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

Shelf space is media

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

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

Amazon is offence

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

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

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

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

Let the machiene do the boring bits

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

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

Taste is the moat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forward this to one girl who’d get it.

Brooke x

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 →

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

If you only take five things out of it:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brooke x

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

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

Every city, growing weekly.

🔗 Join MOODY →

🔗 Follow MOODY on social→

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

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

New episode is live.

Subscribe now

Six reasons to listen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thirty-seven minutes. Go listen.

Brooke x

Share

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

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

Every city, growing weekly.

🔗 Join MOODY →

🔗 Follow MOODY on social→

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

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

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

And he did. New episode is finally live.

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

Subscribe now

First, a confession.

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

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

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

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

Six reasons to watch.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

His answer to that is the whole episode.

Twenty-six minutes. Go watch.

Brooke x

Share

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