01 - THE MOOD
Hi divas 🤍
I’m writing this on a public holiday Monday from the Gold Coast, in the sun, on what I’m going to call a no-phone day and you’re going to correctly read as a low-phone day. I feel more creative than I have in months. It is so good to get out of the noise. Work, events, the running around, all of it.
I did a podcast detox in January when I was in New York and it took me a week to notice how much of what I thought I wanted was somebody else’s voice. It’s still tempting. Every week there’s a community in the US doing a festival, a founder dinner series, a newsletter that looks the way ours should apparently look, and the pull to copy it is real. Even more fun when the person being put on the pedestal in front of you is an ex-associate, and yes, I saw the chat this week. It’s painful for about a minute. Then you remember that nobody built a thing worth having by being a copy of someone else’s thing, and that the version of this that’s actually yours is the only version that lasts. When in doubt, head out of the phone, feet in the sand, remember who you are and where you’re uniquely going in this life. Aussies do it better anyway.
Which is why week three of the yap challenge has been my favourite so far. I’m watching you find your own voices online, in real time, and none of them sound like each other. That’s the whole point. The prompts were only ever a way in. Keep going.
It was a pinch-me week too. I had the best time at TikTok Takeoff in Sydney, a closed room with two hundred Australian brands and a very clear message that TikTok Shop is not coming here and that it doesn’t matter. Eleven pages of notes. They’re the case study at the bottom.
Two things in the works for the end of the year, and I’m telling you early because I need your help. A MOODY headshot day, and the ultimate end-of-year reflection, a jump start on manifesting 2027. Two incredible brand partners are already in on these. I’m looking for cool venues in each city to host us, and for other partners who want to come on board. If you know someone, send them my way.
Love Brooke x
MOODY weekly is free and it’s staying free. The case study at the bottom is paid: one real problem, the mechanics, what to do about it on Monday. $12 a month or $119 a year, and founding members get first access to everything we’re cooking for 2027. If you want to expense it, here’s the email to send your manager →.
02 - THE VLOG
China, part two. Alibaba, Temu, ByteDance, JD Logistics and Tencent in four days, plus the Family Mart and Pop Mart hauls, the Zara that isn’t like our Zara, and the flight from hell. This ones chaotic, overtired, and definitely not polished. Maddi called it “boots on the ground journalism the ambitious girlies need,” which is going on the business card.
Missed part one? Shanghai and the prep for the retail safari. Watch →
Sophie Hood is on the Retail Insights with AWS pod. Scaling Seoul Tonic into 5,500 stores, playing offence on Amazon, and the one job AI doesn’t get. Recorded at NRF in New York, and the write-up is on getmoody.co· Read →
03 - THE READ
The week in consumer, here and everywhere, and what the girls said and did about it.
→ Marketplaces outsold Mecca, Sephora, Adore and Chemist Warehouse combined in Q4. $200m against $199.3m, per Pattern. Amazon alone is 19.9% of online beauty now. If your beauty brand’s Amazon strategy is “not yet,” that’s a strategy, it’s just not a good one. Inside Retail
→ Target is on Uber Eats. 25,000 items, 60 minutes, 120 stores, first Australian fashion retailer to do it. A pair of kids’ school shoes now arrives faster than the pad thai. Ragtrader
→ Shein’s first results as a public company: profit halved. Operating profit down 50% to $538m on revenue of $20bn, up 1%. Shares down 27% since the IPO. Fast fashion at scale is a volume business with a margin problem, and now there’s a quarterly reminder. FashionUnited
→ Adairs CEO Elle Roseby is out after a $39.4m loss and a $63.5m write-down on Focus on Furniture, the acquisition that was meant to be the growth story. Rachel Taylor steps up. Business News Australia
→ The Memo is eight stores. Phoebe Simmonds and Kate Casey opened a 12-month pop-up at Chadstone, mums only, which is the whole point. Same week Nagnata, run by sisters Laura May Gibbs and Hannah Stenmark, got B Corp at 87.8 against an industry average of 50.9. SmartCompany · Ragtrader
→ Beth opened SOOSHY in Melbourne after being made redundant. Jazzie: “I popped in yesterday, when I say it’s seriously good, I mean it. That’s my catering sorted every time.” Beth: “Sooshy empire here we go.”
In our chat: the ecommerce girls rate Ecommerce Equation. Sylvie: “it 3x’d my ecomm brand.” Bec asked the price and nobody answered, so somebody answer.
→ Milk Makeup lost 57% of its revenue in six months. $60.9m to $26.1m. Waldencast, the ex-L’Oréal roll-up that listed in 2021 as a $1.2bn platform, sold Obagi, delisted from the Nasdaq on Friday and is renaming itself after the one brand it has left. The roll-up era in beauty is ending the way roll-ups usually do. Fortune
→ Sephora is opening inside 100 Marks & Spencer stores from spring 2027. The UK beauty market is $7bn and grew 1.2% last year, so this is a share grab, not a growth bet. Watch for the Australian version: a prestige beauty brand inside a supermarket, within two years. Retail Dive
→ The NSW EPA issued stop notices to Mecca, Sephora and ASOS over a dozen scrubs still containing banned microbeads. Fines up to $550,000 plus $55,000 a day. If you make a scrub, check it this week. The Nightly
→ Boots is about to be sold for US$9bn to the Weston family, per the WSJ. Same family that owns Selfridges, Holt Renfrew and, until 2022, David Jones. Reuters
Media & Creator
→ TikTok will pay your brand deals within 30 days, zero commission. TikTok One Pay, for creators over 10,000 followers. Most agencies take 20% and 90 days. The platform just became the best client most creators have. Tubefilter
→ Netflix licensed Chicken Shop Date. The final season of Amelia Dimoldenberg’s show premiered on YouTube and Netflix on the same day, 115 episodes and 12 years in. Tubefilter
→ Instagram’s Edits app now has an AI assistant that reads your retention, shares and comments and tells you what’s working. Which is the yap challenge feedback loop, automated. TechCrunch
→ Yap challenge, week four: receipts. Day 15 passed on Friday and the prompts this week are all about proof. The best advice from the wobble thread, for anyone who’s fallen off: Kayla, skip the prompt if it doesn’t fit and work out your pillars. Ari, film it and send it to the group instead of posting. Brodie, back after four days of procrastinating over a new mic: “clip it from 0:15 to make it more sticky.” Reset call this week, time in the chat.
In our chat: Chiara’s goodbye post flopped on Thursday night and did numbers by Friday morning. My rule: night time here never performs, the window is 9am to 1pm, because that’s when the US and EMEA wake up. Shakas added one on Monday: comments are being cited by AI now, so make your comments on other people’s posts count.
→ Chiara left Amazon after ten years to launch Palm. Amazon employee number one in Australia, launched the store here in 2017 and Singapore in 2019. Palm is a health agent that starts at birth, paediatrics first then the whole family, built on her second mat leave. Twenty hospitals and two hundred paediatricians signed pre-launch, an angel round so oversubscribed it became a pre-seed. Launching in Europe. This is basically Jeff leaving. palmhealth.me
→ ChatGPT can now try clothes on you. Upload a photo, see the garment on your body, save it to a Favourites library. Global, as of Thursday. Your product images are now the fitting room, so shoot them like one. TechCrunch
→ Shopify launched Canvas: build the store by chatting to Sidekick. Same week Meta opened Muse, its AI agent, to small businesses for free, plugged into Shopify, Stripe, Instagram analytics and your ad account. TechCrunch · TechCrunch
→ OpenAI launched Dots: always-on agents you assign a job to and leave running. Each Dot gets its own identity, credentials and tools, works in the background toward a goal, and you message it from Slack or Teams. Pro and Business Premium only for now. Same day OpenAI launched Space, Pages and Slides, an office suite inside ChatGPT where the Dots work on your docs with you. TechCrunch · TechCrunch
In our chat: Bec wants her inbox triaged by AI. Shakas: connect Gmail to Claude, or try Kinso. Lauren Kennedy: schedule it in Claude Cowork, or a Dot. Paige is building an AI platform for PR people, brief in, ranked angles and pitches out, grounded in Australian outlets. Waitlist soon.
→ Oura pulled its IPO two days before pricing. Fifty million shares at $40 to $44, revenue up 90% this year, and it still walked. Jay Ritter, who has studied IPOs for forty years: “Most of the time that a company postpones an IPO, it never returns to the market.” Inc.
→ Firmus’s $7bn ASX float has the fund managers fighting in public. Plato plans to short it, Cadence is sitting out, and the valuation chatter runs from $32bn to US$90bn against $15.5bn in August. Bookbuild Thursday. It would be bigger than Canva on day one. ShareCafe
→ EliseAI raised $350m at a $4bn valuation. Founder and CEO Minna Song, $200m ARR, one in six US apartments. TechCrunch
The Room
In our chat: Rosie showed a male ex-colleague her For You page. He asked, “may I change your algo?”, spent an evening retraining it, and is now building an algo reset toolkit for men. Caitlin’s question for all of us: “If your likes were your investment portfolio, would you be happy with its performance?”.
04 - THE DIARY
Here’s where MOODY girls are showing up.
Wed 7 Oct Brisbane · Mon 12 Oct Sydney. Australian Marketing Summit, Melbourne was today. Sababa has free tickets, ask in the chat. australianmarketingsummit.com
Today, New York. Kayla Moran speaking at AdWeek. State of Mind 2026 →
Wed 7 Oct, 8am, Adelaide. SAFIA Industry Breakfast at Adelaide Fashion Week, Patina Place, $49. The SA Showcase on Thu 8 Oct with Cathy showing Yaneth is sold out. adlfashionweek.com
Thu 8 Oct, Sydney CBD. Emily Elvey’s Gorgias AI agent workshop, build your customer service agent before BFCM. WeWork Castlereagh St, 9 to 4:30, $299, a handful of seats left. Luma →
This week, online. Yap Challenge reset call with Britt and Ari. Time in the yap chat.
Wed 14 Oct, 7pm, online. How To Make AI Your Co-Founder, Cortney and Jami’s free webinar, this room first. RSVP →
Sat 17 Oct, 11:30am, Melbourne. Cook Connect Feast, hands-on Vietnamese cooking with Udoka and Musefunnel at GK Tapas, Moonee Ponds. Pay what you can, 20 places. Luma →
27 Oct, London. Mode Office London launch at The Sloane Club, Chelsea. Doors 7pm, panel 7:30, £60. RSVP →
Wed 4 Nov, Brisbane. The Build x Become Room, a one-day business intensive with Alexis Fenton and Dante Amato at Spicers Balfour, 18 seats, $1,495, plus a dinner. Details →
Thu 5 Nov, Sydney. Techella Fest, Australia’s first tech festival built by women, UTS Underground, from $595, three quarters sold. techellafest.com
Fri 6 Nov, Melbourne. Fashion Law Supper Club, Your Legal Besties x OFF DUTY Society. Sold out, waitlist open. Waitlist →
Sat 15 Nov, New York. Female Founder World at Pier Sixty, $249 GA. Alison’s buying a ticket, who’s going with her. Get yours →
Wed 18 Nov, Sydney. Go-To-Market & CRO Summit, Doltone House, $147, via Mirela at Konnectile. Award nominations open. Luma →
05 - THE CASE STUDY
TikTok Shop isn’t coming to Australia. Here’s what TikTok told us to do instead.
Last Tuesday I sat in a closed room in Sydney with a couple of hundred Australian brand leaders while TikTok ran a day called Takeoff. The theme was where your next chapter of growth comes from. Not one person from TikTok mentioned an Australian launch of TikTok Shop. Not once, not in the Q&A, not in the breakouts.
That’s the answer. The whole day was built around a different idea. Bianca Singh, who runs Shop partnerships globally, said it plainly: “You can actually get started just from your desk in your own city by today. If you’ve already got most of the foundation in place, you can skip the queue and be trading in a new market before Christmas.” The pitch is out, not in.
I took eleven pages of notes. What follows is the operating manual, from the people on stage: HiSmile, Babyboo and Zuru, plus the TikTok Shop team from the US and the founder who built Magic Brief and sold it to Canva. One of them did $50m through Shop this year at break-even, on purpose. One of them ships to 117 countries from Sydney. One of them turned up to New York Fashion Week without an invitation.
06 - CLASSIFIEDS
What the girls need.
→ A US wholesale rep for an Aussie haircare brand. Contract basis, indie boutiques and gift shops. Sumana, DM her in the NYC chat.
→ Free ELEVATE sessions for Melbourne teams to year end. Jacqui’s emotional fitness brand wants intros to HR and People & Culture leads. DM her in the Melbourne chat. elevate-state.com.au
→ Content creators for Veira Boutique. Indian designer outfit hire, Melbourne, ships globally. Srish, DM her in the Melbourne chat.
→ The Clubhouse, Surry Hills. Arielle’s studio is free for accommodation or content shoots from 18 Oct to 25 Nov. DM her in the Sydney chat.
→ Content creation and editing. Udoka has pivoted to services, from shoots to edits. udokaspov.com
→ Testers for Story Forge. AI-assisted branded product ideation for kids, wellness and lifestyle brands. Catherine, DM her.
→ Still open from last week: fractional CMO for a B2B AI company (Jami), designer for a brand platform in exchange for social strategy (Rosie), Christmas gift guide contacts for Bec and Deepa.
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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