaos means people are actually filming. It means real commentary, real feedback, and a room full of women helping each other tune a message instead of guessing alone.

Two thank yous. Britt from State of Brand, who put her hand up to run the kick-off personal branding workshop and get us clear on our message before we start yapping into the void. And Ari from Athlinq, who came up with the whole idea in the chat, which is the magic of that chat. Someone says a thing at 9pm and three weeks later it’s a program.

We kick off Tuesday 15 September, 6pm, with Britt’s 90 minute workshop, then straight into the thirty days.

You need no equipment. Your phone is fine. If you want to spend twenty dollars on a tiny lapel mic it will make your audio noticeably better, and I’ll drop links in the chat for the ones I use.

So, what would you actually say about your work if you weren’t performing it?

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

Let’s go, girls.

Brooke x

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

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

Every city, growing weekly.

🔗 Join MOODY →

🔗 Follow MOODY on social→

Share

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

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

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

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

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

The fluff-free version below.

Subscribe now

01 — Answering was never buying

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

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

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

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

Share

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leave a comment

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

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

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

04 — The audit

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

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

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

Four things decide it.

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

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

Subscribe now

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

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

05 — The bit where I tell you what happened

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

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

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

Watch what she buys.

Brooke x

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

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

Every city, growing weekly.

🔗 Join MOODY →

🔗 Follow MOODY on social→

Leave a comment

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

01 — THE MACRO

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

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

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

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

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

Leave a comment

02 — THE CHEQUE-IN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now

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

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

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

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

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

03 — THE GIRLS WHO ARE BUILDING

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

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

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

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

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

Share

04 — THE MARKETING NOTES

Three to clip and save:

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

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

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

05 — THE AI CORNER

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

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

Subscribe now

06 — THE MONTH, WRAPPED

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

See you in the chat 🤍 Brooke x

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

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

From Sydney to London. Every city, growing weekly.

🔗 Join MOODY group chat→

🔗 Follow MOODY on social→

🔗 We launched the directory. Want to be listed? Fill in the form and we’ll add you.

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

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

The anatomy of the thing

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now

This is structural, not a stunt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Share

Steal this, at any budget

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brooke x

Leave a comment

Instead it kept throwing itself over my shopping. Pop-over after pop-over, always in the way, never earning the interruption. I kept waiting for the moment of value. It never came. Stranger still, nobody else seemed to find it either. Not one “girls, this found me the dress for $40 less,” especially not in Australia. The only Phia news that ever reached me was funding news. When a product’s word of mouth is entirely about its cap table, that’s a tell.

Before we go further: this is not a dunk. Two young women built a consumer app, raised real money from serious funds, and got 1.5 million people to install it. I know how rare that story is, I spend my life trying to make more of them exist. But this week they landed in the worst news cycle of their lives, and the lesson is bigger than Phia. The product was never good. That was the signal.

For anyone who missed the hype: Phia is a browser extension that combs the internet while you shop, comparing prices across retail and secondhand to surface the right buy at the right moment. On paper, one of the most exciting startups you could back in the age of agentic commerce. Under the cover, an affiliate marketing business. Hold that thought.

The search was rudimentary. The price comparisons were often just wrong. App Store reviewers said out loud what I was thinking: “essentially a worse version of Google Shopping.” And yet the company kept getting more valuable. An $8 million seed. A $35.5 million Series A at a $185.5 million valuation, led by Notable Capital, Khosla Ventures and Kleiner Perkins, with Kris Jenner, Hailey Bieber, Sydney Sweeney and Khloé Kardashian on the cap table. 1.5 million users. 9,600 retail brand partners.

A product that mediocre doesn’t become worth $185.5 million on what it does for the user. The value had to be coming from somewhere else. This week, Bloomberg offered an answer.

What the investigation alleges, fluff-free

On July 9, Bloomberg published an investigation, backed by testing from affiliate-fraud researcher Ben Edelman (remember that name) and rival Capital One Shopping. In plain English:

Phia makes money through affiliate marketing, the deal underneath every “free” shopping tool: a publisher recommends a product, a user clicks, the user buys, the retailer pays a commission. The one non-negotiable rule is that the click is real. In Edelman’s words, the rules don’t allow fake clicks, simulated clicks, imaginary clicks or hypothetical clicks.

The investigation alleges Phia was faking the click. Shop at a retailer with Phia installed, even if you got there on your own, and the app could open a hidden tab and fire its own affiliate link without you touching anything. At checkout, its code could take credit for a sale it did nothing to create. In one Bloomberg test, clicking a Wirecutter link to Nordstrom triggered a background tab that swapped Wirecutter’s affiliate credit for Phia’s.

The industry calls it cookie stuffing. Any girl who’s worked a commission retail floor knows it by another name: the assistant who never served you leaning over the register to punch her staff number into your sale.

The fallout was fast. Impact.com, one of the biggest affiliate platforms going, suspended them. Phia told Bloomberg it was a bug in “a recent release,” now fixed. Bloomberg verified the fix.

And that would be the end of the story, if the receipts agreed with the word “recent.” Or the word “bug.”

Subscribe now

The part that made me sit back in my chair

Edelman published his full technical breakdown, test videos, code and network traffic included. This is where “unfortunate bug” gets hard to sustain.

→ Per his findings, the behaviour was a named, built feature: enable_coupon_auto_drop. It does what it says, drops the affiliate link with no user action. You don’t accidentally write a feature, name it, and ship it.

→ It shipped in December 2025 and ran roughly seven months, including the entire holiday season. That’s a lot of releases between “a recent release” and now.

→ It was switched on for iOS users only, off for Chrome. Edelman’s read: most affiliate-fraud testers test on desktop. Whatever the intent, the behaviour lived exactly where the auditors weren’t looking.

→ My personal favourite. Phia’s own telemetry logged an event literally named AFFILIATE_COOKIE_COMPETITOR_DETECTED when a user arrived via someone else’s affiliate link. It saw the other publisher’s claim, wrote it down, then took the commission anyway. It knew. It’s in the logs.

To be fair, and to be clear: these are allegations from Edelman’s testing and Bloomberg’s reporting, nothing court-tested, and Phia disputes the framing. They told industry bloggers Kris and Sarah they’ve been “reviewed and verified as compliant” by their affiliate networks. Edelman’s response, in short: networks can fail to find violations, they can’t certify the absence of them.

Subscribe now

Why “the UX was bad” was the whole tell

The cookie stuffing is the symptom. Here’s the disease.

When a consumer product is free, the business model is the product. Phia’s pitch was Google Flights for shopping: comparison, dupes, discount codes. But the revenue was never coming from you. It comes from retailers paying commissions, so every incentive in the building points at one metric: get the Phia cookie onto as many checkouts as possible. Not “find her the best price.” Not “make search good.” Get. The. Cookie. Dropped.

Suddenly the bad UX makes sense. The search didn’t need to be good. The prices didn’t need to be right. The extension just needed to be installed and present at checkout. The user was never the customer. She was the distribution.

It wasn’t the first signal, either. Back in November, NowSecure found an earlier version of the extension sending snapshots of pages users visited, sensitive ones included, back to Phia’s servers, well beyond what was disclosed. Fortune covered it, Phia updated the product, the news cycle moved on. But look at the shape: data overreach in November, forced clicks in July. Both are value quietly extracted from her browser while she thinks the app is working for her.

My rule: when a free product is bad at its job and still getting more valuable, follow the money until the maths makes sense. It always makes sense. Just usually not in your favour.

We have literally seen this movie

This movie has a prequel with actual prison time. In the 2000s, eBay’s two biggest affiliates were caught stuffing cookies at scale, one after collecting more than $28 million in commissions. eBay went to the FBI. Both men pleaded guilty to wire fraud and served prison time. The researcher who caught them? Edelman. The same man who just spent his July inside Phia’s code.

The modern sequel: PayPal bought Honey for $4 billion. In December 2024, YouTuber MegaLag accused Honey of the exact same two behaviours: hijacking creators’ commissions and standing down for no one. It detonated the category. Honey is still in class action litigation with creators including LegalEagle.

That’s what makes the Phia timeline hard to watch. Honey was the loudest story in this exact category, twelve months before auto_drop shipped. Everyone building a shopping extension in 2025 knew where the line was. The internet had just drawn it in permanent marker.

Now look at who pays, because this is the part that should make you furious. Publishers and creators. Wirecutter has journalists, salaries, actual costs. The girl doing affiliate links in her newsletter has rent. She spent months building the trust that made someone click buy. Phia’s contribution, per the findings, was a background tab.

Sit with the maths. A $185.5 million company with half of Hollywood on the cap table, allegedly taking checkout credit from women earning their first few hundred dollars online. The exact women it was branded for. The industry rule is called “standing down”: when someone else drove the sale, you back off. Every dollar taken by ignoring it comes out of a creator’s pocket, and this community is full of women building exactly that revenue line. This isn’t abstract. It’s your bag.

Don’t file this under American problems either. The same rails run our cashback economy: every ShopBack click, every “shop via the app” bonus is this exact plumbing. We know how fragile the category is, we just lost our homegrown player: Cashrewards, eleven years, two million members, switched off overnight last September in an ANZ restructure. A category built on trust deserves players who protect it. Not ones who treat the rules as optional.

Share

The agentic elephant in the room

Now zoom out, because this is bigger than one app, and this part is my actual day job.

AI already shops for you. Agentic checkout is live in Australia, with THE ICONIC, Adore Beauty, Bunnings, Kogan and Petbarn signed on. The whole premise: you delegate the click, the comparison, the purchase, to software acting on your behalf.

Here’s the law of that world: whoever holds the payment holds the trust. Old-way shopping distributed trust, you saw the store, the reviews, the price, the checkout, and verified every step with your own eyes. Delegate to an agent and it all collapses into one question: do I trust whatever is executing the transaction? You don’t see the shelf. You don’t see the comparison. You see the receipt.

Checkout stops being plumbing and becomes the relationship. PayPal didn’t pay $4 billion for coupons; it paid to own the moment money moves. UCP fights to keep the retailer as retailer of record for the same reason. It’s also why the Phia allegations are worse than skimming: checkout was the one moment the shopper couldn’t see, the moment she trusted the tool completely, and per the findings, that’s exactly where the value was extracted. The deal broke at its most sacred point.

Phia is the first big trust scandal of the shopping-agent era. Break trust anywhere and you lose a customer. Break it at the payment and you break agentic shopping itself, because delegation only works when the thing you delegate to is provably on your side.

Get the incentive design wrong now, while the category is young, and we’ll automate this exact behaviour at planetary scale and call it innovation. The agents are coming either way. The question is whose side they’re on, and the answer is written in the business model, not the brand campaign.

What I’d actually say to the founders

If Phoebe or Sophia ever read this: the comeback is available, and it’s not a PR strategy. It’s building the boring version of this company. Take credit only for sales you drive. Back off when a creator got there first. Make the product so good the commission is earned, not engineered. It’s slower, it looks worse at a board meeting, and it’s the only version of Phia that deserves the 1.5 million women who installed it.

For the rest of us:

→ If a product is free, work out who’s paying. Their interests steer the roadmap.

→ If a free product is bad at its job and still winning, that gap is information. The UX tells you where the value is flowing.

→ If you earn affiliate income, check your attribution reports from the last seven months, especially the holidays.

→ If you’re building with real money behind you: hot-cap-table growth pressure is exactly when “auto_drop” gets shipped. Decide who you’re building for before the Series A decides it for you.

The girls in that app deserved a product that was actually for them. The whole point of building for women is that she’s the customer, not the inventory.

So, my question. What’s in your browser right now that’s free, a bit bad, and worth hundreds of millions, and have you ever asked why?

Reply, I want to know.

Brooke x

Leave a comment

Sources: Bloomberg’s investigation, Ben Edelman’s technical breakdown, TechCrunch on the suspension, TechCrunch on the Series A, Fortune on the data collection, NowSecure’s analysis, Engadget.

It’s EOFY, tax time, the pointy end of the financial year. Quiet on top, busy underneath: rates held, confidence slipped, the headline raises looked huge, and the real action was in the small cheques. Fluff-free as always: what happened, what it means, and the so what for your money, time and energy.

a quick EOFY confession, because you need to hear it

I spent two days processing expenses and I want you to learn from my pain. I put through $22k of reimbursements I’d let pile up since February. Twenty-two thousand dollars, sitting in a company account instead of mine, earning me precisely nothing. Imagine that in a high-interest account or an ETF the whole time, quietly compounding, instead of decomposing in a folder of receipts because I couldn’t be bothered.

Three tax-time nudges. I’m not an accountant and this is a big-sister yell, not financial advice:

→ Claim expenses monthly, not yearly. Money parked in someone else’s account isn’t working for you.

→ If you run a business, the $20k instant asset write-off is permanent from 1 July, so a considered purchase is worth a chat with your accountant.

→ Book that accountant now. Their July is carnage, the good ones find deductions you never will, and they pay for themselves.

The math is the math: idle money is a decision, usually an accidental one. Right. On to June.

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.

Subscribe now

01 - THE MACRO

→ The RBA held the cash rate at 4.35%, its first pause this year after three rises in a row. The cash rate is the dial the Reserve Bank turns to make borrowing cheaper or dearer. A breath, not a turn back down.

→ The twist the headlines missed: reported inflation eased to 4%, but mostly because the petrol discount pulled fuel down. The measure the RBA actually watches, underlying inflation (which strips out volatile stuff like fuel), kept climbing to 3.6%, its highest since late 2024. The number that decides your mortgage is the quiet one, and it’s still going the wrong way. Translation: another rate rise in August is still on the table.

→ Consumer confidence fell to 80.6, a fourth drop this year, with households rating their finances 7.5% worse than a year ago. People are nervous and buying less.

→ Three things change on 1 July: the $20k instant asset write-off becomes permanent for sub-$10m businesses; the fuel-excise relief halves (32c to 16c a litre, about $11 more per tank, then gone by August); and a world-first law bans Coles and Woolworths from gouging on groceries, policed by the ACCC.

→ So what: money is expensive, underlying inflation is still rising, and customers are scared. If you’re building, grow without burning cash. If you’re backing or advising, favour the ones who can. Either way, make the runway (the months of money a business has left) stretch.

Over to you: does the permanent write-off change anything for you, or is it a headline that lands as nothing on the ground? Tell me in the comments.

Share

02 - THE MARKETS

A quick read on the big markets, because they set the mood your customers shop in.

→ Housing The national home value index posted zero growth in May, its first stall of the cycle, with auction clearances near 50%. Perth, Darwin and Brisbane are still throwing a party; Sydney and Melbourne have gone home early, down 2.1% and 3.2% from their late-2025 peaks. The budget’s proposed cuts to property-investor tax breaks could thin the crowd further.

→ Commodities (the raw stuff we dig up and sell). In Westpac’s June read, gold slipped 2.5% on higher global rates, copper jumped 5.6%, and iron ore ticked up 1%. Oil eased as the US-Iran standoff looked to settle, which should finally take some heat out of petrol and inflation.

→ Retail The twist: even with confidence in the gutter, discretionary spending (the nice-to-haves) actually rose 2.1% in May, led by clothes, cafes and travel. But that's one sale-driven month in a cautious year, Deloitte tips discretionary growth to crawl from 2.5% last year to 0.7% this year. Shoppers are out, but only when there's a deal.

→ ETFs (baskets of shares you buy in one trade, now how most people invest). The local market is on track to pass $400B this year, with over $5B flowing in a month. The every girl is quietly becoming an investor, one automated transfer at a time, buying the whole market instead of picking winners.

→ So what: the average customer’s house has stopped climbing, her petrol relief is fading, and her savings compound in the background. Wealth feels flat and cautious. That’s the mood the whole market is selling into, so value and trust beat hype.

03 - THE CHEQUE-IN

June’s money came shaped like a barbell: heavy at both ends, thin in the middle. A few enormous late rounds, a pile of tiny first cheques, little in between.

→ At the top: Airwallex raised US$320M at a US$11B valuation, up 37%, and Everlab took a $65M Series A for preventive health, with Pat Cummins on the cap table (the list of everyone who owns a slice). The cricket captain. No notes.

→ The spread underneath was wide: QuantX Labs ($7M, defence quantum clocks), DataMasque ($5.6M, realistic fake data so AI can train without exposing real customers), New Energy Transport ($5M, electric trucks), Flyweel ($2.41M, the money layer under ad spend), SavvyWise ($1.56M, AI for Australian tax), and Oscorp ($1.3M, AI robots pulling fire-risk batteries out of recycling).

→ Little guys, big backers: two Queensland teams off to Y Combinator at $700k each, Alloovium (construction AI) and Gutgutgoose (personalised probiotics), plus grassroots-sports teamwear platform Nardo ($1M, with Socceroo Tim Cahill on board).

→ One to watch: Nitrosend’s $700k seed, the Adelaide AI email platform from the Hartley brothers, who sent six billion emails at their last company before selling it. Second-time founders, back in the ring.

📊 Venture capital raised by Australian startups, 2019 to 2026 On track for ~$4.3B if the year holds this pace ($1.8B banked, ~$2.5B more expected). Up on 2025’s $2.9B, still well below the 2021 $6B peak. Source: Dealroom.co, updated 18 Jun 2026.

→ So what: the big funds are piling back into the safe, late rounds, which leaves the early-stage gap wide open. Early is where a community like ours makes the most difference, whether you’re building one of these, backing one, or cheering one on.

04 - THE GIRLS WHO ARE BUILDING

All-women founding teams still get about 2% of the country’s venture capital.

Two. Percent.

→ Dr Ariella Heffernan-Marks, Ovum. $4M seed after tripling her valuation, led by Admiralty Capital with Antler, Giant Leap, Brisbane Angels and the Alice Anderson Fund. She started it after doctors dismissed her own chronic migraines, and has built the first dataset that tracks women’s health over time: 60,000+ health insights, 113,000+ AI conversations, and partners already signed in Medibank, Fernwood, Sweat and Menopause Friendly Australia. Lived experience, real data, real distribution.

→ The fix to track: Minderoo put up to $8M into Startmate to back women, where 43% of companies have a female co-founder versus 24% across the industry. That’s what moving the number looks like.

→ So what: she gets backed at the start or not at all. If that 2% ever moves, it’s because someone wrote the cheque early, not five rounds later once she’s “proven” and twice the price.

Subscribe now

05 - THE MARKETING NOTES

Reaching customers split into two lanes this month: the free kind and the paid kind.

→ Earned (attention you don’t pay for): the creator economy took centre stage at Cannes Lions in June, 250+ creators on the ground with their own official track. The quiet admission from brands: they lean on creators because they can’t make enough good content themselves, and creators can. At home it’s heading past $1B this year. The shift that matters: from one-off gifting to ongoing partnerships, and from big names to micro-creators (10k to 100k followers) who convert because their audience trusts them.

→ Paid: retail media is advertising you buy inside a retailer’s stores, app or site. News Australia’s Suddenly launched one and signed BWS, 300+ in-store screens. Woolworths and Coles had this to themselves; now News Corp wants in, which means more ad space and higher costs to be seen.

→ So what: if you’re a founder with little cash, a few micro-creators in a real relationship beat one pricey celebrity post, and beat renting shelf space before you have loyal customers. Earn attention first. Pay for it once the maths works.

06 - THE AI CORNER

Two things to actually know from June.

→ Where the money goes: applied AI beats general AI. Every June raise solved one specific, painful job, Everlab on preventive health, Ovum on women’s health data, DataMasque on safe training data, Oscorp on battery fires. Nobody got funded for vague “AI for everything.” Whether you’re building, backing or betting your career on a sector, that’s the test: one real problem, solved better than a human can.

→ Where the customer goes: agentic checkout went live here, a first for our region. Agentic just means an AI that can act for you, like finding a product and buying it. Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol launched in Australia on 17 June with THE ICONIC, Adore Beauty, Bunnings, Kogan and Petbarn, feeding product and price data straight into Google so people buy inside Search, Gemini, YouTube and Gmail without visiting the shop. The clever part: THE ICONIC stays the “retailer of record,” keeping the customer and the loyalty. It gave up the storefront, not the relationship.

→ So what: discovery is shifting from “rank on Google” to “be readable by the AI.” If a product’s data isn’t formatted for an AI to understand and recommend, it gets skipped at the moment someone’s ready to buy. If that’s your product, or one you back or advise, get the data AI-ready now, while it’s still an edge.

Share

07 - THE MONTH IN ONE LINE

Expensive money, a flat housing market, a barbell of raises, a femtech that finally got paid, a 2% problem, and an AI doing the checkout. None of it gets fixed by the funds alone. It gets fixed in rooms like this, where the people who build, back, buy and consume actually talk.

See you in the chat 🤍 Brooke x

Leave a comment

Join the group chat on WhatsApp, jump in here.

Want in the directory? Fill in the form and we’ll add you.

Socials: @aussie__angels and @brookekmoody.

I had six tabs open this week that I could not close, and somewhere around the fourth one it clicked. They’re all the same story wearing different outfits. Everyone is spending more and getting less, and we’ve all agreed to call it a good time.

A celebrity gadget that’s all casting, no product. A festival selling human connection while drowning in AI. A 188-year-old department store finally handing a woman the keys to fix what it broke. Two cool-girl brands rattling the tin for cash. A European resale giant that slipped into the country overnight. And a tax-time sale that looks like a party and feels like a budget meeting.

Six stories. None of them connect. Lined up, they tell you exactly where the consumer is right now. Let’s go.

1. Kylie put on the Meta glasses and I nearly bought a pair

Here’s the upsetting part. It worked on me.

I have never wanted smart glasses. Never added them to a cart, never thought they were cool, never once felt them enter the group chat. Then Meta dropped its new line this week, quietly scrubbed the Ray-Ban name off the whole thing, and put Kylie Jenner’s name on the hero pair. The Meta Glasses by Kylie land at AU$629, a clean $160 more than the other two models at AU$469. What’s the extra money for? Almost nothing you can use. A little gem on the lens, a nod to paparazzi flashes. Metal nose pads so your foundation survives. A sparkling chime when you put them on. Kylie’s actual voice as your AI, “rise and shine” included.

And there I was at 11pm, basket open. An hour no good decision has ever been made.

Because the casting is the whole product. The tech is the same kit that’s been sitting there unloved for two years. What changed is who’s wearing them. Kylie’s been on a run: the soft, “real” turn on Jake Shane’s Therapuss (Session 120, the most-streamed episode in the show’s history), the courtside silly-goose era with Chalamet, the slow reveal of an actual personality. The campaign landed on top of all that goodwill and it just worked. No other Kardashian name-slap is moving culture like this right now. Get the casting right and the product barely has to turn up.

Then I get off the bus. Because it’s surveillance tech with a gem on it. The loudest take online this week was that a camera that doesn’t look like a camera should probably be illegal, and they’re not wrong. We say we’re desperate for connection. For IRL. For putting the phone face-down at dinner like grown-ups. And the most desirable object of the week is one more pane of glass between you and the person across the table, quietly clocking everything.

It sold me a more elegant way to ghost the people I’m sitting with.

So what does it say about us that the hottest product of the week is a better-looking way to leave the room without standing up?

Subscribe now

2. Why is everyone suddenly at Cannes

Cannes Lions used to be an industry thing. Agencies, ad men, rosé, rooms I had no real interest in. This year I could not stop thinking about it, and judging by my feed, neither could you.

More than 500 creators worked the Croisette, up from about 400 a year ago. Not the kids’ table “media channels” anymore. Strategic partners, with brands rebuilding the room to seat them.

But the glow-up has a crack right through it. Award entries fell roughly 25%, to 20,050 from 26,900. Leadership is calling it a “reset.” Generous. Last year, winning campaigns had their Lions stripped after agencies got caught using AI to fake the results. So the festival that just tightened its rules to punish AI deception threw its biggest-ever celebration of AI creative tools in the same week. Iconic, no notes.

Here’s the line that stuck. One agent remembered when spotting ad legend Martin Sorrell on the street was the celebrity moment at Cannes. That was the old power map: agencies, networks, holding-company chiefs. This year the room belongs to the people who walk in with the audience already attached, a community, a production style, proof people choose to watch them with no media plan forcing it. The power didn’t shift. It flipped.

Before you throw the parade, though, read what the creators actually said. One told the Washington Post his first Cannes felt like an “I made it” moment, then went honest: “I didn’t feel welcome, to be honest.” Cut in line, talked over, treated like a second-class attendee. So here’s the bit nobody says on a panel: the CMOs want the meeting, and the old guard still resents the dollars walking out the door with people who never paid their dues at an agency. Both things. Same beach.

And the detail I keep turning over. In a week absolutely marinating in AI, the rooms that were actually alive were full of creators talking about human connection, real storytelling, getting offline. The main stage sells automation. The crowds show up for the opposite. The smart brands clocked why: a creator partnership that reads as a cash grab or an audience rental now just fails. Authenticity stopped being the nice-to-have. It became the product.

Want proof of where the money’s going? It wasn’t a keynote. It was a handbag. Balenciaga used Cannes to become the first luxury house to join Substack’s new sponsorship program, sitting in the launch cohort next to Uber, T-Mobile and Polymarket, sealed with a literary panel at its Cannes flagship. Read that again. A century-old fashion house decided the place to plant its flag in 2026 is independent writers’ inboxes. Not a feed. Not a billboard. Not a sixty-second pre-roll. Influence moved from the algorithm to the email.

This is the bit I actually care about, so I’ll say it straight. The program lets creators with as few as 100 paid subscribers tap those same advertisers directly. One hundred. Brand money that used to need an agency, a manager and a media kit is now reachable by a girl writing to a few hundred people who actually read her. That’s the whole game changing. The gatekeepers didn’t open the gate. Someone built a new door.

So is this the creator economy’s victory lap, or the most expensive room in the world to stand in, get cut in line, and insist that human connection still matters?

Share

3. David Jones got a woman at the helm. Only took 188 years.

Erica Berchtold is the first female CEO in David Jones’ 188-year history. A department store whose whole reason for existing is the woman with the credit card, and it took until 2026 to let one drive. That’s a headline on its own. But the better story is her CV.

Berchtold ran THE ICONIC and was MD of Rebel Sport. A digital and e-commerce operator to the bone, handed the most analog format in retail at its most fragile moment. David Jones posted a $95.5 million pre-tax loss last year, sales down 8.7% to $2 billion, and her predecessor was shown the door under cover of a “planned transition.” Now she’s running the five-year INSPIRE30 turnaround: efficiency, margin, digital. A pure-play native, inheriting the cathedral.

Here’s where I get personal, because I live in the gap she’s been hired to close. The flagships are genuinely lovely now. Sydney, Melbourne, the level-seven shoe floor. Proof the in-store bet can work. But that is not the everyday David Jones. The everyday one is me walking into Queens Plaza and finding broken change rooms, nobody on the floor to grab me a size, nowhere to actually pay. The basics. Fumbled, by one of the biggest names in the country. You can refurbish a flagship until it glows. But if the local store can’t find me a size 8, the transformation is just a press release.

And she’s inheriting all this as the sector turns into a beauty arms race. Myer is going all-in, doubling its beauty offer, turning the halls into “worlds,” stacking up La Mer, Guerlain, Helena Rubinstein, chasing K-beauty and TikTok ranges to pull the younger shopper it admits it doesn’t have. Looks airtight. Then you check the maths. Only about 13% of beauty sales here happen online; 87% are still in a store, which is exactly why everyone’s racing into bricks and mortar. Yet Sephora, after all these years, sits at roughly 4% of online share. Mecca leads. Adore holds about 10%, and Adore is mid-rollout to 25 stores on about 2% margins, with a share price that’s slid from a $6.91 listing to around 36c. Big land grab. Brutal economics.

My first job was at Myer. The basement, youth fashion. I thought it was the coolest place a person could work. We didn’t have to wear Myer black, we wore our own jeans, and we’d burn mix CDs at home to play over the store stereo. The whole floor had a feeling. Mid-2000s, sure, and I was a teenager who thought a lot of things were cool. But it had something you cannot print on a planogram.

Berchtold can fix the tech. Myer can buy every luxury skincare house on the planet. But the real question for both is the one nobody wants to say out loud on an investor call. Can you merchandise your way back to cool? Or is cool the one thing a department store can never put on the shelf?

4. The DTC darlings go looking for money

Two of the most-watched direct-to-consumer brands went looking for money this week. Side by side, they’re a referendum on whether “born online and impossibly cool” still counts for anything once Wall Street walks in with a spreadsheet.

Reformation filed for an IPO, heading to the NYSE as REF. The numbers are hot: $507.1 million in revenue last year, up 15.7%, 20 straight quarters of double-digit growth, about 90% of it direct. That’s a real business. Not a vibe. But the profit line whispers the other half, net income more than halved, to $12.6 million from $32.6 million. It’s private-equity owned, and the filing opens with the brand’s signature wink (”Being naked is the #1 most sustainable option. We’re #2.”) before getting deadly serious about margins. The test: does the market still have an appetite for premium fashion that built its cool first and is only now sending the bill?

Subscribe now

Glossier, meanwhile, the original DTC sweetheart, raised fresh capital to fund “the next chapter of Glossier’s growth” and said almost nothing about what that chapter is. Which is the tell. Glossier was built on scarcity, community and one very specific shade of pink. Needing a top-up, and being coy about why, is a long way from the brand that had people queuing round the block for a cleanser in a pretty pouch.

Put them next to section three and the irony pours itself. Reformation and Glossier conjured cult cool out of nothing and now have to turn it into the kind of growth investors can model. David Jones and Myer have the scale, the floor space, the foot traffic, and are trying to buy that cool back.

Here’s my flag in the ground. Turning cool into profit is the easier trick. Reformation just proved it. 20 quarters. Cool comes with attention, and attention is the hardest thing in retail to manufacture. You can always staff a model better, tighten a supply chain, raise a price. What you cannot do is reverse-engineer the feeling that made someone queue. So I’d take the brand with the cool and the cash-flow problem over the institution with the balance sheet and the empty change room. Every time.

So which is the harder trick in 2026, turning cool into profit, or turning profit into cool?

5. Vinted quietly landed in Australia

No press release. No launch party. Just a live website and an App Store listing that turned up this week, ahead of the official July 1 start. Vinted, Europe’s recommerce giant, valued at €8 billion, is now trading here. Pointed straight at eBay and Depop.

The model is the hook. Sellers list for free, print a prepaid label, keep 100% of what they earn. The fee sits with the buyer. That’s the same structure that’s already forced eBay to drop private-seller fees market by market. But the smart bit is the exclusive three-year deal with Australia Post, parcel lockers, post offices, the lot. It fixes the one thing peer-to-peer resale always breaks on. Shipping that doesn’t make you want to give up.

And the timing is everything. 46% of Australians already buy second-hand every year, and the local recommerce market is tipped to hit US$6.75 billion by 2029. Read that against everything above. A department store fighting to stay relevant. A beauty arms race. A consumer trading down. Recommerce just stopped being a side hustle and became a channel with national infrastructure behind it.

So when the cheapest, coolest wardrobe in the country is everybody else’s wardrobe, what is full-price retail even competing against?

6. Tax-time sales: everyone’s spending, nobody’s enjoying it

Here’s the tell of 2026. The sale still works. The shopper just doesn’t trust it anymore. She buys, then feels weird about it.

EOFY is one of our biggest retail moments of the year, and it’s set to grow a limp 1.9%, below inflation. About 6.1 million Australians will shop, but the share planning to spend less jumped six points, and around three million who shopped last year are sitting this one out. The clearest signal is generational: the 35-to-49s plan to spend $1,464, less than both the under-35s ($1,946) and the over-50s ($1,993). The middle is the most scared, because the middle is the most exposed. That’s your K-shaped consumer in one line. The backdrop confirms it: Deloitte has discretionary spending growth collapsing from 2.5% to 0.7%.

Same anxiety in the US, different accent. Amazon stretched Prime Day to four days and it’s headed for a record, $26 billion, bigger than Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined. Yet the average order fell 17%, to $48.36. Bigger event. Smaller baskets. Fortune called it the institutionalisation of the panic-buy. The deals are thinner, people buy anyway, and more of it goes on Buy Now, Pay Later (about 44% of Gen Z).

Everywhere you look, the same split. Record headlines, shrinking receipts. We’ve trained a whole generation to never pay full price, and to only move when they’re scared prices will rise. Which works, right up until the discount stops feeling special.

Look no further than David Jones this week. Up to 50% off, plus an extra 20% off designer, with an extra 50% stacked on some categories. Not one discount. A discount on a discount. When half price has stopped moving stock on its own, the baseline has already broken.

So what happens to retail in this country the day the sale stops working?

If there’s a through-line, it’s this: cool is the only thing left that can’t be discounted, faked, or bought back. Everything else is on sale.

Which one are you still chewing on? Reply, I want to know.

Brooke x

Leave a comment

May was a big one — macro, raises and AI all moved. This is the fluff-free version: what actually happened, and the so what for where you put your money, time and energy. Here’s your brief going into June.

Aussie Angels is Australia’s answer to the serendipity Americans take for granted — the room where founders, operators, corporates and creatives are all in the same group chat, and it turns out they needed each other all along. These are the girls who get it.

01 — THE MACRO

The RBA hiked another 25bps to 4.35% in May. Headline inflation now tipped to peak at 4.8% in the June quarter (petrol, the Middle East, the usual). Markets are flirting with 4.7% by Christmas; CommBank is praying they don’t. Business confidence still grim (NAB -24). Consumer confidence ticked to 83 — still nobody is buying big-ticket items.

The one gift: the 12 May Budget made the $20k instant asset write-off permanent from 1 July, and lifted VC caps (VCLP $250m → $480m, ESVCLP $50m → $80m).

→ So what: borrowing is dear and customers aren’t stingy, they’re genuinely struggling — #cozzielives is real. Back founders who can grow without burning cash, and tell them to make the runway last.

Over to you: how are we all feeling about the small-business tax changes — permanent $20k write-off, bigger VC caps? Leave a note in the comments. I want to know if it actually moves the needle for your portfolio or your biz plans, or if it’s a headline that changes nothing on the ground.

02 — THE CHEQUE-IN

The boys raised $81m this month.

→ Ordermentum (Sydney hospo SaaS, 45,000+ venues) — $55m from Five V Capital. Boring B2B middleware always prints money. I’m just salty I didn’t do anything in this space back when Matt and I had this exact problem with our hospitality businesses.

→ Arkeus (Melbourne defence drone AI) — $25m Series A at a $100m valuation, led by QIC Ventures.

→ Lume (digital music platform) — backed by Lorde. Coolest cap table of the month, no notes.

Also worth clocking: a former Up Bank crew raised $4m pre-seed for Extraordinary Money (agentic AI for consumer finance, co-led Airtree + Triple Bubble). And ProcurePro pulled $15m for AI-in-construction.

YTD: $1.63B across 69 ANZ rounds, up 64.6% YoY. But rounds under $2m have declined four quarters running.

So what: rounds under $2m keep drying up, so genuinely good early founders can’t get funded. If you’re building, plan your raise around it. If you’re investing, that gap is exactly where angels do their best work — less competition, better entry price.

03 — THE GIRLS WHO ARE BUILDING

The number that keeps me up: in 2025, all-female founding teams got less than 0.5% of VC. Zero. Point. Five.

Three things worth looking at:

→ NSW finally launched its $4m Diversity Pre-Accelerator. UNSW Founders is running Impact X — free 10-week health pre-accelerator, scholarships cover childcare and travel (a novel concept apparently). Apps open 1 July. Newcastle’s FLIP NSW goes statewide backing 188 women founders, 50% reserved for regional. This is angel deal flow in 18 months. Track it.

→ UQ Empower demo day (7 May) — two to clock: Saipriya on RAPID (AI hospital triage — health + lived experience + real pain, the sweet spot). And Katherine building HomeHunter (one-stop rental search, big TAM, fragmented incumbents). Worth a coffee — DM the UQ Ventures team for intros.

→ Also keep an eye on Proseek Bio — Brisbane founder Michelle Hill just closed an oversubscribed $1.5m seed for OC-Triage, a blood test for early ovarian cancer detection. Up to 80% of suspected ovarian cancer surgeries are ultimately benign. She’s fixing that.

So what: women founders get backed early or not at all. If that 0.5% ever moves, it’s because someone wrote the cheque at demo day — not five rounds later once she’s “proven” and twice the price.

04 — THE MARKETING NOTES

Three things to clip and save.

→ Australian Made Week (18–24 May) — Andy Lee’s mockumentary fronted the 40th anniversary of the green-and-gold logo. 93% of Australians trust it. Free trust premium if your product qualifies. Consumer founders, take note.

→ IAB Australia dropped its LLM Prompting Framework on 20 May — aimed at fixing inconsistent AI use across advertising and marketing teams. The first vendor-agnostic playbook, built with Google, Adobe, News Corp and Reddit. The “everyone secretly uses ChatGPT” era is over. Read it before your next brief.

→ City of Melbourne’s “Melbourne at its most Melbourne” (Town Square × Zenith) — leaned all the way into winter apathy instead of fighting it. Masterclass.

So what: the thing people complain about most in your category is usually your strongest brand angle. Melbourne owned the cold instead of apologising for it. Find your version.

05 — THE AI CORNER

AI news this month, because it’s moving too fast to leave out.

→ Google’s Universal Cart landed at I/O (19 May) — one AI cart that follows you across Search, Gemini, YouTube and Gmail, hunts deals in the background, and can check out on your behalf via its new Agent Payments Protocol. Launch brands: Nike, Sephora, Target, Shopify merchants. The checkout rolls into Australia in the coming months.

→ Mastercard just ran Australia’s first agentic transaction — the agent-buys-for-you era isn’t a US thing anymore. 64% of shoppers say they’ll let AI help them buy, and a fast-growing slice never visit the retailer’s own site at all. My theory? Agentic shopping is fantastic for commodity or repeat items. Fashion? Luxury? Not so much.

→ Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 4.8 (28 May) — runs multiple sub-agents at once and works solo for longer stretches. The point for us: building software keeps getting cheaper and faster, so the moat is distribution, not code.

So what: shoppers are starting to ask an AI what to buy, and the AI only picks from products whose data it can actually read. If your listings aren’t structured for machines to find, they get skipped — even when they’d win on a real shelf. Tell every consumer founder or retailer you know to get AI-readable now, while it’s still a head start and not table stakes.

06 — THE MONTH IN ONE LINE

Expensive money, an $81m month, a 0.5% problem, and AI at the checkout. May was loud. None of it gets fixed by the funds alone — it gets fixed in rooms like this, where the people who build, back, buy and consume actually talk.

See you in the chat 🤍
Brooke x

Join the group chat. The conversation lives on WhatsApp — jump in here.

We launched the directory. Want to be listed? Fill in the form and we’ll add you.

Find us on socials @aussie__angels @brookekmoody

1. Why SXSW matters more than ever (and why you should be there)

There are few places where founders, marketers, artists, and AI researchers share the same coffee queue, and that’s what makes SXSW Sydney magic. It’s not just another conference; it’s the collision point of culture, commerce, and creativity. If last year was about discovery, this year is about deployment - how ideas move from panels to prototypes, from podcasts to real-world impact.

🧠 Agentic AI goes hands-on. Fewer “what is AI?” panels, more live demos, workflows, and results.

💬 Marketing gets practical. Expect sessions that show process, not just inspiration - prompts, pipelines, and proof.

🎧 Media keeps evolving. With Reddit & TikTok in the mix and a buzzing podcast stage, distribution meeting the message is the meta-conversation.

🇦🇺 Australia’s moment. Founders here are building for scale with clear eyes — watch the collisions between fintech, retail, health, and creative tech.

This year I’ll be on the ground across AWS activations and Hot Smart Rich community moments, catching the best sessions, side events, and people to watch.

2. How to SXSW like a pro (Brooke’s Playbook)

I was on the founding event team for Years 1 & 2 - so I’ve learnt a thing or two about how to actually do SXSW Sydney right. It’s equal parts tech, culture, and good timing - plan your week and then throw it out the window when the vibes take you down the SXSW vortex!

• ☕Anchor your day at the Exec Lounge: coffee, ignore emails, take quick resets between sessions.

• ⚡Follow the sparks: it’s okay to bail on a panel if the hallway conversation is better.

• 💬Say hello to people you don’t know - SXSW works when you engage with people outside your usual circle.

• 💻Talk to the demo teams: ask “show me what’s under the hood.”

• 👜Pack your kit: portable battery, water, charlotte tilbury lip oil & tote for the merch haul.

• 🧭Bookends > marathons: 2–3 great blocks beat 10 mediocre ones. Save energy for night events.

• 🥗Eat real food: grab coffee and bites in the Tumbalong precinct, book dinners early.

• 🎶Don’t be a square - and don’t skip the music: by Thursday, the tech crowd thins and the rhythm kicks in. Go support Aussie up-and-coming musicians — they’re often the best part of the week.

• 🧭 Use the SXSW Sydney app: for live updates, room numbers, and add-to-calendar links. Then close the app and look up - half the magic happens in the halls.

  

  Saying hello to new people was how I ended up on the Primeville carpet with the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City last year.

3. Your Insider Base: The Executive Lounge (Publicis × AWS)

📍 Le Checkpoint, high-traffic area near the Podcast Stage (ICC precinct) 🕓 Open all week

Your SXSW base — part workspace, part idea lab, part cocktail bar. In partnership with Publicis Groupe, AWS will host three speaker sessions and a two-hour evening cocktail event.

✨ Don’t miss: The Game — Agentic AI for Executives — a two-hour leadership cocktail experience exploring how Agentic AI will reshape industries. Think less PowerPoint, more power plays. Register here > 💻 Le Checkpoint: lecheckpointsxsw.com.au

✨Step inside the future of fashion: SmartStyle by AWS uses generative AI and real-time rendering to show how clothes look on you — instantly. Snap a photo, choose an outfit, and watch as the system builds a digital twin and short fashion video in seconds. A crowd favourite at AWS Summit Sydney and Gartner Symposium, SmartStyle returns to SXSW to showcase what’s next for retail, personalization, and customer experience.

4. Hot Smart Rich Aussie Angels at SXSW — Dinner with the girls who get it

HSR Aussie Angels: Rooftop Dinner & Drinks 📅 Wednesday 15 Oct | 🕡 6:30 pm | 📍 Jimmy’s Rooftop

A moment to debrief the panels, the big ideas, and the SXSW vibes — falafels, drinks, city views, and the girls who get it. Spots are limited → RSVP here. Bring your notes, your questions, and your best hot-take from the day. No SXSW ticket necessary.

5. Your weekly rhythm (Suggested)

Mon/Tue: Big keynotes + first-look demos. Walk the precinct. Wed: Deep-dives on the expo floor + HSR Rooftop Dinner. Thu: Customer experience + Agentic AI day + The Game cocktail event. Fri: Follow-ups, intros, and the meetings you promised yourself you’d book. Then a night out at Sydney’s best live music venues.

6. One last thing

SXSW isn’t about collecting lanyards — it’s about collecting momentum. Go where you feel curious, take notes, make one brave introduction a day, and don’t forget to look out over the view of Tumbalong park.

See you out there - I’ll be bouncing between sessions with an oat flat white and a tiny mic glued to my hand.

— Brooke

🔗 Follow: linkedin.com/in/brookemoody/ | @brookekm_

7. Session Guide

Your SXSW Sydney 2025 insider schedule - equal parts culture, chaos, and caffeine should give you the perfect SXSW experience!

Monday 13 October

🎤 11:00 AM — SXSW Sydney Opening Ceremony Culture & Lifestyle | Smoke, song, and the collective inhale that marks the start of the week. Tumbalong Park sets the tone.

🎧 1:00 PM — From Passion to Paycheck: Cracking the Creator Economy Media & Creator Culture | Creators, platforms, and paydays — the evolution from side hustle to full-stack brand.

💅 2:30 PM — The Future of Style in Motion (Hosted by Marie Claire) Fashion & Culture | The gloss and grit of the new fashion economy — AI stylists, digital runways, and a generation remixing identity.

🧠 3:15 PM — Navigating the New Age of E-Commerce AI & Retail | How automation, attention, and authenticity can coexist in the algorithmic mall.

🤖 4:30 PM — How AI Agents Are Changing the Creator Game AI & Innovation | Meet your new creative partner: a bot that brainstorms faster than your team — and maybe better.

🍸 5:00 PM — Tech & Innovation Opening Party (Presented by Accenture) Networking & Innovation | The unofficial first toast. Ideas get louder after dark.

Tuesday 14 October

🧠 8:30 AM — Hallucinate to Innovate AI & Innovation | Ben Moir (AWS) on turning generative chaos into tangible creation. AI as muse and maker.

🎭 10:00 AM — Main Character Energy Culture & Identity | When everyone’s the protagonist — the psychology of self-branding meets the algorithm.

💬 11:30 AM — The Cost of Customer Lies Marketing & Behaviour | Decoding the gap between what audiences say vs do — and the price of believing them.

⚙️ 1:45 PM — Operating as an AI-Native Business: Inside the Future of Work Future of Work | Daniel Palmer (Relevance AI) on re-architecting orgs around automation — not fear.

🎬 3:00 PM — Beyond Reality Live: Behind TV’s Most Addictive Shows Media & Storytelling | Streaming as sociology — what our binge habits reveal about us.

💅 5:00 PM — AWS SmartStyle Demo Launch @ Le Checkpoint Fashion Tech | AI mirrors, digital twins, and instant runways. Fashion gets its neural-network moment.

🍸 6:30 PM — Evening Drinks @ Le Checkpoint Networking & Ideas | Where execs, creatives, and founders swap notes before day two resets the pace.

Wednesday 15 October

⚙️ 9:00 AM — Work in 2035: Moving from Zoo to Jungle Future of Work | The survival guide for hybrid workers — less control, more curiosity.

💬 11:00 AM — The AI Revolution in Marketing Ethics Marketing & AI | Automation meets morality — who’s accountable when the algorithm writes the brief?

⚡ 1:45 PM — Leadership in the New Era of (AI) Marketing Leadership & AI | Jackie Hill (Canva) on creative courage — how to lead when machines can brainstorm.

⚡ 3:30 PM — How to Be a Manager People Want to Work For Leadership & Culture | Less LinkedIn-speak, more human. Practical empathy as competitive edge.

💅 5:00 PM — Fabrics of Modern Australia Runway Show Fashion & Design | The country’s creative identity on display — threads of heritage and futurism.

🍸 6:30 PM — Hot Smart Rich Aussie Angels Dinner & Drinks Community & Connection | Rooftop air, falafels, and big-idea debriefs with the girls who get it. Jimmy’s Rooftop.

Thursday 16 October

🧠 8:45 AM — The Future of Agentic AI AI & Automation | Machines that act on intention, not instruction — frontier thinking for founders and operators.

🤖 11:00 AM — Inventing Tomorrow’s Customer Experience with Agentic AI Tech & Customer Experience | David Hyman (Lendi) on AI that listens, learns, and leads.

🌍 1:00 PM — Ethical Tech and the New Normal Sustainability & Society | Innovation without exploitation — tech’s conscience check.

🛍️ 2:15 PM — AI in Retail: From Personalisation to Prediction Retail & AI | How data turns into desire — and where to draw the creepy line.

💬 4:00 PM — Stories Beat Data — Every Single Time Marketing & Storytelling | Why gut still wins over graphs — a love letter to intuition.

🍸 5:30 PM — The Game (Agentic AI for Executives Cocktail Event) Leadership & Innovation | AWS’s signature night — Agentic AI meets strategy (and champagne).

🎧 8:00 PM — SXSW After Dark @ The Checkpoint Sessions Music & Culture | Live sets, late debates, and the kind of networking that only happens after 8 PM.

Friday 17 October

⚙️ 9:00 AM — The Future of Australian Innovation: Next Gen Builders Entrepreneurship & Policy | Start-up stamina and sovereign tech — what building locally really looks like.

💬 11:00 AM — Women Redefining Work Leadership & Equality | A sharp conversation on ambition, burnout, and designing balance on your own terms.

🎧 1:00 PM — The Creator Economy — Act II Media & Monetisation | Algorithms evolve, audiences fragment — the next playbook for sustainable creativity.

🎤 3:00 PM — Closing Reflections: Building What Lasts Culture & Purpose | Final wisdom before the espresso martinis — ideas that stick beyond the week.

🍸 5:00 PM — SXSW Sydney Wrap Drinks @ Le Checkpoint Community & Wind-Down | One last toast to ideas that deserve to live past the lanyard.

Eight months later? Spoiler: still no Substack.

Why? Because 2025 hit me with full-on total burnout chaos. I sold a business (takes way longer than planned), got sick twice, survived a major car crash (still stuck in analysis paralysis on buying a new car), kept up treatment for my dachshund’s spinal rehab, and to top it all off, broke my arm.

Somewhere in the chaos, I also quit the pill to try and balance my hormones - a total rollercoaster ride. The routines that usually keep me sane? Tossed out the window. Instead, I mastered bed rot, doom-scrolling, drinking way too much, and crying *all the time*. The worst version of me showed up daily. Despite some amazing wins sprinkled in, I couldn’t even appreciate them - too buried in the burnout to notice.

August was my breaking point. Meltdown central.

Now, here I am in Bali, trading brain static for ocean waves, trying to figure out how to get back to me. Yes, it’s very Eat, Pray, Love, but at the ripe old age of 34, I’ll swear by the sun/sea magic combo to fix all manner of things.

After the psychic, I’ve also had a palm reader and a tarot reader tell me the same thing - my creative energy is huge, just seriously repressed. There’s something to be said here for keep asking the same question and getting the same answer. No wonder I’ve been feeling stuck.

Tech in 2025? It’s an endless white-knuckle ride. AI concepts drop weekly and if you’re not an instant expert, you’re already behind. On top of that, the industry’s choking on wave after wave of layoffs. Everyone’s nervous, job security’s a myth and optimism is on life support. The news? A relentless, anxiety-spiking circus ready to send me into a spiral every time I hit refresh.

So what’s the play? I went full-on digital detox, no socials, no doom scroll, for about four days. Then day five, back to 5 a.m. screen time. Breaking a phone addiction? Turns out it’s hard. Did you know the consumers now scroll on average 2 miles per day?! I don’t know what that is in KM but it feels like a lot.

Reset doesn’t come in a detox app or a no-phone rule. It’s in the tiny wins. Like forcing myself out of bed, swapping the iphone for an actual book (yes, the old paper kind), and reclaiming silence without that itchy panic that I’m missing something.

Pool chair politics have replaced TikTok become my latest obsession. I’ve been watching it all unfold like a reality show and inventing full-on White Lotus style storylines for the fellow guests.

YES to protecting my energy, NO to every distraction dripping for my attention. Tiny wins in the age of info-overload feel nothing short of revolutionary.

What I’m gossiping about

Sunscreen gate. Now, I’m not here to throw shade at these brands - I genuinely love Ultraviolet and Naked Sundays and am in awe of what they’ve achieved. I’ve been slathering their stuff exclusively for 3 years (RIP my melasma). So yeah, this sunscreen scandal stings a little more than it should. Independent tests showed SPF ratings as low as 4. Basically, sunscreen or baby oil? Tough call. And it’s not just them, multiple labels (so far 17 have pulled products from the market) using the same white-label formula are scrambling. The quick white-label shortcut? Looks like it is dead as a strategy.

The way it’s been handled? A lot of denial, deflection, and excuses before maybe some independent testing. Sub-par doesn’t even begin to cover it. Consumers want honesty and accountability. Brands, your credibility is on the line, and trust me - it’s not endless.

Hot recs

Buying: A gorgeous polka dot dress by Cielle, a Bali brand designed by two sisters. Another halter style brown dress from Bec & Bridge and a blue one from Sir. Resisting the urge to buy ‘aquatic holiday jewellery’ (as Matt calls it). Eyeing a studded brown suede tote bag at the local stores. Considering if the studded totes are already over and if I’m too late to jump on the trend. Picked up some great holiday looks from Cotton On of all places. Will do a full Bali outfit post later.

Listening to: Nothing. Cold turkey off the pods this week. Trying to buy some brain space back as I’ve realised I’ve become uncomfortable in silence.

Reading: A lot, because books are better by the beach. The Maid by Rita Prose (a pleasant blind date with a book), The Tell by Amy Griffin (excellent but I’ve DNF’d this for now as it was killing my holiday vibe), Hot Milk by Deborah Levy (recommended by the epic HSR angel Georgia).

Beauty fave: Kevin Murphy Supergoo Rubbery Sculpting Gel. This has changed the game for beachy slick-back hair. No muss, no fuss, a perfect slick every time and rinses out with water alone.

Manifesting: My next vacay.

So here we are - a psychic’s nudge, a tropical reset, and plenty of hard-earned lessons later. No magic fixes. Just the sometimes uncomfortable work of showing up for yourself.

This Substack will be a blend of whatever’s on my slashie mind: marketing, branding, tech, retail, culture, consumer gossip, community, and shining a light on some of the remarkable Hot Smart Rich angels I’m lucky enough to meet.

Brooke x