Paula Ironside

A Real Talk conversation with Dr. Brent Ridge I walked into this interview thinking I knew the Beekman 1802 story. I had read the book. I had done the research. I knew about the goat farm, the recession, the 52,000 bars of soap. I knew that kindness was the strategy, not the tagline. What I didn't expect was how much of the conversation would feel personal, not just as someone who studies brand strategy, but as someone who is, right now, in the middle of building something herself. Dr. Brent...

Before I sit down with Brent Ridge, I've been sitting with his book. I came across Brent Ridge the way a lot of good things happen, unexpectedly, through a conversation that led somewhere I didn't anticipate. I looked him up, found the book, and by the time I was boarding a flight to Warsaw for a podcast recording, I had it downloaded on my iPad and ready. I didn't put it down for the entire flight. Not because it's a page-turner in the conventional sense, but because I kept stopping to...

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, explicitly,...