Hey, starter! Read on for…

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

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1. Roll up, then pour. “I love jiu-jitsu, I love coffee, and I love having people around,” Thi Lam says. “So having those three together is a dream come true.” The founder of creative agency Garnish Studios followed his passions and took a 1,050 sq ft studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, threw down some mats, wheeled in a La Marzocco Linea Mini, and opened Kawabonsai – a ‘jiu-jitsu cafe.’ I love this concept. I love how it doesn’t fit into any neat boxes. And the name: it came to him in a dream – kawa meaning coffee in lots of languages, and bonsai nods to a craft that demands discipline (and artistry). → Say it fast and you’ll also hear a certain ‘90s turtle catchphrase too… 🥋☕️

2. Take a seat. Meanwhile, in Dubai, Lebanese designer Zein Hageali of Zeino Makes has launched a product called Tawlitna – “our table” – a flat-pack riff on the arabesque side table sitting in grandparents’ living rooms across the Middle East. Hers are beech wood painted in 4 colours (mix the legs and tops if you want, too…) and packs into a backpack, so it can go wherever you go. → Starter insight: What products or objects are in your house but haven’t been given a creative glow-up in ages? Tons of magic there. 💡

3. Follow the sun(s). And in the Blue Mountains outside Sydney, self-taught Chilean baker Romina Gardella runs House of Suns, a bright yellow micro-bakery stocked with the cake, pastries and biscuits she grew up on. Romina and her family built the stand from recycled pallets outside their off-grid home in March. It opens Saturdays at 9am and sells out within the hour – pretttty impressive, given reaching it means a 1 km hike through bushland! ☀️🍰

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Cornelius Klimt has always been a mosquito magnet. But most chemical mosquito sprays suck. In 2021, after dousing himself in the stuff left him waking up with what felt like the “worst hangover ever,” he wondered if there was a better way…

The Vienna-based starter’s first idea: a premium, plant-based mosquito spray – one that works, smells good, and looks great. His second idea was even more clever: use high-end hotels as the distribution and marketing channel.

He tinkered with a pharmacist friend, tested formulas on family holidays in Brazil, and got... nowhere. Then, at a gathering after a funeral (of all places), he mentioned his crazy idea to a stranger, who replied: “You should talk to my wife.” Hemma had made her own mosquito spray years earlier. By the next morning, they were cofounders.

Calma Compania launched in 2024, and is now stocked at some of Europe’s most beautiful hotels – Reschio and the Four Seasons among them. 10% of profits fund the fight against malaria. And now Cornelius and Hemma are plotting their next act: going all-in on direct-to-consumer.

→ For Starters asked Cornelius how you build a luxury brand around a bug spray. Keep reading… 🦟🦟🦟

💬 Hey Cornelius! How’d you stumble upon mosquito spray as a market gap?

When I was a kid, I was always getting bitten by mosquitoes. I was also a bit allergic, so I’d get these huge, swollen bites. My parents worked in development aid, so we travelled to South Africa and Mozambique a lot. The topics of malaria and mosquitoes were always present. It’s funny, sometimes when I smell a super chemical mosquito spray, it brings me back to my childhood! But yeah, if I sat next to you at the dinner table back then, you’d have zero bites and I’d get all of them.

💬 There’s always one person in the group...

Yup. Fast-forward to 2021 and I was travelling a lot. I spent a week at a friend’s house in Italy and there were a lot of mosquitoes. I sprayed myself head to toe with this chemical spray and woke up the next morning feeling like I had the worst hangover ever. A few other things happened around this time. I remember reading an article about a boutique perfume shop in Mexico that discovered one of their perfumes had minor repelling qualities against mosquitoes, which was interesting. Then, I was helping my wife with some copywriting for a skincare company she was working on, and I learned a lot about the insect repelling qualities of essential oils. And finally, I spent a night at an incredible hotel in Italy – amazing food, glassware, service, everything was perfect – but they had an ugly yellow chemical mosquito spray bottle on the table. All of these experiences mixed in my mind, and I thought: “It’s super niche, but maybe there can be a better solution.”

💬 It sounds niche, but mosquitoes are also a universal pain in the ass for pretty much all of us – and one of the world’s biggest killers too, of course. So you had this eureka moment… and then what? Did you start googling ingredients? Messing around with formulas?

Pretty much! I was talking to a pharmacist friend in Vienna and we tried different combinations. I also travelled to Brazil for a family vacation and took a lot of sprays with me to test them. For me it was about testing the repelling qualities along with the scent. And so back then, my idea was to experiment with this whole world of fragrances, so to say. But while a lot of essential oils repel mosquitoes, they tend to work for only 45 minutes to an hour. If you have to use a spray every 45 minutes it’s a bit annoying. It was a lot of trial and error. But I wasn’t really getting anywhere and my focus ended up going somewhere else…

💬 So how’d you get back on track?

A sort of funny moment happened. One day, at a gathering in Vienna following a funeral, of all places, I was talking with someone who asked me what I do for a living. I mentioned, “I have this project and that project and I’m freelancing here and there with this hotel group, and blah, blah, blah.”

And he said, “Yeah, that all sounds cool, but what do you actually want to do?” And I said, “Well, I have this crazy idea – I want to create a mosquito spray for premium hospitality.” And he’s like, “You should talk to my wife!” He leans over and Hemma is there. She said she’d made a mosquito spray four years ago with some oils. I told her I’d been trying to develop a spray for a while but wasn’t really getting anywhere, and that maybe the two of us should just do it together!

💬 Boom.

It was like midnight at that point, so we said, Let’s hop on the phone in the morning to see if it's still a good idea. It was, and we’ve been doing it ever since!

💬 I love it. How did you land on hotels as an ideal customer?

Normally if you develop a mosquito spray, you sell through pharmacies because pharmacies basically give you their okay and sign-off. If something is in a pharmacy, people think it’s great. But our goal was always hotels. I worked with hotels in my day job and I knew that there was a market for it. Hoteliers are a specific kind of person. They spend a lot of time sourcing their materials carefully and perfecting them. I was talking to a few hotel owners back then and they were like, “This sounds interesting. If you have something, send it over.” The plan was to build hospitality-first – to have hotels be our B2B distribution channel and also the main marketing channel to build the social proof. Then we’d build our direct-to-consumer brand out of that.

💬 Clever. You’re now stocked in really amazing, premium luxury hotels. Was that a matter of cold emailing, warm introductions? How did you get into these stockists?

I had some contacts at some great hotels. They were our first buyers. But the next hotels we got were basically through cold email outreach. I had a hypothesis: if there’s a hotel with a certain approach to quality – if they care about where their food comes from, what bed linens and soap they use, etc. – and if they also have mosquitoes present in the area, then it should be a no-brainer for them to buy our product. Because there’s no premium mosquito spray brand out there! We approached the hotels and we said, “Well, we’re already stocked in Parkhotel Mondschein and Ottmanngut,” two hotels in Südtirol. And it worked. We soon got into Reschio, one of the world’s best hotels. And then we got into Four Seasons in Mallorca last year. That was through a cold email outreach. Email isn’t dead!

💬 Do you want to make Calma Compania your main gig?

That’s the goal! Before today, the company was mainly focused on brand-building, building social proof, and not growing in terms of quantity, but in quality. We focused on proving our B2B case: we had a proof of concept and we thought there was market fit, we’ve now proven it. We really solved a problem for these hotels. Right now we’re in a transition: our next proof of concept is our B2C case, as a direct-to-consumer brand. We’ve had crazy traction in Austria. In May, I randomly did three Instagram reels about the Tiger Mosquito because it’s been all over the news in Austria, and those went semi-viral! As well as this recent post I did. I don't know where it’s all coming from…

💬 The algorithm gods.

Yeah, it’s insane. Now I’m getting messages from all over the world – Hong Kong, Singapore. It’s great but also funny that this resonates so much. At the end of the day, it’s a mosquito spray.

💬 But that’s precisely why. It’s a market that hasn’t really been innovated in for years, so it’s like ‘Whoa, this is a cool category to innovate in!’ But going back a sec, I’d love to know more about your B2B vs B2C strategy – they’re totally different routes. Being stocked at Whole Foods or in luxury hotels or selling DTC via ecommerce are all wildly different paths.

We always said we’d build hospitality first and then through that grow our direct to consumer brand, because people will get to know the spray at the hotel first, and then order online. In terms of retail, the product won’t work in classic retail, because our mosquito spray costs €28, compared to another which might cost €9. And we knew that for hotels, the pain point is so high and that they want to provide their guests with a premium solution, so they’re very likely to buy our product.

💬 Can you dig a bit into your pricing and costs?

It’s an expensive spray. But that’s not because we're greedy. It’s just that we’re a really small business, production costs are really high, and we try to source really good ingredients. Of course, this will get lower once we start producing hundreds of thousands of sprays. But right now, it’s expensive. Yet our DTC is growing. Also, right now we’re only available in Austria, Germany, and France, which is another bottleneck we have. It’s also maybe why very few brands have done it before: it’s very, very painful in terms of regulation! 

💬 Go on…

Every country in Europe has different rules for our active ingredient. Our active ingredient is used in every single European country, but because we also use other essential oils in the spray that aren’t an active ingredient, but mainly for the smell, it’s considered a whole new product, which means we need to go through so many applications. For example, in Austria, you’d basically say, “I’m using this ingredient” and you can sell it straight away. But if you do the same in Spain, just as an example, the process might take a year and cost €10,000! So we need to see where we focus and expand. Like I said, it’s a bottleneck, but we’re solving it.

💬 You guys have raised some cash, too, right?

At the beginning of the year we did a friends and family investment round – we raised €70K, which was basically to make this year possible – for production, for a bit of cash flow for compliance and legal things, and for studies we have to do on the spray, etc. We’re not paying ourselves salaries yet; until now we’ve only invested in the business. And since we’ve had crazy momentum recently, we can do another financing round to really scale it up. We’ve been pretty conservative until now, so let’s see where it goes!

💬 What a journey.

It’s been so cool to work with these hotels so far. For our first customers, these small bed and breakfasts in Italy with five rooms, the amount of sprays they need per year isn’t that much, but they’re so excited about the product. That’s what I love about the hospitality industry. There are so many driven people. They want to make the world a better and more beautiful place. It’s just lots of fun to work with them. ☼

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Seasonal publications 📆 → Heatmaps is a great newsletter about Mediterranean culture, climate and futures… and it only publishes between June and August. I asked the starter behind it, Philip Teale, about the logic/limitations of a ‘seasonal’ publication. He says:

Four stools 🤏 → Is this India’s smallest bar?

Retro tech ☎️ → All the analog hardware making a comeback.

Older customers 🧓 → Some DTC brands are pressing pause on their worship of Gen Z and millennials, as grandparents & boomers make up a bigger slice of their customers.

Umfunktionierung 🛠️ → Functional transformation: “Sometimes, we make an impact by transforming the function of what already exists.”

Bananatex 🍌 → A textile made from the Philippine-native banana species abacá, now used by fashion brands.

AI can’t smell 🐽 → “Scent is a vital component of human intelligence. But in our quest to advance artificial intelligence, nobody seems to care about it.”

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Marker — A newly launched writing tool “for people who believe in writing.” I’ve got 5 invites (first come, first served!)

Those At Large — A printed directory (!) of top freelancers, creatives and agencies. Extremely cool.

Solo Grants — Microgrants from $100 to $1,000 for solo builders, no strings attached.

How Wales is weaving their ancient craft into the future of fashion. CN Traveller

PopUp remade the bagel shop for Gen Z. But what’s lost in its pared-down, endlessly replicable model? GrubStreet

What I learned about time. Wonder Tools

Wait for “ready,” and it might never come. In Stock

‘It’s like Dunkirk for the construction industry!’ The small team rescuing London’s precious building materials. Guardian

He’s reviewed over 2,300 varieties of instant noodles. Meet South Korea’s ‘ramyeon critic’. SCMP

The pursuit of hungriness: 250 years of American food innovation. NYT

This father-daughter duo brought in $428K last year making 3D-printed fidget toys. Make It

Birdwatching in Tokyo. Ssense

€27K — The price to buy this restaurant in Domme, one of the most beautiful villages in France. Or you can become the new owner of The Old Grocery Espresso Bar, a cafe in Northampton, England. Or why not lease this cute commercial space in Bushwick and open up the shop of your dreams?

Mechanical Pencil, an illustrated celebration of the engineering around us.

I suppose if a corner shop can no longer be a corner shop, turning it into a lush family home is the next best thing.

Check out these folding fans from Porter, made with Kyoto’s specialty fan shop Miyawaki Baisenan.

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Alright people, this is your periodic reminder to hit reply to this email (or send me a note at [email protected]) and tell me what you’re working on.

Let me know! Don’t be shy. I love hearing from you.

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