01 - THE MOOD
Hi divas 🤍
Arielle, Jordyn and I were talking last week about the death of self in order to become the next version.
Dramatic. Using it anyway. When you’re building something, there’s a stretch where the version of you everyone already knows has to die before the version you’re becoming turns up. Nobody warns you that the gap between those two women is where you spend most of your time. You’re not who you were. You’re not yet who you’re going for. You’re just in it, making decisions nobody claps for, explaining yourself at dinners, quietly wondering whether this is conviction or delusion.
It’s the loneliest chapter of the whole thing. It’s also the one nobody posts about.
I’ve been in it myself lately. It’s like my shoes have gotten too small. I know I’m getting new ones, I just don’t know which pair yet, so I keep trying them on. Too small. Too big. Too shiny. Not the right style.
And I keep having to remind myself that the trying on is the work. It’s reps. A thousand of them before you’re good at anything, and not one of them is worth posting. The reps you do in private are the only thing that builds the muscle. In business, in creativity, in life.
It’s also not lost on me that I reached for shoes. Fashion is where I’ve worked a lot of this out, because trying on versions of yourself is so much easier when it’s literally clothes, and considerably more fun.
Which is not a small thing in my family. Mum was Miss Australia in the eighties, my sister Lauren modelled professionally for a decade, and I had a brief, extremely 2013 stint in fashion PR launching Net-a-Porter and Country Road Home here. So I have never thought about how we dress as decoration. It’s what decides the energy you carry into a room, and it counts for most in exactly the transitions I’m describing.
Three women have done that for me this year. Cat Spanti got me through the wedding and found my bride personality, which turned out to be confident and loud with permission to be soft and a little silly. Shannen Thomas at Désordre has styled me for everything from Domefest to our launch party, including that 6kg bedazzled dress and helped me find my hosting identity. And I always come back to Lauren, the other MOODY sister who has the most complete sense of self in how she dresses of anyone I know.
Which is why she is now our fashion editor. More from her below.
Two weeks ago we put 150 of the most ambitious women in this country in one room in Sydney. What I felt, standing in the middle of it, was that nearly every person there was in that exact chapter. Different businesses, different cities, same gap. All of them further into the discomfort than they’d ever admit online.
And it isn’t a big-room thing. This weekend twenty of us sat down for coffee and croissants in Brisbane and it was exactly the same feeling, just quieter.
That’s the whole thing. That’s why this exists. You don’t get out of the lonely chapter by being tougher. You get out of it by standing in a room where nobody needs it explained to them.
I love us. I’m so fucking proud of us.
02 - THE READ
CONSUMER & RETAIL
Australians say they’re broke. Retail just hit $40 billion a month.
On Monday JB Hi-Fi fell 13%, closing at $71.65 from an $81.72 open, comparable sales down 1.4% in the first four weeks of the financial year. eToro’s read: three rate hikes, the consumer is under pressure. Every headline in the country ran with it.
Three days later, Roy Morgan forecast Australian retail past $40 billion in a single month for the first time in history. Up 6% year on year. Household goods up 8.8%.
Both true, same week. The money didn’t leave, it moved. And JB’s problem is a supply problem as much as a demand one, because chipmakers are prioritising AI infrastructure, so tech stock got scarcer and dearer at exactly the moment shoppers went hunting for value.
→ “Sentiment is bad” is a headline, not a strategy input. Where the spend actually went is the input, and this month that’s household goods, hospitality, and whoever ran the promotion.
Your bank wants to be your loyalty program. CommBank expanded Yello across home loans, savings, cards and insurance. → Which is why I keep saying don’t build a loyalty program. The bank has your entire financial life. You cannot out-point them.
Spotify and Depop are collaborating. Music discovery meets secondhand fashion discovery. → Nobody is selling a product here, they’re selling the same taste in two places. If your customer’s taste travels across categories, your collab list is longer than you think.
BUSINESS & INVESTING
Blackbird closed a billion dollars. Fund six, targeting $1.2bn. Their 2022 fund was the biggest VC raise in Australian history. → A closed fund is a deployment schedule, not a vibe. And in the same week they went hiring a brand storytelling and community lead, which tells you what they think creates deal flow.
BÉIS sold for $210 million. Alex Cooper’s Unwell is shutting down. Same week, same question: can an audience be turned into a brand? Shay Mitchell’s answer was yes. Alex Cooper’s was no, and Cooper has the bigger audience of the two, so size isn’t the variable. → The variable is in the multiple. BÉIS made around $210m in a year and sold for around $210m, so roughly one times revenue. Hailey Bieber’s Rhode, doing comparable revenue in skincare, was valued at a billion. You buy skincare every six weeks and luggage every five years, and that one fact is the entire gap. Category choice is a valuation decision, not a passion one. → Separately, count the coverage the Unwell shutdown got against everything Cooper has actually built. We are so much faster to report an ending.
In our chat: Holly asked who’d moved their super to Vanguard and it turned into one of the most useful threads we’ve had. Bonnie’s adviser moved her to HostPlus and the maths came out at nearly half a million extra over 20 to 30 years. From filling in a form. Then Holly admitted she’s far too tech heavy and it worries her, and I admitted I’m about 95% tech.
→ We back what we understand, and we understand what we work in. Concentration risk is the quiet one.
TECH & AI
Canva lost $11 billion. Blackbird and Airtree cut their mark 17%, employee shares cut 20%, growth forecast down from 30% to 20%. Melanie Perkins: the cost of serving an AI task was too high. → Everyone called it AI beating Canva. It’s a margin story wearing an AI story’s coat, and every one of you shipping an AI feature is running the same equation at a smaller scale.
In our chat: the Tech + AI room is new and it is already the most technical space we have. Jess Jackson is building agents that own a department and report to each other like an org chart, Claude Code in VS Code hooked into Shopify, Notion spitting out her weekly work plan. She’s stuck on autonomy and asked the room for help instead of posting it as thought leadership. Ananya works on AI interpretability and reliability and will be in Sydney for NeurIPS in December. Andrea has started a tech and AI Substack for us. SJ runs enterprise AI transformation and wants a Melbourne crew, over matcha, coffee or oysters.
→ Every one of them introduced themselves by what they’re building, not what they do. That’s the difference between a channel and a room.
HEALTH & BEAUTY
Three of these are the same story: how fast this category is monetising, and how slowly the rules are catching up.
A free TikTok trend is now a $59.99 product. EZZ launched a daily powder off the viral cortisol cocktail. → The demand gen was done for nothing by women on TikTok. If people are copying your format uninvited, someone is eventually going to put a barcode on it.
Kim Kardashian is selling broccoli. Partnered with Broc Shot. → Ingestibles are where beauty margin went. Lower regulatory bar than skincare, higher repeat purchase, claims you never quite have to prove.
Sunscreen gate isn’t over. Ultra Violette has sent customers another update. The TGA investigation is still live. → And here’s the bill for the two stories above it. When a category sells faster than it can substantiate, the regulator eventually turns up. Trust never shows on a balance sheet, which is why brands only find out what it was worth after they’ve spent it.
Postpartum care is going national. Senator Marielle Smith wants an inquiry covering birth trauma, mental health, breastfeeding and allied health access. → An inquiry is a market signal as much as a policy one. It documents the gaps in public, with evidence, for free.
MEDIA & THE CREATOR ECONOMY
Sophia Begg fronts Glassons’ premium collection You may better know her as Sopha Dopha. A creator getting a campaign is old news. A mass retailer using one to sell up is not. → Creators carry aspiration now, and aspiration is the expensive part.
In our chat: Rachel shared a piece on keeping things private and Kayla landed it: a personal brand doesn’t have to be every waking moment of your life. → The market is paying more for creators than it ever has. The price of admission is climbing at the same rate and nobody prints that number.
Influencer weddings are a marketing platform. Paige Paul and Acquired Style both in the past fortnight. → The only content format with a guaranteed audience, a fixed date and unlimited brand slots. Of course it got productised. Slightly grim. Extremely smart.
Earle Meets World. The trailer landed this week, Netflix drops it 4 September. Alix Earle, 13 million followers, a reality series about a content creator making content. → The old path was influencer to sponsorships. The new one is influencer to media asset, and Netflix is now buying audiences instead of building them. Alix gets the platform and the cheque. Netflix gets 13 million people it didn’t have to earn. Decide which of those you’d rather own.
And it was the hottest topic at Miss Double Bay trivia last week, where Sophie Greiner and Jordyn Christensen got into a heated debate about it. This is the level of discourse we’re operating at.
03 - THE STYLE EDIT
Hi divas, I’m Lauren. Among many other things, your MOODY fashion editor.
I’m a chronic overdresser, an obsessive outfit researcher and deeply susceptible to beautiful things, weird things and things that make absolutely no practical sense but somehow make perfect emotional sense.
I’m not interested in finding one neat aesthetic and sticking to it, and that probably traces back to spending my most formative years modelling, living as someone else’s creative canvas. A chameleon. I was dressed as a hundred different women before I’d worked out who I was, so I’m not especially interested in being told which one I’m supposed to be now.
Those years also taught me how much I love the hunt. Alone in foreign cities between castings, digging through consignment stores, vintage basements and the IYKYK places you only find because someone whispered the address to you. Learning to look properly. To spot the thing with history, the thing everyone else missed, the thing worth carrying home in an already-overweight suitcase. I want to build an archive, not a perfect wardrobe.
So that’s the energy I’m bringing. Taste over trends. Curiosity over rules. Discovery over consumption. Not just what to buy, but how to notice.
And this month? Work hard, party harder.
MOODY launches, packed calendars, late nights and very little interest in dressing appropriately for any of it. I want my tailoring sharp, my lace a little indecent and absolutely nothing sensible. We’re wearing sheer in daylight, suits that mean business and pieces that make people stop and ask questions.
Obviously, we don’t gatekeep here. No must-haves. No trend forecast. No fucking capsule wardrobes.
Only lust-haves and vibes. Take it or leave it, divas. Fashion is a choice, not a crisis. Make it fun.
Lauren is available for personal styling, whether you have an event or big meeting coming up or need a full wardrobe refresh. lauren@getmoody.co
04 - THE DIARY
Six cities this week, and on Friday we’re in two of them at once on opposite sides of the planet, and I’m running neither. That’s the part I want you to notice.
First, the big one. Wed 9 Sept, the MOODY Melbourne launch party. Our biggest night of the year. Co-hosted with Melbourne city leads Lauren, Sarah and Udoka. Nearly 100 of you are registered and there is a capacity number I am going to hit. Get your name down, sort the logistics later. Register →
Tue 25 Aug, Gold Coast. MOODY Gold Coast at Bam Bam Bakehouse, Mermaid Beach. Coffee, matcha, bagels, no panels, no pitches. Georgia and me. RSVP
Wed 26 Aug, Sydney. MOODY Business Book Club, first ever session, 7pm at Four In Hand, Paddington. Sylvie of Unicorn Cart hosting, reading From The Ground Up by Bree Johnson and Jess Hatzis. Full, but the waitlist moves. Waitlist
Thurs 27 Aug, London. MOODY London at Nancy’s, London Bridge. Your city leads Caitlin, Emma and Jess. Drinks and a yap, that’s the format. RSVP
Fri 28 Aug, Adelaide. MOODY Adelaide, 5:30pm at Honeydripper, 11 Frome St. Your city lead Cathy Karuga is running it. No panels, no pitches, come on your own if you want to. RSVP
Sat 29 Aug, Sydney. Build A Personal Brand Bigger Than Your Business, QT Sydney, taught by Teodora Ivin. Standard $89, networking-only tickets still available. Tickets
Mon 1 Sept, closing. Startmate’s First Believer applications shut. You learn the early-stage framework, review 800+ real applications, interview founders. Lisa did it two years ago and rates it.
Fri 18 Sept, Sydney. The Social Summit, Manly Pacific. I’m on stage with Lauren from Verity AI and Rowena from OpenAI for a session called The customer is no longer human, which is the conversation I have been waiting to have out loud in front of a room. Arielle and Jordyn are speaking too, and the three of us went from knowing each other to being a trio at this event, so walking back in together is not something I’m going to be normal about. Code MOODY30. Tickets
Dates landing next week: the Melbourne golf day, the Étoile dinner in Adelaide and pickleball in LA.
05 - RECEIPTS
What you’ve been building. A month’s worth, because I’ve been hoarding.
→ Amelia Godfrey has 6,500 patients on Pelvy. 125 clinics, seven countries, eight months since launch. Bootstrapped, built while working part time as a pelvic health physio, and funded with her house deposit and her car fund. She’s also offered to talk anyone here through launching on a budget, which she has more authority on than almost anyone I know.
→ Codie ordered the samples. Pilates socks. Two years of thinking about it, talking herself out of it, coming back to it. The fear was still there and she went anyway, and she credited this group for the push. That’s the chapter I was talking about up top, and what got her through it was other women saying do it.
→ Nancy Cao and Udoka are running two events together. Saturday’s personal branding workshop and a Vietnamese cooking night in October, both seeded in here. Two women met in this chat and are now producing events with me nowhere in the middle. That isn’t a nice story. That’s the product working.
→ Melissa Drennan, MD of Napoleon Perdis, launched a subscription. The Golden Ritual: quarterly box, 40+ full-size products, no sample sizes, around $2 a day. Love seeing an iconic Aussie brand in this good a pair of hands, trying something new.
Here’s the part Mel didn’t expect. She thought it would be an existing-customer play. It’s turned into one of their biggest acquisition levers instead. Everyone builds subscription for retention. Almost nobody builds it as a front door.
→ PARQ Sport is making golf a female space. The brainchild of Sarah, Viktoria, Woods and Jen from Dissh. Sarah floated a MOODY x PARQ golf day in the Melbourne chat and had seven women in within the hour, most of whom have never played. Women’s sport has never been hotter. We’re planning a collab, watch this space.
→ London is becoming its own thing. Liv is launching a bridal and occasion ready-to-wear label and came into the chat looking for PR contacts. Soph is bringing Nice One, Aussie-style canned cocktails, and wants a satellite. Neither of them knows anyone there yet. Friday fixes that.
06 - CLASSIFIEDS
→ Hiring for a Brand Storytelling & Community Lead, Blackbird. The fund that just closed a billion is hiring exactly one storyteller, working with Joel Connolly and the art department across the brand, the community programs including Sunrise and Spring Camp, and the Foundation. Erin vouched for Joel personally: “12/10 recommend any opportunity to work with him.” I can’t think of a community job in Australian tech with more leverage in it. Apply →
→ Hiring for a Corporate Partnership Advisor, SYNC Health. Founding-level seat on the leadership team of a personalised telehealth company, with real upside as they scale. A “your network is the product” role. If you’ve spent a decade building relationships and watching other people monetise them, read it twice. Amelia’s in the LA chat.
→ Hiring for a Digital Marketing Manager + Social & Content Manager, Burleigh. Two roles, one brand, and Sylvie knows the founder directly. She’s not a recruiter, which makes this the good kind of introduction. Gold Coast girls.
→ Brand designer, food supplement brand, looking for a freelancer. Full visual identity and packaging, possibly ongoing. Must understand the regulatory limits on supplement claims. Worth knowing before you pitch: Atina built and sold a consumer brand before this one, so she’ll brief properly and pay on time.
→ Pelvy is raising. Amelia is after $300k pre-seed, closing November. Numbers above. She’s in this chat and she is not going to chase you.
→ Nina is offering MOODY girls a complimentary shoot for any event or launch in September. ninafromnowhere.com or producedbynina@gmail.com
→ Holly built funds.wiki, a database of investor leads, then offered to add hundreds more from her own investor calls. For free. In a group chat.
→ Kate needs a contract lawyer who knows Chinese manufacturers and the fashion industry. Rebecca wants the same rec.
→ Sophia is building a community plan for a podcast that’s already doing well and wants to know what actually moved the needle. @sophiafromtmrw
→ Karen Barr is the best for conveyancing. Rosie: “she talked me off a cliff.” She picks up the phone and the contracts are chic. karelba.com.au or @karelba.convey
→ Bree is offering career coaching, and runs a recruitment and people growth agency.
MOODY is Australia’s answer to the serendipity Americans take for granted. The room where founders, operators, corporates and creatives are in the same group chat, and it turns out they needed each other. These are the girls who get it, and we are in a MOOD.
This newsletter is the highlight reel. The WhatsApp is where we actually live.
Every city, growing weekly.
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