The Modems

A leading doctor at Knightsbridge’s renown Dr Rasha Clinic and ambassador for PLIM, Dr Sara sits exactly where medicine, technology and fintech collide. PLIM is the ‘buy-now-pay-later’ platform revolutionising how we finance our cosmetic treatments: with 0% interest, instant pre-approval, and a marketplace of over 836 vetted clinics. The idea is that paying for aesthetic treatments shouldn’t be a lump-sum gamble but a planned, long-term investment in your skin. That philosophy is personal.

If you’ve ever wondered how some of the most polished digital strategies in London get made, Sophie Southmayd is the woman behind a surprising number of them. “Before starting Social Southmayd, I spent over a decade working in luxury fashion and beauty,” she tells The Modems. A Montreal native who arrived in London knowing precisely “nobody”, she did what any resourceful millennial would: she opened Instagram and got to work.

Meta has dropped the Ray-Ban name, launched its first in-house eyewear line, and handed Kylie Jenner the keys to the whole conversation. The smartest detail isn’t the gem on the lens – it’s the voice in your ear. Meta has retired the Ray-Ban and Oakley branding it has leaned on for years and launched its first eyewear line under its own name – a trio of AI glasses called the Adventurer, the Fury, and, most discussed of all, the Starfire Kylie Edition, co-designed with Kylie Jenner.

Snap Inc. (yes, aka Snapchat’s parent company) has unveiled SPECS: a wearable computer built into a pair of see-through augmented reality glasses. They went up for pre-order this week at specs.com for £1,995 – with a refundable deposit to hold your place – and are expected to ship this autumn in the UK, US and France. Which means, in theory, you could be wearing a 115-inch cinema on your nose by the time the clocks go back. Bold? Wildly so.

Anyone who has ever bought something on Depop knows the specific leap of faith involved. You find the perfect vintage Carhartt jacket or the exact slip dress you’ve been hunting for months, photographed in a stranger’s bedroom against a radiator and a half-closed Ikea wardrobe, and you have to extrapolate from one grainy image whether it’ll look like a dream or a regrettable £40 on you. Resale fashion runs on imagination, optimism and a generous returns-free gamble. Until, perhaps, now.

Let me set the scene: California sun, an iced coffee sweating in one hand, my press lanyard swinging like the season’s most coveted accessory, and me – grinning like I’ve just landed the FROW at JW Anderson’s first Dior show… because there are very few places I’d rather be than at Apple Park for my first WWDC. WWDC, or Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, is the company’s flagship annual event, held each June and typically centred on its Cupertino campus, aka Apple Park.

There is a version of the tech-funding story where the headline is the money, and a more interesting version where the headline is who, exactly, decided to part with it. Phia – the AI shopping app co-founded by Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni in April 2025 – has just delivered both. The company has confirmed the investor cohort behind its oversubscribed $35.5 million Series A, and the roster is as much a cap table as it is a VIP guest list.

There is something poetic about the latest attempt to cure our collective phone addiction: a callback service, delivered via WhatsApp, fronted by a Spice Girl. If the medium is the message, the message here is that we are all beyond saving – but Mel B is going to try anyway. On 3 June, O2 launched the “O2 scroll stopper,” which it describes as a straight-talking nudge to put your phone down, voiced by Melanie Brown.

If you have ever left a meeting energised by what was decided and then immediately deflated by the realisation that you now have to actually do all of it – write the recap, update the tracker, build the deck, chase the three people who went quiet – then Zoom has built something aimed squarely at your particular flavour of dread.

Be honest about how you actually shop. You see a coat on someone’s story. You screenshot it. You reverse-image-search it at 1am, find it on three sites at three prices, drop it into the group chat with “thoughts??”, get two thumbs-up and one “the colour washes you out,” add it to a basket, leave it there for eleven days, and eventually buy something else entirely. Nobody designed shopping to work like this. It just… happened, app by app, tab by tab.