Substance-Driven Brand Strategies

Looksmaxxing looks like a grooming trend. It isn't. It's the male version of something the beauty industry has always done, and that makes it both more familiar and more urgent than most founders realise. Sources: TikTok internal data; American Society of Plastic Surgeons, 2024; ResearchAndMarkets, 2025. You've seen this before "Why does the male version require a briefing when the female version has been running for a century?" Good question. The beauty industry was built, e

Why the brands winning beauty and wellness in 2026 are using AI where it adds leverage, and refusing it where it erodes trust. Image created by me in Midjourney The brands winning right now aren't the ones using AI the most. They're the ones using it where it adds leverage and refusing it where it would erode trust. That's the whole post. The rest is the working out. I've been using AI for over three years now. Long enough to have seen both the good and the bad sides, which I

On longevity, formulation, and the architectural choice most beauty founders never realise they are making. There is a conversation moving through the wellness and beauty industry this week, kicked off by a piece in Beauty Independent, about a small group of indie clean beauty brands, Maya Chia, Laurel Skin and May Lindstrom, who have done something most of their contemporaries have not managed. They have stayed. More than ten years in, founder-led, formulating in-house, stil

Real Talk with investor Rich Gersten on what early-stage founders get wrong, and what the ones who make it do differently. There's a specific kind of doubt that hits founders around month six or twelve. The brand exists. The product is real. You believe in it completely. And yet nothing is moving the way you thought it would. You're doing everything, the content, the outreach, the ops, the strategy, and it still feels like you're shouting into a room where no one can hear you

As fragrance booms, Byredo’s success reveals why insider codes, cross-cultural references and restraint are redefining value in beauty and wellness In an era where fragrance has re-emerged as one of the fastest-growing categories in global beauty, few brands have navigated its cultural ascent as precisely as Byredo. Once a niche Stockholm-based fragrance house, the brand has evolved into a €1 billion luxury player, propelled not by performance marketing or mass appeal, but by

Aesop case study and why the most powerful brand strategy available to scaling beauty and wellness founders isn't a campaign. Let's start with a provocation. You have spent the last three years building a content engine. You have a posting calendar. You have a UGC strategy. You have an influencer tier, micro, macro, and one mega, who did that one story that drove 4,000 clicks but zero retention. You have repurposed, reformatted, and refreshed. You have hired a social media ma

The shift from aesthetic wellness to measurable health. A conversation with Lisa Tengbom by Paula Ironside. The wellness industry didn't just grow, it expanded into something ambient. It became part of how we signal identity, discipline, even taste. Green juices, cold plunges, infrared saunas, rituals that promise not just health, but a certain kind of life. But as the category scaled, so did a quiet fatigue. Not necessarily with the practices themselves, but with what they r

Kateřina Rydlová on Body Moody, chaos, and showing up anyway Kateřina Rydlová, CEO of Body Moody The pills to survive the day Eight years ago, Kateřina Rydlová noticed something. Not something new, but something so normalised it had become invisible: every woman she knew carried pills in their bag. Pink pills. White pills. Paracetamol. Ibuprofen. The kind you pop between meetings, the kind that let you get through the day when your body is screaming at you to stop. "I neede

Building brands with soul and structure. Four months ago, I made a decision that made complete sense and no sense at all. I left ten years in tech, a world I knew well, a world that trained my brain in systems and scale, and stepped into wellness and beauty. An industry where business collides with identity. Where culture moves faster than product cycles. Where the founder is often the most powerful ingredient in the entire company. I’m not writing this from the safe distance

The wellness optimism era is over. Welcome to wellness overwhelm. For a few years, wellness ran on optimism. Not the sweet, wholesome kind. The caffeinated kind. The kind that said: If you optimise enough, you can do it all. Track everything. Fix everything. Upgrade everything. Turn your life into a dashboard and your nervous system into a KPI. It looked like a hybrid athlete everywhere. Run clubs as social networks. Fitness tourism. Brand races. Brand activations. Brand ever

Finding the one story only your brand can tell There is a moment every founder knows. You scroll through your feed, you look at the brands around you, and something feels off. Not wrong, exactly. Just… loud. Everything is competing for attention, and somewhere underneath all that noise, you sense there might be a quieter, more meaningful way to build. That feeling is worth paying attention to. Because it might be pointing you toward the most important strategic question you'l

Why the next generation of wellness and beauty businesses won’t be built on aesthetics, but on non-negotiables Across wellness and beauty, we’re hitting a point of aesthetic saturation. Not just in products, but in faces, lighting, copy, tone.The same skin. The same glow. The same language. Repeated, endlessly. And the data is starting to reflect it. Instagram, once the engine of beauty and wellness brands, now sits at some of the lowest engagement rates across platforms, hov

Discernment, product truth, and the quiet strategy behind enduring wellness brands. Last week, I came across a word in English that stopped me for a moment. Discernment. I looked it up. Discernment is the ability to see what’s really going on beneath the surface,to judge well, separate truth from nonsense, and recognise subtle differences. In other words, discernment operates at a deeper level. It’s the ability to recognise what actually matters. Not what is loud. Not what is

Why 2026's most magnetic brands stopped selling and started building brand worlds. Imagine you're staging a dinner party in a garden you've spent years cultivating. Not the kind where you stress over the menu or worry if the lighting is Instagram-perfect. The kind where guests arrive and immediately feel like they've entered another world, where the lavender smells like childhood summers, the wine tastes like a secret, and no one wants to leave. That's what the best brands fe

How to build a brand people keep coming back for. I need to tell you why beautiful brands aren’t enough anymore. When aesthetics are perfect. The typography, the palette, the "elevated minimalism" that looks like every other wellness or beauty brand on Instagram. It's gorgeous. But it's all icing, no flavour. And people can tell. They take one bite, one interaction with the brand, and they don't come back. Not because it looks bad. Because it tastes like nothing. Or worse: it