Japanese market data is signalling a consumer shift. Here's what European beauty founders need to hear. There's a consumer in the exosome skincare market who researches like a scientist and purchases like a poet. She knows what EGF is. She can explain the difference between PDRN and exosomes. She's read the group threads, watched the dermatologist breakdowns, cross-referenced the ingredient lists. And then she buys the product because a reviewer said her skin had a healthy gl

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

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

How three wellness brands found their white space by seeing the market differently I spent years in tech selling digital products with one-click efficiency. Launch, optimise, iterate, repeat. The work was fast, the metrics were clean, and the distance between me and the end user was... complete. I never knew who bought what I built. I never heard how it landed. I just moved to the next campaign, the next product release, the next optimisation cycle. And then I started working

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

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

Turning clarity into confidence, one story at a time. For many founders and creators, content feels endless, a constant loop of planning, posting, and guessing what to say next. It’s not a lack of creativity that drains us. It’s the absence of structure. In this blog, we’ll look at a framework that brings calm back to the creative process, a way to turn scattered ideas into a rhythm that feels strategic yet natural. In this post: 💛 Why every brand needs a few clear content p