Patrick Crowley

Patrick CrowleySep 11, 2026

Feisty just raised its first external funding from Btomorrow Ventures. Self-funded up to this £500,000 round. The positioning: "Poppi's fit cousin." Take a proven functional soda category and add the missing piece (10g of clear plant protein per can), without any of the gym-bro branding. Protein for people who don't want to look like gym people. The founders: former Louis Vuitton designer Vy Cutting and her mother, Dr. Hong Huynh, a PhD scientist who runs R&D. Right combo for the positioning: one for taste and design, one for technical credibility. The mother-daughter build story has done real work already, generating 4M+ organic TikTok impressions and retail placement in Selfridges, Whole Foods Market, Harrods, Soho House & Co and Zapp before any institutional cheque landed. Full piece on The Checkout 🛒

Patrick CrowleySep 8, 2026

Waitrose & Partnerse just launched dedicated Wellbeing Bays across 52 stores, putting 40+ premium wellness products into the weekly grocery shop. The stat behind the move: Waitrose.com searches up 171% for collagen, 160% for creatine, and 152% for electrolytes in the past year. These aren't gym-first or DTC-only categories anymore. They're mainstream grocery lines. That's a structural shift for European consumer brands. Among others, Ancient + Brave | B Corp, TRIP, Humantra, Free Soul, Dose & Co, Hunter & Gather and Nutriburst are all on the shelves. Also worth flagging: half the range is in exclusive or supermarket-debut formats, with smaller pack sizes. Retail is deliberately being positioned as a trial channel for DTC brands, not just a revenue channel. Full piece on The Checkout 🛒

Patrick CrowleySep 9, 2026

The barriers to building a consumer brand have been dissolved. Shopify built the tech. Contract manufacturers have steadily dropped MOQs from thousands of units to hundreds. Meta, Google and TikTok made acquisition self-serve. Amazon and TikTok Shop opened vast distribution channels. Content Marketing exploded and a VC boom in the early 20s along with Wayflyer esque revenue-based financing options solved cash flow. The result: A race to the middle. A flood of new consumer brands, all looking, sounding and selling the same. To win right now, brands need to deliberately break away from that. Here's some that are: 1. CatCrew — Build the audience before the brand. Co-founder Luca Gervasi set up a cat-only Instagram page a full year before launching CatCrew. Narrowed the content down to cat nutrition six months out, teased the brand three weeks out. At launch, 30k followers transferred straight to the brand page and the waitlist pulled 12k emails in 5 days. First-party audience as the actual launch asset. 2. Pulse Mindfulness Inc. Differentiate by subtraction. Every other ring in the category raced to add features. Johan Matton went the opposite way and launched Pulse as "the first wearable in the world that tracks nothing." The reframe from measured to felt gave them a distinct piece of ground in a crowded market. 15,000 on the pre-launch waitlist. 3. JAW studios (Behind DIRT + Drink Oshun). Obsess over design as the social trigger. DIRT ships premium olive oil in a cologne-style bottle. Drink Oshun did the same with its distinctive electrolyte bottle. For a studio model built on high output and low capex, packaging is the growth lever. Every kitchen counter and dinner table does the marketing paid ads normally would. 4. 8hours. Build a product Roadmap, not a SKU. Rather than pitch investors on the sleep supplement alone, Ollie Groombridge & Mathias Deceuninck built a product roadmap by breaking down the 24-hour biological cycle. VCs loved it because they could show the vision beyond a single product. Competitive but exciting times in Consumer! 🚀