Thingtesting

Entire brands have been built around skincare ingredients — think The Ordinary, Paula's Choice, and The Inkey List — so why don't we see the same pattern in other personal care categories, like toothpaste? Bastét is a new brand that is applying this ethos to oral care, with products built around a hero ingredient called nano-hydroxapatite, the mineral that makes up around 97% of your tooth enamel and which has been used in Japan for decades.

I’m Danny Giacopelli, the founder of For Starters, an independent weekly newsletter for the next generation of small business owners. I send small biz inspiration, ideas, tips and tools every Friday morning to thousands of subscribers around the world. Previously, I was editorial director of Courier magazine and host of Monocle’s business podcast The Entrepreneurs. New York raised, London based. Matsu-Cha – At London Coffee Festival last year. They had, by far, the most beautiful stand and packaging.

Peptides are a polarising topic. At one end of the spectrum, there are GLP-1s, which are now broadly accepted as mainstream. At the other, there are research chemicals that people import from who knows where and inject themselves based on questionable intructions. Phases is a new brand from Floom founder Lana Elie, and it seems focused on building trust in a space where consumer interest (and the potential for misinformation) is spreading fast.

Right now, Becca Millstein is in the midst of a complex R&D process to decide which brands Fishwife, her tinned fish company, should launch new products with. It'll be another year or so before we consumers find out who made the cut.

This week, we spotted Suna, an "AI-native" wearable device for tracking gut health. The brand's website is vague on how it actually works, but the fact it exists shows how embedded optimization culture has become, and how GLP-1s are changing what people want to track. Now blood sugar monitors are a social signifier, and more normal than neurotic to go get a full-body health scan.

Lyndon Cormack was busy renovating his 1990s log cabin in Whistler when he decided to get some new towels for the place. But from where? His friends weren’t much help — they could tell him which stores they got their towels from, but they struggled to recall the brands. It surprised him that a category could be so enormous, and used daily, yet so few people could even name a company in it.

When Dominika Minarovic and Elsie Rutterford decided to sell BYBI, one founder had just given birth, and the other was heavily pregnant. Something had to give. The cult British beauty brand had been moving fast from the start, striking a deal to stock 2,000 Target stores at just three years old, then taking on debt financing and giving away equity to fuel further international expansion. “We were on this rocket ship, and it felt so stressful all the time,” says Minarovic.

At Jolie, co-founder Ryan Babenzien likes to keep things simple. The product line-up has barely changed from the showerhead and replacement filters the brand launched with four and a half years ago. There are just five full-time members of staff, and when universities or hotel chains offer to kit out their hundreds of bathrooms with Jolie’s product, the answer is often no.

Are you thirsty? Seems like everyone's launching a drink brand at the moment, and this week we spotted four of them: spiked Shirley Temples from Tempted, drinkable skincare from Mushus, alcohol-free, relaxing tipples from Ginny, and Unfair Advantage, a drink mix from the defiant Tati Westbrook (internet drama followers — IYKYK).

Roughly twice a year, drums of white powder arrive at a manufacturing facility somewhere in the US. They are logged, inspected and sampled before anyone is allowed to touch them. Technicians test for heavy metals, pesticide and microbial contamination. Once the paperwork comes back with the all-clear, the powder gets cut with other ingredients — if you were to stick your finger in the pure substance for a taste, it would be bitter — and tested one last time.