Hey, starter! Read on for…

—Danny (tell me your biz dreams: [email protected])

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1. From CDMX, with love. Andrea Monroy and Teodoro Moya didn't come from the art world. They ran clothing shops in Mexico City's Condesa neighbourhood, and in 2019 they carved out a 2-metre stretch of wall to hang prints by artist friends. The wall outgrew itself fast. 7 years later, Mooni runs 3 spaces, 800 works in rotation, and 150+ artists on the books. They've made their salon-style hang (floor-to-ceiling, every size and medium jammed together) a signature. This month, they opened their first space outside Mexico: a basement on Orchard Street in NYC's Lower East Side (above). Love the ambition. 🎨

2. Slow burn. “I flew to the United States for a poker tournament. BBQ wasn’t part of the plan,” says Man Hon Luk. The plan changed at a poker table in Austin, when another player pointed him to Interstellar BBQ. Hon ended up asking pitmaster John Bates if he’d teach him – despite zero professional cooking experience – and Bates said yes. Hon came back to London and spent the next few years “learning through smoke and service.” A residency in Hackney Wick built a loyal following for his Texan BBQ with Hong Kong roots. And now Uncle Hon’s BBQ is crowdfunding for his own permanent 80-cover canal-side spot. One week left on the campaign → Check it out. 🍗

3. Hear you loud and clear. A year ago I wrote about father-daughter duo Ken and Alana, who created a gorgeous wooden standing desk – designed in Seattle, handcrafted in Tokyo. Now, their company Kenwork has built a genius speaker stand made of solid wood and wrapped in sasawashi fabric – a handwoven fabric blending Japanese washi paper and Kumazasa bamboo plant leaf fibers. If you happen to be in Tokyo today or tomorrow, swing by their first ever popup. 📣

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Most athletes hate what they eat on the move. Two starters in France decided to do something about it.

Anouck Grau had a career in professional snowboarding before training as a nutritionist and working as a private chef for sports teams. Chris Bellamy, meanwhile, engineered electric cars and recyclable footwear before pivoting to sustainable design. They met on a bike ride in Switzerland, when Chris tasted a savoury purée Anouck had made and packed for the ride. That was their starter moment.

Three years and hundreds of recipe trials later, the Annecy-based pair launched a brand together called Yanaa. A survey they conducted showed that, of 592 athletes, nearly 80% thought existing sports nutrition wasn’t healthy, 77% actually found it disgusting, and 75% wanted savoury food.

Yanaa’s solution: organic, savoury purées cooked by chefs in Provence, packed in on-the-go pouches, and designed for athletes sick of eating ‘space food’. The name says it all: Yanaa cheekily stands for “You are not an astronaut”.

→ Below, Chris and Anouck share what they discovered about regulations, why business-building is like a snowball, and what they've learned about switching from a race mindset to a training one...

💬 Hey you two, let’s talk pouches. That’s the first thing people see when they look at Yanaa.

Chris: Initially, everyone said, “What you’re trying to do is impossible. You can’t put savoury food in a pouch. It’s never going to work.” But we very luckily, and completely by chance, stumbled upon a family producer that makes organic baby food and precooked restaurant ingredients. Having this small family producer, which was so collaborative and really bought into the project, was key for us. They’re sporty and loved what we were doing. We’d propose these mad ideas and they were just super supportive and prepared to take risks and take a chance on us.

💬 Is the food-in-pouch niche dominated by one big player or hundreds?

Chris: Most are actually produced by one manufacturer in Italy, but their minimum order quantity is a million pouches. It’s completely inaccessible for a startup, so we had to get a bit creative. That’s why we tried to find more niche suppliers to work with, and products that met all the safety standards, and so on. But yeah, the packaging was a big challenge. 

💬 Your idea was to market Yanaa to athletes. Did you anticipate an education curve or would athletes instinctively ‘get it’?

Chris: The pouch format can be a strange one. People might look at it and say, “Oh, that’s baby food.” It’s changing, though, because yogurt products are coming in pouches and we’re starting to see a cultural shift. We decided to start with athletes because it’s a niche we know, so let’s play to our strengths. The product also had a really good market fit with athletes. The nuance for us now is about which specific sports to target. We launched in trail running and cycling and it went down really, really well.

The whole brand around ‘you are not an astronaut’ is kind of poking fun at the industry – and in the world of trail running and cycling, there are a lot of astronauts. Some people love that, but for some people it touches a nerve!

Our target market is active, fun and playful, and we're exploring where best to land within that and seeing naturally where demand comes from. 

💬 What were some other challenges getting Yanaa off the ground initially?

Chris: EU regulations! Packaging needs to be legally compliant and EU food legislation is an absolute minefield. Making sure that you’re compliant with legislation is really hard. What most food brands do is add a load of synthetic additives to their product. So, if they want to say it’s ‘high in protein’, they’ll add a lot of whey protein. Or if they want to say it’s ‘got energy’, they’ll add a load of synthetic manganese or whatever.

Anouck: We realized that anytime there’s a food claim or health claim on a product in the store – imagine, for instance, you’re buying something because it claims that it has B6, and you buy it because it’s healthy – it’s actually not healthy because it's synthetically added. Real food from nature is a mix of good things and is more healthy, but you’re not allowed to say that.

Chris: It’s funny – the word ‘ultra-processed’ comes up a lot in our day-to-day conversations. In our photography, we’ll say, “Let's not make our photography ultra-processed.” We live those values through every single part of what we’re doing.

💬 Yanaa is based in France. Is that sense of place something you want to lean into? Do you want the brand to ‘feel’ French?

Chris: The UK sports nutrition market is ten times the size of the French market, so from day one, we knew we wanted to be international. International markets are really appealing for us. Obviously it takes a lot of extra work to be bilingual, and to have a brand that’s universal, but everything we’ve done is international-ready. What we’ve kept is the French language and ‘Made in France’, because we feel that ‘Brand France’ is incredibly strong wherever you are in the world, especially when you’re talking about quality of food, nutrition, and ingredients. That’s why we have a distinctive French edge. It’s very intentional.

💬 What are some things that you two have learned since you launched that might be instructive for starters?

Anouck: That it’s so hard. I’ve done hard things in my life, but starting a company from scratch is much, much harder than what I ever expected. There are just so many specific little things to think about. It’s really interesting to realize that basically there’s nothing to learn, per se – it’s more like you’re following a path and one thing after another arrives in your path. You also need to work out your brain and protect your health, otherwise none of this is viable.

Chris: Both of us come from an athletic background and we’re quite competitive, determined and resilient. But if you have that mindset when you start a business, you’ll realize there’s no finish line. You’re going to keep running and running and running and never cross that finish line. So it’s about switching from a race mindset to a training mindset. We’re not going at it all the time – you have to switch from work to recover mode.

💬 It’s true, if you have a 9-5 job, you finish and go home to see family or friends. You might not think about your day job. But if you own a business, it’s in your brain 24/7 unless you consciously say ‘stop’.

Anouck: That’s actually what you need to learn. I'm still learning it.

Chris: I’m still learning it! I often think of a business like a snowball. We spent three years making this little snowball with so much passion and energy and quality and research, and then you finally launch it… and you realize that actually you’ve just gotta keep rolling the snowball! You keep it rolling and slowly gain momentum.

💬 Okay, imagine the snowball keeps rolling. In five or ten years, what kind of business do you want to run? And as the owners, what kind of life do you want to build?

Anouck: We always promised ourselves that we started this brand to have fun. It’s actually written in our company document. So we keep this top of mind, and when things get hard, I’m like, “Hey, Chris, remember we’re here to have fun. Let’s make the decision that brings us the most fun.” So in ten years, we’d like to have enough money to have fun! Maybe we’ll do a collaboration with an artist, maybe we’ll be in an art biennale somewhere, doing things that aren’t necessarily linked to the sports industry.

Chris: I’ve got two projects. One is Yanaa, which takes up most of my time, but the other is Biocrafted where I develop conceptual materials and work with fashion designers. That’s about far-out future exploration, whereas Yanaa is the hard reality and trying to make impact at scale. I’m going to try and keep that balance – where I’m stretching the idea of what’s possible with Biocrafted, then trying to implement that reality with Yanaa.

For the moment, though, the mission is fairly simple: we’re trying to get athletes to eat real food. And doing it with flair, a touch of design, and creativity is where a lot of our fun comes from. ☼

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Boutique 🤔 → Is it a bad word?

Cities only work if we show up 👏 → The case for small business and creative density.

Peanut butter raises 🥜 → Across-the-board pay bumps to employees, spread out thinly, instead of merit-based raises to a select few.

Carrom 🎲 → The resurgence in popularity of a centuries-old south Asian board game.

Mobile tortilla factories 🌮 → Tortillerías are a brilliant, delicious biz I can get behind.

Things have jobs 🧠 → “Pillows are made for comfort, scissors are sharp, and digital devices are made to track your every move.”

Expat, Inc. ✈ → Businesses are charging $$$ to teach Americans how to move/live abroad.

The DTC cheat code 💀 → It’s dead.

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Link Kit — A new link-in-bio tool that doesn't suck, for designers and creatives.

Ten Lives: How What We Have Shapes Who We Are — An exploration of how money – and the lack of it – shapes our lives, told through the stories of ten people, written and illustrated by Mona Chalabi.

Landscapes Directory — A growing archive of 2,600 landscape paintings in the public domain – free to browse, download, share, and reuse.

Core by Brand Stamp — A quick and easy way to make great brand merch.

Bare necessities — In 2020, four friends in Montreal spent a year and 30 prototypes making the perfect boxer brief. The launch flopped (4–5 orders a day for months), but they recently hit 1 million customers and opened their first retail store. How'd they do it? Co-founder Berto Rebelo gave Shopify's newsletter In Stock all the deets. Plus: fibre-maxxing data, the rise of “grow your own” gardening products, a $1M landline phone, and more. Take a look ✨

How to enter side doors: a field guide to jobs, cold emails, and making yourself legible to the right people. Velvet Noise

A spontaneous late afternoon call with Lydia Pang. Dot Dot Dot

The independent bookstore revival is underway. The Nation

On grindslop. Will Manidis

How to be inspired without copying. JA Westenberg

Herschel co-founder Lyndon Cormack says Typical Towels will teach his old brand new tricks. Thingtesting

New arts magazine Totei to focus on the ‘creative process’. Semafor

I believed sustainable fashion’s hype. But between Everlane and Allbirds, the letdowns keep coming. Guardian

61% → The slice of US small biz owners who say they’re happier now compared to when they first opened their doors, per the Small Business Happiness Report.

330,000 → The number of retail outlets in Korea – mostly cafes, restaurants and convenience stores – where ‘pay with your face’ scanners have been installed.

$1.8 billion → The size of the global pet waste removal services market (as in, professionals rocking up to your house to take away your dog’s poo). It’s expected to rise to $3.5 billion by 2034.

Cookie Queens

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In London, For Starters subscriber Payal Wadhwa runs the annual De Beauvoir Jazz Festival, the next edition of which is 10-12th July. “I started it 3 years ago,” Payal tells us, “having found myself jaded doing a job I’d always wanted to do (but somehow left me feeling deeply vacant and slightly soul-less). After two decades in design & innovation, I find myself actually ‘doing design’ rather than talking about it.” See you there? 🎺

Congrats to Kim Darragon, founder of the marketing consultancy Kim Does Marketing (also my partner in crime and For Starters’ right-hand woman), who’s back as a mentor at this year’s SXSW in London. Wanna discuss all things marketing, social & personal branding? Book a session 👏

In Barcelona, Clara and Greg have created a storytelling platform called Huevos Rotos. Check out this story in their newsletter about their time in Wazuka, Japan, and meeting the team at Obubu Tea Farms. “We think they are the embodiment of what a starter is,” they tell us. “A small, passionate team working to preserve traditional Japanese tea-growing techniques whilst sharing their knowledge with the world through education programmes and a global tea club.” 🍵

And in Montreal, Matthieu Guyonnet-Duluc has built a fun, useful, and free travel tool called Midway – it helps groups of people in different cities find destinations they can all reach by direct flight. He says it might help a group of friends planning a getaway weekend, a family organizing a reunion, and co-workers looking for a retreat in a third-place. Cool! ✈

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