01 - THE MOOD
Hi divas 🤍
I’m writing this from Shanghai.
I flew out on Saturday with Georgia to spend a week walking stores and going behind the scenes of the full consumer lifecyle, which is the part of my job I would do for free. Ten hours a day on foot, looking at how things are merchandised and priced and who is actually buying.
Before anyone pictures glamour: we were not at the pointy end of the plane. We’re middle seats on China Eastern becasue I couldn’t work out seat selection on the app. Add business class to the vision board.
I got one event in before I left: coffee, matcha and croissants on the Gold Coast on Tuesday morning hosted by Georgia. Then, in the days I was packing, this community ran three more without me. Twenty in London with Caitlin, Emma and Jess. Fifteen in Adelaide with Cathy. Another twenty at the first Business Book Club in Sydney with Sylvie, on a night I had to pull out of because I was eyeballs deep in a board pack.
I wasn’t in a single one of those rooms. The girls just went ahead anyway.
Last week I wrote about the shoes being too small and not knowing which pair comes next. Here’s the part nobody tells you: some of the transition isn’t about becoming a bigger version of yourself. Some of it is about becoming less necessary.
And that’s harder than it sounds, because being needed feels exactly like being valuable. Every time someone asks a question only you can answer, it’s a small hit of proof that you matter. Designing yourself out of that is the least instinctive thing you will ever do, and it’s the only way anything you build survives your own calendar.
So if you’re the bottleneck in your own business right now, and most of us are somewhere: what’s the one thing you’d have to teach someone this month to stop being the person who has to be in the room?
Caitlin, Emma, Jess, Georgia, Cathy, Sylvie. You didn't cover for me. You made me optional, which is the nicest thing anyone has done for me this year and also the entire point.
Two things before you scroll.
The MOODY Yap Challenge is happening in September. Thirty days of showing up, a virtual workshop to kick it off, and daily prompts dropped in the chat so you actually film something. The part that makes it ours rather than a rerun of someone else’s: we audit each other’s accounts and give real notes, instead of doing it alone in the dark. Built with Ari and Britt, invented on the fly, because MOODY girls get shit done. Join the channel →
And tell me what you want to know about China. I’m in stores here all week with a notebook and I’m thrilled to go digging on your behalf. What do you actually want reported back? How they merchandise beauty, what’s on shelf that isn’t here yet, what live selling really looks like, how much of it is already agentic. Reply to this and I’ll bring back whatever you ask for.
02 - THE READ
Last week I hosted a room on the future of retail, consumer behaviour and commerce with McKinsey, Macquarie and Amazon Ads. Firms, not names. Here’s what I walked out with.
The consumers are ahead and the businesses are behind. Roughly a quarter of consumers already use AI search to discover products. Fewer than one in twenty companies has a real agentic commerce strategy. That is the widest gap between customer behaviour and business readiness I have seen, and gaps like that close violently, not gently.
Three separate things get called agentic commerce, and conflating them is why most strategies go nowhere. Inbound is discovery: ChatGPT and Gemini as the front door, so when someone asks for the best moisturiser for her skin, are you in the answer or invisible? On-site is the assistant on your own property. Outbound is the autonomous agent shopping across other people’s sites for your customer.
“You must be part of the answer.”
That was the line of the day, and it is the entire inbound strategy in six words.
But it is early, and one number tells you how early. When OpenAI opened up shopping, roughly three thousand retailers were listed. Eight actually transacted through it. Three thousand to eight. → Being listed is not being live. If you are counting yourself as agent-ready because you appear somewhere, check whether anything has ever actually been bought.
The line I’ve repeated every day since: agents don’t browse pages, they query data. If your product information isn’t rich, structured and accessible, you’re not badly ranked. You’re absent. Most brands are still optimising a page a machine will never look at.
In our chat: Sophia had a trial reel go viral overnight and asked the room when to publish it to her real audience. Five answers in an hour, all the same: leave it in trials until the views slow. → Same principle, smaller scale. A machine will show your work to strangers for free and almost none of us use it. We post to the people we already have and call it growth.
The Australian numbers finally exist. CBA has banked $200 million in AI benefit and expects it to double. Walmart is holding headcount flat at 2.1 million for three years and retraining everyone instead of cutting. Set that against Qantas, Coles and Woolworths all announcing reductions this year and you have two opposite bets on one technology. → The investor question isn’t whether you use AI. It’s whether the market believes your story enough to value you like a tech business instead of a retailer. Guzman y Gomez is trading north of a hundred times earnings. It sells burritos. That gap is the whole prize, and it gets earned by quantifying the benefit in public the way CBA just did.
Not every category is equally exposed. The more research a purchase takes, the higher the disintermediation risk. Consumer electronics, health and beauty, home improvement are the vulnerable ones. Groceries least. If your customer does an hour of reading before she buys, an agent is about to do that hour for her.
The Australian read on timing was blunt: “you can’t afford to wait here, you need to be early.” The retailers who sat back and watched during the e-commerce wave took five to seven years to learn it. That same learning curve has compressed to about six months.
Retail media has quietly become the most profitable thing in retail. Grocery runs around 2% net margin. Specialty retail, eight to ten. Retail media runs at 70 to 80, because the data is already sitting there and all you’re adding is the tech to make it addressable. → Loyalty is the connector. Not the points, the unique ID. Without it you can’t tell that Tuesday’s customer and Friday’s customer are the same woman, and then you have transactions instead of a business.
And we have more room to run than we think. Australia does about 20% of retail online. China does closer to 50%.
Two things to act on. Reddit and increasingly LinkedIn are among the biggest sources feeding what an LLM recommends, so showing up in a community has quietly become distribution. And then the closing advice, which covers everything above:
“It needs to be useful. It needs to be valid. So you want to get it right.”
A result that isn’t relevant doesn’t just annoy someone, it erodes their trust in the whole platform. Getting found is worth nothing if what they find is wrong.
Also this week
AI is making your laptop more expensive. Wholesale PC costs are up more than 50% on AI-driven memory shortages, because the chips in a laptop are the chips in a data centre and the data centres are winning. JB Hi-Fi posted $11.06 billion in sales, profit up 6% to $489.9 million and a dividend up 22.5%, and the shares still fell 12.3%. → Record year, punished anyway. If your product has silicon in it, your input costs are now set by a bidding war you are not part of.
The reporting week put numbers under all of it. Woolworths did $71.5 billion, up 3.6%, net profit up 18.1%, e-commerce up almost 16%. Coles did $41.5 billion in supermarkets, up 3.7%. Both into a market running at two speeds: value shoppers trading down and waiting for the promotion, and a wealthier cohort still spending freely. → There is no such thing as “the Australian consumer” right now. Build for the average of those two and you get a product neither wants.
And Woolworths credited Ooshies with roughly 1.5 to 2 percentage points of sales acceleration. A plastic toy moved one and a half points at a seventy-one billion dollar company. People don’t collect points. They collect things. What they’re really collecting is cultural capital, the thing you can put on the bench and have someone else recognise.
03 - THE EDIT
Lauren is our fashion editor, our music editor and the other MOODY sister. Kicking off september, in her words.
I’m listening to Jigitz, 50 Ballerinas, I’m wearing TIG 008 and I’m dancing like Adela. Only badly.
I haven’t been able to stop thinking about something Jigitz said about their new album: ballet as a metaphor for obsession. Wanting something so badly you build your whole life around it. Knowing it might fuck you up and wanting it anyway.
Unfortunately, I get it.
I’ve always had a soft spot for the slightly irrational pursuit. A career move that would be much easier not to make. An idea you can’t leave alone. And, on a far less consequential level, the piece of clothing you absolutely do not need but have mentally styled seventeen different ways before you’ve left the store.
What stuck with me was the bigger parallel. Careers, ideas, goals. The thing you keep coming back to even when the sensible version of your life would be easier. The opportunity that scares you because saying yes might rearrange everything. The slightly unhinged belief that if you want something badly enough, you’ll find a way.
I’ve never been very good at wanting things casually.
Maybe that’s why I keep coming back to the ballerina right now. Not the bows and slippers, the obsession underneath it. 50 Ballerinas is on repeat, and so is Adela’s Prima, because the baddest bitches ain’t in LA.
And TIG 008 is giving me the wardrobe: lace, washed-out pastels, sheer layers, elongated silhouettes and femininity with something a little stranger underneath. TIG feels like if Chloé and Ed Hardy had a gothic baby in Brazil whose hobbies include partying and surfing.
I said what I said.
What I love is that it never feels too resolved. Always something contradictory, a little chaotic, slightly off. Romantic without being precious, sexy without being obvious, a little bit wrong in exactly the right way.
Consider yourselves introduced.
And that became the starting point for this edit. Not ballet. Obsession. The pieces I can’t stop looking at, the designers I want you to know and the things that make absolutely no sense together until suddenly they do.
Lace with leather. Pretty things with a mean streak. A power suit because apparently we have jobs. Zebra wedges because apparently we also make bad decisions.
Not balletcore. Please don’t make me call it balletcore.
Just the current mood.
Lauren x
The MOODY girl September playlist →
04 - THE DIARY
We needed a bigger boat. The Melbourne launch party has moved to Godby Hotel because the response broke the old venue. Same date, same time, more room. Wednesday 9 September, 6pm. RSVP →
Tue 1 Sept, closing. Startmate’s First Believer applications shut today. Last call.
Tue 1 Sept, virtual. Business Book Club round two with Sylvie. Virtual this time, so it doesn’t matter where you are. Be on this one.
Tue 1 Sept, Sydney. Nicole is running a content day and street interviews and wants a few more girls in it. @nikkicolesurfer.
Wed 2 Sept, New York. Ana is hosting an event with Emma Grede’s team for her book. NY girls, this is your room. RSVP
Tue 15 Sept, London. Canva’s AI Vision. Panels on AI, creativity and marketing. Hollie works there and has a 50% off code for us, so message her in the London chat. Her words: let’s fill the place with women so it stops being a boy topic.
Fri 18 Sept, Sydney. The Social Summit, Manly Pacific. I’m on stage with Lauren from Verity AI and Rowena from OpenAI for a session called The customer is no longer human. Code MOODY30. Tickets
Fri 18 Sept, Adelaide. The Dinner Club by Étoile, FARINA00 Goodwood, 7pm, $75. Every ticket puts a menstrual kit in the hands of a girl in South Australia.
Sat 19 Sept, Los Angeles. Pickleball and Prosecco for the LA crew. Details
The Yap Challenge kicks off in September. Details up top, channel is open, workshop date locked this week.
05 - RECEIPTS
What the girls have been building.
→ Leonie launches The Nested App today at midday. Built by qualified teachers for parents of 0 to 5s, it takes the mental load out of working out what to do with your kid when you have nothing left. thenestedapp.com. If you know a parent in the trenches, send it today.
→ The book club authors sent champagne. Two bottles waiting on the table when twenty women walked in to discuss From The Ground Up, plus a video message from Jess and Bree that Sylvie played to the room. The reveal that got everyone: Frank Body started as a case study for the founders’ copywriting agency. Not a brand plan. A demo.
→ Sylvie then manifested her way onto Add to Cart. Read the book, wrote it down, invited last week, records Friday. The book was Manifest. It’s also the next book club pick.
→ Cathy ran Adelaide. Caitlin, Emma and Jess ran London. First time for both, and neither needed me in the country. Cathy’s summary: one group shot and “some action wine shots.”
→ Kirby decided on Wednesday to run a meetup on Thursday. Coffee, a croissant and a yap at A.P Quay, purely because she was in Sydney for a few days. Nobody asked her to.
→ Karen Barr, who Rosie recommended in last week’s issue, has joined us. Twenty years in, just launched her own conveyancing practice. Recommended in issue one, a member by issue two.
→ Erin Core is done being a best-kept secret. MD of Veracity Research, five years in, freshly ISO 20252 accredited, and scaling through reputation instead of sales pressure.
→ Alexandra shipped Sigma Mind 1.0.2, and the best thing in it isn’t the AI. It’s the bit that asks whether your problem needs a model at all or whether plain automation would do.
→ Also new in the room: Lucy Hay, co-founder and CMO of CLUTCH Glue. Sharon, founder of OPILLAR and host of Beyond Wellness. Ano, building a beauty-tech platform on top of a day job putting AI into engineering teams.
06 - CLASSIFIEDS
What the girls need. All of it fresh this week.
→ Anthropic is hiring a Partnerships Lead for ANZ. If you have ever wanted to be the person in the room where those deals get done, this is it. Apply →
→ Atina wants a content person, or a small content team, for her personal brand. Short-form video editing, hook ideas, trend research, and someone with their finger genuinely on the pulse. Worth knowing who you’d be working with: she built and sold a shoe brand, grew a personal account to 75k, and used to be a strategy consultant. She’s starting a new account from scratch and wants someone who will tell her when a hook is weak. She’s in the Melbourne chat.
→ Kat runs People and Experience at PAL and has offered to talk to anyone here about hiring, recruitment, culture or Meta ads. Ex Big Four, Geelong based. @palaccounting_
→ Hollie has a 50% off code for Canva’s AI Vision on 15 September and is happy for you to use it to bring a friend. She’s in the London chat.
→ Nina is shooting TFP in Sydney and will do a complimentary shoot for any September launch or event. @nina.from.nowhere
→ Hailey is offering fundraising sessions to founders for the next little while. US advisory, Australia based, previously built a funding marketplace for female founders. She’s in the Investing chat.
→ Sababa needs a developer who has worked with the Meta API for Instagram. She’s a solo technical founder building Studio Crew, an AI operating system that gives a content creator their own virtual production crew. Currently at MVP on YouTube. She’s in Tech + AI.
→ Tanu is a product and website designer in Melbourne looking for women with an idea that needs building.
→ Ano is looking for a mentor, someone a few steps ahead who has built a tech or a beauty business. She’s in Tech + AI and Melbourne.
→ Sharon is looking for podcast hosts to collaborate with. OPILLAR · Beyond Wellness Podcast
Forward this to one girl who’d get it.
Brooke x
MOODY is Australia’s answer to the serendipity Americans take for granted. The room where founders, operators, corporates and creatives are in the same group chat, and it turns out they needed each other. These are the girls who get it and we are in a MOOD.
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