01 - THE MOOD
Hi divas 🤍
Wednesday I was in a Sydney studio at half eight in the morning filming a little podcast with Spotify and Netflix, on a plane by lunch, and walking into the Godby to an event the three Melbourne city leads had built while I was blissfully in the dark on every detail. 180 names on the list. Someone asked if we wrapped at eight. If it ends at 8pm we’re doing it wrong, I said, and it didn’t.
Thursday was the prep run with LSKD. Friday was drag bingo in Carina, where the queens sang the national anthem and I have not fully recovered. Sunday I actually ran the Bridge, 10km in 58 minutes, which I will be mentioning again. We’re over $20k for Small Steps 4 Hannah, the exact number we wrote down in July and did not really believe, and the charity got picked up on 7, Nine and 10 off the back of it.
None of that was the hard part though. The hard part was the months before any of it looked like anything, and nobody claps for those. There is no photo of you sending the fourteenth venue email, or asking a stranger for money, or rewriting the caption for the ninth time, or standing in a room where you know two people.
The week you see is the receipt. It is not the work.
Which is why the yap challenge exists, and why 88 of you signing up is the only number from this week I actually care about. You can be excellent at your job and turn into a completely different person the second a camera comes out. That is a skill gap rather than a character trait, and skill gaps close with reps. Thirty days of them, starting tomorrow.
I want actual replies on this one. What are you competent at in private and cowardly about in public? Speaking, selling, pitching, posting, asking for the raise, naming your price. Tell me which one and I will build something for it. The education pillar is real now and I would rather build what you actually need than what I assume you need.
Two things before you scroll.
Lauren, Sarah and Udoka built Melbourne. Lauren pitched 21 venues and shortlisted five before landing on Godby, Sarah pushed the RSVPs through every network she has, Udoka brought the video, and Lisa got me dressed by Tojah. We stood around eating tiramasu with forks. It was a massive VIBE.
The photos are here → Add yours.
And the full China write-up is coming as its own piece. I have a notebook full of it and the topline is below. Tell me what you actually want reported back and I will make sure it is in there.
02 - THE READ
Notes from the room: China
Four days, two cities, 22 stores, a delegation of Australian retail execs and one very jetlagged me. Here is what I walked out with.
China is booming and China is stalling and both are true, because it runs at two speeds. Exports up 24% in July, retail sales up 0.6%, property new starts down 28%. Macquarie called consumption the anti-AI trade and I cannot improve on it. Over there the apartment is the family balance sheet, so when new starts fall off a cliff, confidence goes with them. → Read any China headline by asking which track it is describing. Most of the contradiction disappears.
The flat number is hiding a bloodbath underneath. Cars down 17% and furniture down 8.8%, while phones are up 20% and cosmetics up 6.8%. She has not stopped shopping, she has stopped shopping for some things entirely: traditional luxury, anything hitched to property, anything that is all story and no use. She reads the ingredient list. She will not pay for your logo. She will absolutely pay for how you make her feel.
→ Which of your categories is running on brand premium alone? That is the one she just walked out of, and we are three years behind her on the same curve, not a different one.
I went for the robots and got humbled by the fundamentals. The robots earning money are the ones nobody films. What took me out was the staffing, personal shoppers as standard rather than a luxury tier, payment engineered out of the way, and the associate adding you on WeChat before you reach the door. Every store, not just the flagships.
“The gap is standard, not capability.” That was the only thing I saw all week with no technology barrier and no capital cost attached to it, and it is the one that stung.
Discovery has also left the search engine. RedNote is doing roughly 300 million searches a day and retailers have largely stopped building apps to trade inside WeChat instead.
→ She is researching you somewhere you do not exist. Turning up is free and absence is not neutral, so if she looks you up and finds nothing, the nothing is doing the damage.
We never asked a single host about culture and it came up in every session anyway. Public personal OKRs, decisions sitting with whoever is closest to the work, one convenience chain telling us its best idea of the year came from a single store owner. Everyone shipped in weeks. Nobody mentioned a steering group.
In our chat: Bec, Sophia and Bianca all want to build something physical, Bianca having already done Yiwu. Then Rebecca, who is actually going to the Canton Fair in late October, asked the question nobody who romanticises this asks first: anyone got lawyers for NDAs over there. Niamh does, across Australia, China and Southeast Asia.
→ The upside is real and the downside is a contract you did not read in a jurisdiction you do not understand. Go and look at your supply side with the energy you bring to your meta account, and take a lawyer.
Reply if you sell physical product, because a group of us going to buy product at Canton Fair is a very different trip to one of us going.
Also this week
Discovery leaving the search engine is not only a China problem. Of two million listings studied, only 1.28% of products ranking in normal search also showed up in Google’s AI Mode the same day, which surfaces about four products where the carousel showed 28. Ad inventory opened inside the assistants the same week. → Your organic shelf shrank by roughly four fifths and the replacement is an auction. Go and look at your ten best sellers in there. It is free and it will ruin your afternoon.
Our own consumer is running a quieter version of the same rotation. Four datasets landed on one Monday and none disagreed: sentiment down to 84.4, mortgage holders down 13% against renters down 0.6%, only 16% calling it a good time to buy anything big, business conditions negative for the first time in six years, and 254 retail insolvencies in the quarter.
→ When the next spending print lands strong, and it will, do not let anyone call it a recovery. Nominal growth on top of grocery inflation is not demand.
The biggest shift in Australian beauty distribution in years went through with no fanfare. Infinity, the largest Priceline franchisee at 91 stores, collapsed owing creditors over $400 million, and seven stores have just been bought personally by the sitting president of the Pharmacy Guild and a former president, with most of the rest going to Chempro.
→ Priceline is where most Australian women actually buy their beauty. If you sell in that channel, your most important door changed owner, buyer and payment terms, and nobody sent you the memo.
03 - THE DIARY
Tomorrow night. The Yap Challenge kicks off with a workshop with Britt from State of Brand, 88 of you registered, then thirty days of daily prompts in the chat. Two prizes at the end, best yapper and most improved, and you have to do all thirty days to be eligible. Free. Amelia is hosting a watch party in New Farm if you want company. RSVP →
Tues 15 Sept through Sunday, Melbourne. Lauren has been busy organisng the Zimmerman outlet sale. She’s dropped the family & friends early access link for the Moody girls. You don’t want to miss this.
Thu 17 Sept, Sydney. Space Bar Run Club, 4km from Cicada Innovations in Redfern, then a drink. Spiral Blue’s crowd, space and deep tech, all paces welcome. Partiful
Thu 17 Sept, Melbourne. Cocktails & Creatives at Monash Caulfield, 6pm. MADASS’s annual night for design, art and architecture students plus industry, and free entry if you come as a professional. contact@madass.club
Thu 17 Sept, Sydney. GPT6 After Dark with Zehra and Amber Main. Zehra still needs a collar mic to borrow, which is the easiest favour on this page.
Fri 18 Sept, Sydney. The Social Summit. I’m on a panel called The customer is no longer human with Lauren from Verity AI and OpenAI. Code MOODY30 for 30% off. Tickets
Wed 23 Sept, Melbourne. ELEVATE Taster at High Note, Northcote, 6.30pm. A routine taught step by step by Emily Zumstein, Esin on the decks, 2000s and 2010s pop and house. Every ticket includes bring-a-friend-for-free and babes in arms are welcome. Jacqui’s pitch: a few hours where nobody needs anything from you. Tickets
Thu 24 Sept. Aditi has something on and has been extremely cool about not telling us what. Luma
Wed 7 Oct, Adelaide. SAFIA Industry Breakfast at Adelaide Fashion Week, 8am, Kate’s panel on craft to scale. A quarter of the tickets have already gone. adlfashionweek.com
Thu 8 Oct, Adelaide. SA Showcase: Threads Between Us, with Cathy showing Yaneth. Kate says not to be missed. adlfashionweek.com
Thu 8 Oct, Sydney. Ai in a Day with Emily Elvey, building your customer service AI agent for BFCM. Capped at 20 so she can actually help everyone, catered, drinks after. She gave us the head start before it goes public. Luma
Thu 8 Oct, New York. Dinner, probably. Lily’s in town until the 30th and put the 8th up, Kayla can do the 7th, Ro wants the 8th, so a poll is coming. Soph is our lead there and is planning a meetup of her own.
November, New York. Alison is putting together a night for women in VC, women trying to break into VC, and female founders. Register your interest
04 - RECEIPTS
What the girls have been building.
→ Emily Hausman started Y-Care of Dementia eighteen months ago as, in her words, a bit of a cry for help. She was caring for her grandmother and found every support service in the country built for spouses over 65. It now has 80+ young carers nationally, meets monthly in Sydney, has reached national media and just landed a grant from Dementia Australia. Building the thing you needed and then refusing to let it stay small is the whole job, and she has done it while being the carer. She wants a sponsor or a venue. ycareofdementia.com.au
→ Jade put willX into the world with a waitlist for the first 100 beta testers. Her line: everything in our lives got smarter, banking, dating, ordering dinner at 11pm, and wills didn’t get the memo, they’re still in a filing cabinet somewhere written once and forgotten. Nobody has modernised that category because nobody wants to sit with the subject long enough, which is exactly why it’s a good business. She’s picking the first beta round now. willx.com.au
→ Fern Zamprogno launched Surf Coast Social a month ago for women in their twenties and thirties across Geelong, the Surf Coast and the Bellarine. Sixty members and every scheduled event at capacity or waitlisted. Capacity is the only community metric I actually trust. A follower count is vanity, a waitlist is demand. @surfcoastsocial
→ Claudia Sullivan’s SEASON is live and rolling out across Australia and New Zealand. Airbnb by Depop for fashion, outfit first, rent and sell. Most of us are sitting on a wardrobe that is the most expensive underused asset we own, and she’s recruiting founding curators, so this is your chance to make it pay rent. season.style
→ Jennica Palecek opened the Founding Members Circle for Sèva, clean beauty with dosed actives, so you can watch the formulation and the testing and the things that don’t work before it’s a brand. Building in public before you have anything to sell is the hardest version of this and the only one that reliably produces buyers who were there first. Join
→ Mia quit her job and went full time on Welloh, taking meditation, breathwork and sound baths into corporate spaces, and relocated Sydney to Melbourne in the same breath. Doing both at once is either brave or unhinged and I suspect it’s both.
→ Alexandra published her first ever self-recorded video, on how to tell the three types of AI project apart and why choosing agents because agents are the hype will cost you. Three weeks of work for under three minutes of footage, which is the ratio nobody warns you about and the reason most people never post the first one. Watch it
→ Lauren Moody is doing her first panel outside of Zimmermann, at HEX in Melbourne, on a bill with the editor-in-chief of The Daily Aus and the grants lead at Blackbird. Rosie had a spare slot and put Lauren’s name forward herself. That is the room working exactly as intended, and all it took was one person deciding to spend their access on someone else.
→ Amelia Godfrey was yapping before the challenge even opened, posting daily for Pelvy on pelvic health, working around what the platforms will let her say and using flowers as stand-ins. A real content constraint solved with actual craft. Holly, Alexis, Cha, Sam, Sophia and Nicole have all put a first one up too.
→ Sharon has quietly become the group’s best critic. Her note that you should be doing something while you talk, making a smoothie, gardening, anything, is the most useful feedback anyone gave anyone this week.
→ Also in the room: Ro published a Sastain piece timed to New York Fashion Week, then offered intros across APAC, the US and EMEA plus interview prep and resume reviews in exchange for engaging with it, which is how you ask for a favour. Sharon posted her first ever partnered content. Christie finally got the brand footage she’d been chasing, out of Nicole, @nikkicolesurfer. And Nancy Cao shipped Musefunnel fixes live in the middle of a thread about her own product, in front of everyone.
05 - CLASSIFIEDS
What the girls need. All of it fresh this week.
→ Laura needs a mid-level copywriter, four-week contract at a Sydney agency, BAU plus some conceptual briefs, starting asap, four days a week in Pyrmont. She’s in the Sydney chat.
→ Bree has a spread of roles open at Rallee People across retail, wellness, agency and ecomm, including some strong BDM and sales ones. brianna@ralleepeople.com
→ Caitlyn Watson needs a freelance video editor for Archie + Fox, across Premiere, Adobe and DaVinci. Her client list runs to Under Armour US, Mecca and Rationale. caitlyn@archieandfox.com.au
→ Solar’s client is hiring an in-house marketing and ecommerce assistant. On-site, not remote, and Solar runs the ads externally so you’d be working alongside her. glow@sascha-martini.com
→ Abbey is building a freelance bench at Bold Mood for client briefs across design, copy, content, social, photo and video, motion, web, illustration, PR and ops. The broadest single door on this page. Sign up →
→ Persephone needs a Sydney photographer and videographer for a wine brand launch, elevated product and lifestyle, stills and video for site, social and launch. Vivi and Paris have both already put their hands up, so this is a shortlist rather than a cold start. hello@bellecreativeco.com · itsstudioblueproductions@gmail.com
→ Kari opens several free brand and social strategy slots every quarter for founders and creators. She’s a fractional social strategist for eight-figure brands in New York and soon Sydney, so this is the most valuable free thing here. karikaranikos.com/work, then DM her.
→ Leslie is testing a half-day content shoot where she follows you through an actual working day, almost paparazzi-style, and you come out with a pile of strategic iPhone video plus a handful of polished brand images. Shot list, outfits and locations planned in advance. Thumbs up in the chat for Melbourne, plane for Sydney.
→ Niamh can help with legal in Australia, China and Southeast Asia, which given how many of you spent this week thinking about manufacturing is better timed than she knows. She’s in the General chat.
→ Zehra needs a collar mic to borrow by Thursday for GPT6 After Dark. Easiest favour on this page. She’s in the Sydney chat.
→ Alice needs five minutes on a survey. She’s validating a tool for choosing a Sydney suburb and is offering to return the favour to anyone else validating something. alice@onthehousegroup.com
→ Luci wants to talk to founders publishing on Substack about what’s working and what’s not. Sydney, virtual or in person, and she’ll trade you her content marketing brain for the conversation. She’s in the General chat.
Forward this to one girl who’d get it.
Brooke x
Still time to throw a few dollars at Small Steps 4 Hannah →
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.
I love the concept of the receipts. The part that all the hard work culminates in, but never happens without the unseen grit.