Sophie Hood confessed to me in New York that she once spent a full hour on a single TikTok carousel, digging through a feral camera roll and writing every caption herself, then wondered if she’d just wasted a founder’s afternoon. In the same breath she mentioned pitching her brand to 10,000 US wellness retailers in one day using AI.
That combination is the smartest operating model I’ve heard all year: give the machines the grunt work, keep the taste for yourself, and know exactly where the line sits.
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.
She was never going to cold-email a wellness store in rural Georgia, and now those stores are ordering samples.
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.
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