This week was an emotional rollercoaster. And I heard every bit of it.

It started with gratitude. A man almost as old as my father came to install our dishwasher. It was a hot day. He was running around, sweating, working. And something hit me quietly. The comfort I live in, the safety, the small luxuries I move through without thinking so much of that came down to where and to whom I was born. The birth lottery. I watched him, and I heard that feeling clearly. Gratitude. Deep, humbling gratitude. The kind that makes you realise you have no business complaining.

And then by the end of the same week, I was feeling detached. Questioning my worth. A completely different emotional place.

I heard that too.

Both of those were me in the same week. And instead of pushing either feeling away, I sat with them. That’s the practice, not managing your emotions, but actually hearing them and letting them tell you something.

You can be grateful and sad at the same time. You can feel full and empty in the same breath. You can count your blessings in the morning and question everything by evening. That is not a contradiction. That is just life. And life only makes sense when you’re honest enough with yourself to hear what you’re actually feeling, not what you think you should be feeling.

That’s where your voice lives.

The voice that only you can hear. The one that speaks in the quiet, in the in-between, in the middle of an emotional week when everything feels like too much. It was there when I watched that man and felt grateful. It was there when I felt lost by Friday. It’s always there. Telling you what you need, what you want, what comes next.

But you have to be attuned to yourself to hear it.

And the more you listen consistently, honestly, without judgment, the stronger that voice gets. That is how you build intuition. Not from a book, not from advice, not from anyone outside of you. From the practice of hearing yourself over and over again until you learn to trust what you hear. Until that voice becomes your compass.

Your friends will show up. Your kids, your husband, and your parents will be there. But none of them can hear your voice the way you can. None of them can feel your needs the way you feel them. That responsibility belongs to you alone.

So don’t lose your voice for anyone.

Build that relationship with yourself. Protect it. Because you are the only constant in the life you are building. And that voice, the one only you can hear, is not just self-awareness. It is your intuition. And your intuition is the truest guide you will ever have.

Don’t stop listening to it.

What I’m Reading

Think Faster, Talk Smarter — Matt Abrahams

A practical guide to improving spontaneous speaking and clear communication under pressure. I want to improve how I think and speak, so I am trying this highly rated book.

South to Freedom - Alice L Baumgartner

A historical account of enslaved people fleeing south to Mexico and how this challenged U.S. slavery laws. This is for my book club, and I’m truly enjoying it.

What Else Dropped This Week

Off Script

Engineering Her Own Lane: Mitali Saxena on Reinventing Fashion, Tech & Herself

Under the Hood

The Bankruptcy Test: What Retail’s 2026 Wave Is Really Revealing

Note to Self

Life goes by quickly.

You don’t want to look up one day and realise you moved through it without really knowing yourself. Without knowing what you felt, what you wanted, what mattered to you in each moment.

Don’t wake up ten years from now asking what I actually wanted back then?

Every phase of your life is still you. The you who was figuring it out. The one who was hurting. The you who was hopeful. The you who didn’t have the words yet but felt everything deeply.

Know her.

Know the you in every season, not just the polished, put-together version. All of her. Because each version of you is building the next one. And if you’re not paying attention, life will pass, and you will have missed yourself entirely.

So listen. Feel. Write it down. Sit with it.

Know who you are right now in this season, in this moment.

Because this version of you deserves to be known, too.

Be bold. Be real. Be Anomalous.

— Sai Menon

Follow for more Be Anomalous stories, conversations, and behind-the-scenes.

Website | Instagram | LinkedIn | YouTube | @iamsaimenon

In this episode of Be Anomalous, I sit down with Mitali, the founder of Fashom and XFashom, two ventures that bridge fashion, technology, and sustainability. Her path is anything but traditional: from growing up in Oman and Saudi Arabia, to studying engineering in Florida, to leaping headfirst into the fashion industry in New York. Along the way, she’s built platforms that celebrate real women, real bodies, and real style long before “body positivity” was a marketing trend.

We talk about the cultural whiplash of moving from Saudi Arabia to the U.S., the loneliness of being a woman in male-dominated industries (both engineering and tech), and what it takes to raise money when investors tell you, “What if you spend it shopping?” Mitali shares how she turned rejection into resilience, why customer feedback is her secret weapon, and how she built not one but two companies that marry AI, style, and sustainability, all while running a nonprofit in Africa and teaching at a fashion institute.

This episode is about resilience, pivoting with purpose, and building companies that empower women without burning yourself out in the process.

If you’ve ever felt torn between safety and passion, or wondered how to balance ambition with self-care, Mitali’s story is a reminder: you can redefine success on your own terms.

🎧 Listen to the episode

[Spotify] | [Apple] | [YouTube]

What You’ll Learn

• How Mitali went from engineering to fashion and why problem-solving, not design, has always been her superpower

• What it was like growing up in Oman and Saudi Arabia as a young woman obsessed with fashion

• How cultural constraints and reverse culture shock shaped her worldview

• The founding story of her first app, celebrating real women and unfiltered style

• Fundraising as a woman in tech: discrimination, rejection, and lessons in resilience

• Why customer feedback is the most important data point for a founder

• How YouTube unboxings (not Instagram) unlocked her first wave of traction

• Pivoting from fashion box to data-driven technology engine

• Her leadership philosophy: emotional intelligence, empathy, and mindful workplaces

• Burnout as a founder — how she rebuilt balance and why mindfulness is now a business strategy

• Building sustainable solutions for fashion waste and retailer returns

Favorite Quote

“Your world is the reflection of your state of consciousness.

— Eckhart Tolle

Favorite Book

📖 The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle

In This Episode, We Cover:

(01:00) Mitali’s love for fashion, despite an engineering background
(02:00) The leap from engineering to entrepreneurship
(03:00) Launching her first company to showcase real bodies and unfiltered style
(04:00) Growing up in Oman and Saudi Arabia, cultural constraints and identity
(06:30) Moving to the U.S.: Florida, New York, and reverse culture shock
(07:00) Engineering as problem-solving and a foundation for entrepreneurship
(09:00) Bootstrapping vs fundraising and the sting of investor bias
(10:30) Always going back to her “why” of women’s empowerment
(11:30) Pivoting into Fashom and XFashom: AI, style boxes, and tech for retailers
(14:00) Operations lessons, returns, and building warehouse systems from scratch
(16:00) Running a nonprofit in Swaziland and teaching at Marangoni
(18:00) Burnout, mindfulness, and choosing balance over endless growth
(20:00) Emotional intelligence as the underrated skill of leadership
(22:00) Building team culture through values, wellness, and empathy
(24:00) Founder loneliness and why surrounding yourself matters
(25:00) Resilience, pivoting, and flexibility as must-have founder traits
(27:00) Customer feedback as the key to knowing when to pivot
(29:00) From a kitchen full of boxes to the first warehouse, early founder realities
(31:00) Finding traction on YouTube unboxings and reaching suburban moms
(32:00) Customer stories that remind her of her “why.”
(33:00) Sustainability goals: cutting waste and reducing returns
(34:00) Favorite book, quote, and final reflections

Referenced in This Episode

The Power of Now — Eckhart Tolle
Sarah Blakely (Spanx) — Founder inspiration
YouTube unboxings as a growth channel
Institute of Marangoni (where she teaches)

New episodes drop every Monday and Thursday.

Be bold. Be real. Be anomalous.

Follow for more Be Anomalous stories, conversations, and behind-the-scenes.

Website | Instagram | LinkedIn | YouTube | @iamsaimenon

Walk through a Saks Fifth Avenue today, and everything looks the same. The marble floors. The perfume counters. The quiet hum of luxury. But beneath the surface, something has broken. On January 13, 2026, Saks Global, the entity created from the $2.7 billion merger of Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The company that was supposed to define the future of American luxury couldn’t pay its vendors.

And it wasn’t alone.

Francesca’s filed in February. Pat McGrath Labs filed in January. Forever 21 liquidated entirely in March 2025. The LYCRA Company, the supplier that put the stretch in your workout gear, filed for bankruptcy in March 2026. In the span of a few months, names that shaped how Americans shop, dress, and see themselves began appearing in bankruptcy court.

The easy story is that retail is dying. The more interesting story is what happens after the filing, because that’s where you find out which brands actually had something worth saving.

What’s Driving the Wave

Three forces are converging to create this moment, and none of them is new. What’s new is that they’ve stopped being manageable.

1. The Debt Reckoning

When interest rates were near zero, retailers could carry significant debt loads cheaply. Private equity-backed buyouts loaded companies with leverage on the assumption that cheap refinancing would always be available. That assumption died in 2022. Retailers who could refinance did so in 2025, often at painful terms. Those who couldn’t are now in bankruptcy court.

The Saks-Neiman deal is the most visible example. To fund the $2.7 billion acquisition of Neiman Marcus, Saks raised $2.2 billion in high-yield bonds. Between the two legacy businesses, the combined company entered 2026 with roughly $4.7 billion in total debt. When it missed a $100 million interest payment in December 2025, the spiral began: vendors stopped shipping, shelves thinned, sales dropped, and the debt became unserviceable.

This is not a retail story. It is a capital structure crisis.

2. The Consumer Has Moved On — Permanently

E-commerce didn’t just add a channel. It restructured consumer expectations entirely. The average shopper now begins their purchase journey online, even if they complete it in a store. Brands that couldn’t build a compelling digital presence lost relevance before they lost revenue.

Meanwhile, the rise of ultra-fast fashion, with Shein turning a trend into a $7 garment in days, has compressed the timeline in which any physical retailer can respond. Forever 21, which was once a fast fashion brand, filed for bankruptcy in March 2025 because it couldn’t move fast enough. The traditional retail calendar, with its seasonal buys and six-month lead times, is a competitive liability in this environment.

3. The Luxury Slowdown Hit Harder Than Expected

The luxury sector is experiencing what analysts are calling a “spending hangover.” After years of post-pandemic splurging, high-income consumers are pulling back. The irony for Saks Global is sharp: the merger was designed to create a fortress against exactly this kind of pressure. Instead, the deal itself became the pressure.

Moody’s currently holds a negative outlook on the retail sector for 2026 as a whole. As one S&P analyst put it plainly: consumers can spend as long as they have a job. With consumer confidence at historic lows and employment the key variable to watch, the wave isn’t done.

The Part Nobody Is Talking About

Here’s what gets lost in the bankruptcy headlines: Chapter 11 is not a death sentence. It is a legal tool specifically designed to let a company separate its financial problems from its operational ones. The court freezes the debt, gives the business room to breathe, and creates a structured process for figuring out what’s worth keeping.

For the right kind of brand, that’s not an ending. It’s a reset.

The brands coming out of this wave in better shape than they entered are the ones that used Chapter 11 for exactly what it was designed for: isolating a capital structure problem without destroying the underlying asset. The brands that didn’t make it out are the ones that discovered, under court supervision, that the underlying asset wasn’t there. That distinction is key.

This Isn’t New

The idea that bankruptcy can be a beginning rather than an ending is well-supported by history, and the numbers are more encouraging than most people realize.

A Wharton study analyzing Chapter 11 filings between 2019 and 2021 found that 88% of companies that went through the process successfully emerged from bankruptcy.

The most dramatic proof of this is Marvel Entertainment. In December 1996, Marvel filed for Chapter 11 after declining comic book sales and a collapsing trading card market left it financially unviable. The company used the restructuring to pivot, acquiring toy maker Toy Biz, licensing its characters aggressively, and laying the groundwork for what would become the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Today, Marvel is the most valuable entertainment franchise on earth. The characters were always the asset. Bankruptcy just gave the company the chance to reorganize around them.

General Motors filed for bankruptcy in June 2009 at the height of the financial crisis, one of the largest bankruptcies in American history. With government backing and a complete leadership overhaul, it shed decades of legacy costs, closed underperforming brands, and emerged leaner. It went public again just 18 months later. The brand equity, the idea of American-made cars, was never in question; it was the cost structure.

In fashion specifically, Betsey Johnson filed for Chapter 11 in 2012 after profits fell sharply from their mid-2000s peak. Nearly all retail stores closed. Rather than disappear, Johnson used the reset to introduce a new lower-priced line, pivot to e-commerce, and rebuild distribution through wholesale partners like Macy’s. The brand survived because the creative identity, her signature whimsical aesthetic, was something customers recognized and wanted. That didn’t go away when the stores closed.

The pattern across all three is the same one playing out in retail right now: the companies that came back knew exactly what they were, and used the bankruptcy process to shed everything that wasn’t that.

The Identity Test

Think of every bankruptcy filing as a question the market is asking: Is there something real here?

Pat McGrath Labs filed on January 22, 2026, not because customers stopped loving the brand, but because a lender dispute triggered an asset auction the founder didn’t consent to. The filing paused the auction, gave the brand court protection, and created the space to find better capital. Within three months, Pat McGrath Labs had secured $30 million in new financing, restructured under new ownership with GDA Luma, and emerged from Chapter 11 with its creative identity intact. Dame Pat McGrath remained as Chief Creative Officer.

The LYCRA Company filed on March 17, 2026, with a prepackaged restructuring already agreed to by the overwhelming majority of its creditors. The plan was designed to eliminate over $1.2 billion in debt while keeping its 2,000 employees, eight manufacturing facilities, and customer relationships completely intact. It is expected to emerge within 45 days. The filing wasn’t a crisis; it was a tool. The underlying business, the fiber technology, the brand recognition, the supply relationships, none of that was broken.

Saks Global is a harder case. The filing stripped away most of its off-price business, installed a new CEO, and secured $1.75 billion in financing to fund the restructuring. It may yet emerge. But the question hanging over it is whether a luxury department store model built on physical flagships, expensive real estate, and a consumer who increasingly shops differently can be restructured into relevance, or whether the capital structure problem was always layered on top of a model problem. Something to think about.

Francesca’s and Forever 21 answered the question differently. Francesca’s, filing for the second time in six years, ended in full liquidation of all ~450 stores. A capital infusion fell through, suppliers lost their own financing, and lenders issued a notice of default. There was no going-concern buyer. Forever 21, which had once defined affordable trend-chasing for a generation, couldn’t find a path back, either losing $400 million over its final three fiscal years before liquidating 354 U.S. stores entirely. When the court looked for something to reorganize around, it wasn’t there.

Bankruptcy doesn’t kill brands. It reveals them.

What This Means Beyond Retail

For anyone building something, a brand, a company, a career, the 2026 retail wave is worth studying not as a cautionary tale about debt or disruption, but as a case study in what holds when everything else gives way.

The brands that are coming out the other side have a few things in common. They stood for something specific enough that customers, creditors, and new investors could see the value beneath the financial wreckage. Their identity was the asset. The capital structure was the problem. And those two things, it turns out, can be separated.

The deeper question, the one worth sitting with, isn’t whether your business could survive a bankruptcy filing. It’s whether, if you stripped away everything except what you actually stand for, there would be enough left to rebuild around.

That question doesn’t require a bankruptcy court to answer. But the 2026 wave is a good reminder that at some point, the market will ask it for you.

New article every Tuesday.

Be Bold. Be Real. Be Anomalous.

Follow for more Be Anomalous stories, conversations, and behind-the-scenes.

Website | Instagram | LinkedIn | YouTube | @iamsaimenon

I went to a book event this week.

My usual pattern is to show up with someone I know, or I go alone, sit quietly, take notes, talk to no one, and leave. I’ve done it enough times that it stopped feeling like a choice. It just became what I do.

This time, I wanted to break that.

So I volunteered. I checked in every guest who walked through the door. I had to talk to every single person who came in. It was uncomfortable. That was exactly the point.

And here’s what I’ve been sitting with since.

As we get older, it gets harder to meet new people. Not because we lose the ability, but because we stop putting ourselves in situations where it has to happen. We stick to what’s familiar. The same people, the same spaces, the same version of ourselves that we’ve gotten comfortable performing. And comfort, after a while, starts to feel like safety. But it isn’t. It’s just stillness dressed up as stability.

You cannot grow in that state.

Growth lives on the other side of uncomfortable. It lives in the room where you don’t know anyone. In the conversation, you almost didn’t start. In the version of yourself that shows up when you have no choice but to figure it out.

I didn’t change my life by checking in guests at a book event. But I showed myself something small and important that I can choose differently. That the pattern isn’t permanent. That discomfort, when you walk toward it instead of away, is actually just the feeling of expanding.

That’s worth something.

Start Here.

Volunteer at something.

Just like I did. Find an event, a cause, a gathering, and sign up to help. Volunteering removes the awkwardness of not knowing what to do with yourself in a room full of strangers. It gives you a role. A reason to talk to people.

Go somewhere alone. On purpose.

Not with a friend as backup. Alone. A dinner, a show, a class, an event. When you go alone, you are forced to engage. There is no comfortable corner to retreat to. Aloneness in a social setting, when you choose it deliberately, builds a kind of quiet confidence that you can’t get any other way.

Say yes to the thing that makes you hesitate.

You know the invitation. The one you read and immediately start finding reasons to decline. The event that sounds interesting but unfamiliar. The gathering where you won’t know many people. That hesitation is information. It’s pointing at exactly where the growth is. Say yes before you talk yourself out of it.

Put yourself in rooms you haven’t been in before.

New industries. New neighborhoods. New circles. Different kinds of people live differently from you. Familiarity is comfortable, but it is also a ceiling. The most interesting shifts in how you think come from exposure to people whose lives look nothing like yours.

What I’m Reading

Think Faster, Talk Smarter — Matt Abrahams

A practical guide to improving spontaneous speaking and clear communication under pressure. I want to improve how I think and speak, so I am trying this highly rated book.

South to Freedom - Alice L Baumgartner

A historical account of enslaved people fleeing south to Mexico and how this challenged U.S. slavery laws. This is for my book club, and I'm truly enjoying it.

What Else Dropped This Week

Off Script

How Katherine Built Francis Henri During The Pandemic.

Under the Hood

Anjali Sud: The Builder CEO Who Rewrote the Rules of Streaming

Note to Self

When you learn from people of different walks of life, something shifts in you quietly.

You build empathy. The kind that comes from sitting across from someone whose life looks nothing like yours and finding yourself in their story anyway. You build community beyond the people who already think like you, look like you, live like you. You grow.

And here is what I keep coming back to.

You have this one life. To explore. To learn. To do.

So why are you resisting yourself?

Not the world. Yourself. Because that’s what it actually is when you shrink back. When you don’t start the conversation. When you leave early. When you stay in the same rooms, with the same people, and wonder why nothing feels new.

Stop waiting for the right moment. Walk into the room. Talk to the stranger. Let yourself be a beginner somewhere new.

You only get one shot at this. Don’t spend it playing it safe.

Be bold. Be real. Be Anomalous.

— Sai Menon

Follow for more Be Anomalous stories, conversations, and behind-the-scenes.

Website | Instagram | LinkedIn | YouTube | @iamsaimenon

From Flint to the Fortune 500

There is a particular kind of ambition that is forged in awareness and understanding, that the world does not automatically open its doors for you. For Anjali Sud, that awareness was shaped in Flint, Michigan, a city that would become as much a part of her story as any boardroom or business school she later attended.

Born in Detroit to Punjabi immigrants from India, Sud grew up in Flint in a family that believed in the power of business to create a positive impact. Her parents were physicians, but their ambitions extended beyond medicine. From the time Sud can remember as a child, her father’s passion was entrepreneurship. Even though he was a physician, he also started a plastics recycling plant in Flint that still operates today. He held the philosophy that if you really want to influence people’s lives at scale, business is a powerful vehicle to do so.

Her father would place clips from Wall Street Journal articles about CEOs on her pillow for her to find when she went to sleep, sending the message: “I grew up with parents who believed I could be the person in that clip.” It was a quiet, persistent form of encouragement, a daily act of belief from a family that had sacrificed everything to plant their roots in American soil.

Growing up in Flint also gave Sud a ground-level education in what business failure looks like in real communities, a lesson that would later shape her conviction that leadership must serve people, not just shareholders.

Building the Foundation: Amazon, Time Warner, and the Art of Learning

At age 14, Sud left Flint for Phillips Academy Andover, an elite boarding school in Massachusetts. After Phillips, she earned a Bachelor of Science in Finance and Management from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, then an MBA from Harvard Business School in 2011. By any conventional measure, the credentials were impeccable. Yet when she began applying to investment banks, every major firm turned her down. The rejection that would have derailed many simply redirected her.

Rather than mourn the closed doors of finance, Sud took a deliberately winding path through media and technology, starting as an M&A analyst at Sagent Advisors, then moving into mergers and acquisitions at Time Warner, and eventually landing at Amazon in a marketing and category lead role. At Amazon, she absorbed the company’s relentless customer obsession, its culture of bold experimentation, and its willingness to play a long game.

Each role was chosen not for prestige, but for what it could teach her. As she later put it:

“I thought, ‘No one’s going to create a career path for me. I need to create my own.’ I went from being a toy buyer to being a marketer to selling diapers online to running a global video platform.” - Anjali Sud

That nonlinear trajectory was not a detour — it was her education.

The Vimeo Bet: Seeing Opportunity Where Others Saw Defeat

In 2014, Sud joined Vimeo as Head of Global Marketing. At the time, the company was trying and failing to compete with streaming giants like Netflix. Most people would have written it off. Anjali saw a different kind of opportunity.

What she saw, and what others missed, was that Vimeo’s true value had nothing to do with out-entertaining Netflix. Its value was in the tools it provided to the creators, the professional videographers, small business owners, and storytellers, who needed a reliable, high-quality platform. The audience wars were already lost. But the creator economy was just beginning.

Sud joined Vimeo, an IAC subsidiary, in July 2014 as Head of Global Marketing. She was promoted to General Manager of Vimeo’s core creator business and then became CEO in July 2017 at age 33.

Becoming CEO at 33 was not a moment Sud had anticipated. “People often ask me about what I did to become the CEO of Vimeo. The truth is, until the minute that the job was offered to me, it never even occurred to me that it was a possibility.”

But the groundwork had been quietly laid through a leadership strategy that she practiced from day one: obsessive customer listening.“When I got to Vimeo, I was in a VP of marketing role, very middle management — so my first task was to understand our customers. I spent a lot of time talking to the humans that we served and listening. Every year at Vimeo, I knew job number one was to keep talking to customers and to have a pulse on what mattered to them.”

This was not performative stakeholder engagement. It was strategic intelligence-gathering that informed every major decision she would make as CEO.

The Great Pivot: From Entertainment Platform to Video SaaS

Once in the CEO seat, Sud made one of the most audacious strategic pivots in modern media history. She walked away from the content arms race entirely.

She was appointed CEO of Vimeo in July 2017, as the company announced its plans to refocus its strategy from investing in original content to offering software and tools for video creators.

As Sud explained, “We pivoted away from being a viewing destination or media platform, like Facebook or YouTube or Netflix, and really into a video SaaS or software company for businesses.”

The move was counterintuitive. The industry was pouring billions into original programming. Sud was doing the opposite, stripping Vimeo down to its functional essence and rebuilding it as infrastructure for creators. Critics were skeptical. But the numbers told a different story.

In September 2017, she oversaw the acquisition of Livestream. In April 2019, she oversaw the acquisition of video editing app Magisto. In November 2021, she oversaw the acquisitions of video software startups WIREWAX and Wibbitz. Each acquisition was a deliberate expansion of Vimeo’s toolkit, not its content library.

The pivot worked. Under her leadership, Vimeo expanded rapidly and went public in 2021 with a $6 billion valuation. During her six-year tenure, she took the company public and established Vimeo as the home for video creators and professionals worldwide, building a community of over 300 million users.

This was leadership through strategic conviction, the willingness to be wrong in the short term to be right in the long term.

The End of One Chapter, the Beginning of Another

After nearly a decade at Vimeo, six years as CEO, Sud had accomplished something rare: she had taken a struggling, directionless company, reimagined its entire reason for being, and guided it to a public market debut worth billions. By any measure, it was a complete story.

But by 2023, the chapter was closing on its own terms. After nine years at Vimeo and six years as CEO, Sud announced on July 5, 2023, that she would be departing the company in September 2023 to pursue another opportunity. The SaaS transformation she had pioneered was maturing, and the company’s next phase was one of operational consolidation rather than strategic reinvention, no longer aligned with what Sud does best.

She is, at her core, a builder. And the most honest builders know when the building is done.

What she was looking for next was a new problem worthy of her particular skill set. The question she was asking, she later said, was not what’s the safest next move? But where is the biggest opportunity hiding in plain sight?

The answer was Tubi, a free, ad-supported streaming service owned by Fox Corporation that offers over 300,000 movies and TV shows with no subscription fees required.

“We are witnessing a seismic shift in where and how content will be consumed, and I believe Tubi can become the destination for the next generation of audiences,” said Sud. “The future of streaming TV is free, and I am excited to join the Tubi team to help shape the next wave of entertainment, giving all people access to all the world’s stories. Tubi is doing things differently in a space that is being imminently disrupted, and that is my kind of opportunity.”

That last phrase — “that is my kind of opportunity “— is the key to understanding her decision. Tubi wasn’t the obvious, prestigious, or safe choice. It wasn’t a household name in the way Netflix or Disney+ were. But it had something more valuable to Sud than brand recognition: a structural advantage the rest of the industry was too committed to its existing models to see.

Most leaders in her position would have taken time off or waited for the perfect next move. She didn’t. That same year, she joined Tubi as CEO. The speed of the transition was itself a statement. She was following the logic of her own convictions directly to the next place they led.

Tubi and the Billion-Dollar Proof

The results at Tubi have vindicated Sud’s instincts with remarkable speed. While user growth exploded from 64 million in February 2023 to 97 million by the end of 2024, profitability has arrived earlier than expected. Tubi generated $1.1 billion in fiscal year 2025 revenue and closed its second consecutive EBITDA-profitable quarter at the end of last year, powered by 19% year-over-year revenue growth and a 27% surge in user engagement.

In June 2025, Tubi announced that it had crossed 100 million monthly active users, over $1 billion in annual revenue, and an all-time high share of television viewing in the U.S.

The platform’s audience demographics are also telling. Tubi’s audience, 77% of which doesn’t have cable TV, skews toward millennials, Gen Z, and females, with more than 34% between the ages of 18 and 34. These are precisely the viewers the traditional Hollywood model has struggled to reach — and they are exactly who Sud built Tubi for.

The Boardrooms, the Honors, and the Bigger Platform

As her operational record has grown, so has her platform for influence.

Sud sits on the board of Sirius XM and Dolby Laboratories and is chair of the board of Change.org. She is a designated Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum and a Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute. In May 2025, Sud was elected to serve on Harvard University’s Board of Overseers, filling a vacancy left by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney.

She uses these platforms not to collect titles, but to advocate for the ideas that animate her career: that entertainment should be accessible to everyone, that diverse storytelling reflects the diversity of the world, and that the next generation of leaders need not fit a preexisting mold.

At Pace University’s 2025 commencement, Sud urged graduates to pursue impact, embrace authenticity, and lead with boldness in a rapidly changing world.

The Architecture of a Career

What makes Anjali Sud’s story worth studying is not simply that she became a CEO twice before 45, or that she built a billion-dollar company, or that she navigated the chaos of modern media with apparent ease. It’s the architecture of how she did it.

She chose learning over prestige in her early career. She listened to customers before she formed opinions. She made bold strategic pivots and held them through skepticism. She built teams that looked like the audiences they served. She led with transparency when opacity would have been safer. And she bet on herself, repeatedly and unapologetically, in a world that did not always bet on her first.

As she put it:

“The thing I’ve learned is that you can create your own opportunities, and we can all reinvent ourselves at any stage in our careers.”

If this was useful, please share it with anyone who needs to hear it.

New Article drops every Tuesday.

Be Bold. Be Real. Be Anomalous.

Follow for more Be Anomalous stories, conversations, and behind-the-scenes.

Website | Instagram | LinkedIn | YouTube | @iamsaimenon

I have been devouring Grit by Angela Duckworth, a book that has sat with me for years, and I cannot believe it took me this long to actually get into it. At its core, it helps you understand what it means to be a gritty person, but the first step is surprisingly simple: you need to know your goal.

As humans, we are rarely working toward just one thing. We are restless and easily pulled in multiple directions. Duckworth explains this through the concept of hierarchy of goals, the idea that our ambitions exist on different levels, from small daily tasks all the way up to a single overarching purpose. (I’ve attached a video below for a quick visual breakdown.)

Reading this pushed me to sit down and identify my own main goal and, honestly, to audit everything beneath it. Some lower-level goals needed to go. Others needed to be reshaped so they actually serve where I am trying to go. I think of this main goal as your purpose; the two words can be used interchangeably once you understand what they point to. Duckworth’s own purpose, for example, is to use psychological science to help individuals, especially children, thrive by developing grit and self-control.

What struck me most was realizing how scattered my own goals had become. I was overcomplicating things, layering ambition on top of ambition without checking whether any of it was actually aligned. The truth is, what we want from life is usually simple. The path is what gets complicated. But it helps to pause and remind yourself: you probably have not strayed away as far from your original goal as it feels. You just need to clear the noise around it.

If you would like to see a video of me doing this, comment below.

What I’m Reading

Grit — Angela Duckworth (Finished)

This one really stays with you. It breaks down the idea that success isn’t just about talent; it’s about consistency, resilience, and showing up even when it’s hard.

A Different Kind of Power - Jacinda Ardern

It reflects on her journey into leadership and the personal values that guided her time in office. It explores how empathy, resilience, and compassion can redefine strength in politics and inspire a more human-centered approach to power.

What Else Dropped This Week

Off Script

How Katherine Built Francis Henri During The Pandemic.

Under the Hood

Outdoor Voices: The Inside Story of Ty Haney

Note to My Future Self

You will meet people on this path. Many of them.

Some will be so interesting, so full of life, so different from anything you have known, that they will make you stop and wonder if you have been living wrong. They will open doors in your mind you didn’t know were closed. They will make you question the direction, the pace, sometimes even the destination.

And that’s okay. Let them. That is part of it.

But here is what I want you to remember when that happens.

The people who shake you are not signs that you are on the wrong path. They are just reminders that the world is bigger than you thought. You can be moved by someone and still return to yourself. You can be changed by an encounter and still know where you are going. The two are not in conflict.

Because at the end of every detour, every distraction, every beautiful and unexpected thing that pulls you sideways, there is still a question waiting for you.

What are you willing to keep going for, even when it’s hard?

Be bold. Be real. Be Anomalous.

— Sai Menon

Follow for more Be Anomalous stories, conversations, and behind-the-scenes.

Website | Instagram | LinkedIn | YouTube | @iamsaimenon

In February 2020, Ty Haney said goodbye to the company she founded on Slack. She was 31. She had built Outdoor Voices from a concept sketched out at Parsons School of Design into a $110 million activewear brand, raised over $64 million in venture capital, opened stores across the country, landed magazine covers, and built a community of genuinely devoted customers around the radical idea that movement should be joyful, not performative. “Doing Things” wasn’t just a tagline. It was a cultural posture that resonated with a generation tired of fitness culture’s punishment-and-discipline aesthetic.

She typed out her goodbye message and hit send.

She still owned 10% of the company she had created.

How do you go from founder to owning 10%

Outdoor Voices didn’t fail because of bad press or a difficult founder personality, though both became part of the story. It failed structurally, and the structure was set years before anyone wrote an unflattering article about Haney or before the board decided she needed to go.

Here’s what actually happened, round by round.

When Haney launched Outdoor Voices, she needed capital to turn her vision into a real company, including inventory, manufacturing, branding, and a team. She raised seed funding, then a Series A, then more. Each round felt like validation. Each new investor felt like a partner who believed in what she was building. In legal terms, each round was a transaction: cash in exchange for a piece of the company. Do that enough times, and the pieces add up. Your 100% drops to 80%, then 60%, and so on. This is dilution, and it’s not inherently bad.

Dilution is the cost of capital, and capital builds real things.

But dilution does something beyond shrinking your ownership percentage. It shifts voting power. It fills a board with people who backed the company financially but didn’t build it, people whose job is to protect their investment, not to steward a creative vision. By the time Haney’s conflict with her board came to a head in early 2020, her investor group, led by General Catalyst and Forerunner Ventures, with retail legend Mickey Drexler installed as chairman, controlled the board entirely. Haney owned 10%. When they decided she needed to leave, there was no mechanism for her to resist. She didn’t have the votes. She didn’t have the leverage. She had the vision, the community, the taste, the relationships that made the brand what it was, and none of that appears anywhere on a cap table.

What the board saw versus what the brand was

This is where the story gets complicated in a way that doesn’t fit into villain-and-victim framing.

Mickey Drexler was not a bad bet. He was one of the most accomplished retail executives in American history, the man who transformed Gap and rebuilt J.Crew. His instincts about retail operations, unit economics, and scaling a consumer brand were genuinely world-class. When he looked at Outdoor Voices, he saw real problems: the company was spending heavily, profitability was distant, and some of Haney’s leadership decisions were creating organizational friction. From a conventional retail-building perspective, his concerns weren’t wrong.

But Outdoor Voices was not a conventional retail company. It was a community-first brand that had grown precisely because it wasn’t optimizing for the metrics that traditional retail optimizes for. Its customers weren’t just buying leggings, they were buying membership in a movement, an identity, a sensibility. That’s harder to measure and much harder to hand off. The brand’s value lived inside Haney: in her aesthetic instincts, her relationship with the community she’d built, and her ability to make people feel that Outdoor Voices understood how they wanted to live. Strip that out, and you don’t have a $110 million company anymore. You have inventory and leases.

The board saw a founder who was difficult to manage and a business with financial problems. They made a decision that made sense within their framework. What they miscalculated was that in a founder-identity brand, removing the founder doesn’t solve the problem; it becomes the problem.

What happened after she left

Outdoor Voices did not recover under new leadership. The brand that had built its entire identity around an authentic, anti-performance-culture voice struggled to sustain that voice without the person who had originated it. The community Haney had cultivated started to dissipate. The business continued to deteriorate, losing reported estimates of up to $2 million a month at its worst. By March 2024, the company closed all 16 of its retail stores and went online-only.

That same month, former employees confirmed the company was preparing a Chapter 11 filing. Instead, in June 2024, private equity firm Consortium Brand Partners stepped in and acquired the brand for an undisclosed sum, effectively a distressed sale of an asset that had once been valued at $110 million.

The brand that had defined a moment in DTC retail had changed hands at what was almost certainly a fraction of its peak value.

The return

In 2025, Haney came back not as an employee, not as a figurehead, but as founder, partner, and co-owner, with a negotiated stake that gave her real governance rights alongside a new ownership structure. The terms of her return reflected everything she had learned the hard way the first time.

She was direct about the lesson: “I learned the hard way that ownership really matters. The first goal put me in a position where I was diluted to the point that I lost control, so that is something I prioritized in my companies since.”

And on fundraising specifically: “I’ve become a lot more sophisticated, or precise, in terms of who I raise money from, how much money I raise, and ultimately considerate of ownership and as little dilution as possible.”

She also said something about the new version of the business that contains more wisdom than it first appears: “The way that we’ve funded and structured OV doesn’t require that it needs to be massive overnight. The model has changed, and the model today requires being more mindful of profitability.”

Read that sentence carefully. “Doesn’t require that it needs to be massive overnight”. It’s a recognition that the growth-at-all-costs imperative raises more, spends more, scales faster, and is itself a control mechanism. When your business model requires constant outside capital to survive, you are always at the mercy of the people providing that capital. Reduce that dependency, and you get something back: the ability to make decisions based on what’s right for the brand instead of what satisfies the next round’s narrative.

The structural lesson

The Outdoor Voices story is often told as a human drama, a difficult founder, a frustrated board, and bad press at the wrong moment. That framing is more compelling and less useful than the actual lesson.

The actual lesson is that Haney was operating without structural protection from the moment she diluted past a threshold that gave her board control. Everything else happened downstream of that. The outcome was determined not in February 2020 when she sent the Slack message, but years earlier, in the accumulation of funding rounds she didn’t fully understand the governance implications of, like many founders.

Some tools could have changed this. Dual-class share structures, where founders hold shares with 10 votes each versus 1 vote per investor share, allow founders to retain voting control even as their economic ownership is diluted. Protective provisions, contractual clauses that require founder consent for specific decisions like replacing the CEO, can be built into investor agreements

And foundational to all of it: you need to know your cap table with precision at every moment, not approximately. Who owns what? Who has board seats? Who has the votes when a decision gets forced? Not your lawyer’s job to track and tell you. Yours.

Ty Haney was not oblivious. She was just a founder, like most founders, who learned from experience.

Related Content:

1. Ty Haney Built a $100M Brand... Then Walked Away | SOCIAL CURRENCY PODCAST 001

2. The Brutal Fall of a $100M Brand & the Woman Behind It | Ty Haney of Outdoor Voices

3. 5 Years After Being Pushed Out of Outdoor Voices, Ty Haney Is Doing Things Again

Follow for more Be Anomalous stories, conversations, and behind-the-scenes.

Website | Instagram | LinkedIn | YouTube | @iamsaimenon

Katherine is the founder of Francis Henri, a curated children’s clothing retailer that brings together thoughtfully selected international baby and toddler brands for the U.S. market through both brick-and-mortar stores and an online platform.

In this episode of Be Anomalous, she shares her journey from a childhood dream of becoming a wedding planner to building a career in PR at Neiman Marcus and ultimately leaping into entrepreneurship during the pandemic to create a growing retail brand.

What started as curiosity, a personal Excel list of favorite brands, and frustration with international shipping costs evolved into a business that now spans online retail and physical storefronts. Katherine’s story is one of experimentation, intuition, and learning by doing—while raising three young children.

🎧 Listen to the Episode

[Spotify] | [YouTube]

What You’ll Learn

• How Katherine turned a personal passion for kids’ fashion into Francis Henri

• Why did she start by building an Excel sheet of global baby brands before launching a business?

• How COVID unexpectedly became the catalyst for starting her company

• The transition from corporate PR at Neiman Marcus to full-time entrepreneurship

• Why she believes brick-and-mortar retail still has a powerful future

• How pop-ups validated product demand before opening stores

• The realities of bootstrapping a physical retail business

• How motherhood reshaped her priorities and decision-making as a founder

• Why hiring slowly helped her understand every part of her business

• The importance of staying lean while scaling intentionally

Favorite Quote

“Work hard and be nice to people.”

A simple but powerful principle that guides how Katherine approaches business, leadership, and life, balancing ambition with empathy and integrity.

Favorite Books

📖 The E-Myth Revisited — Michael E. Gerber

A foundational book on building systems and scaling a small business into a sustainable company.

In This Episode, We Cover

(00:00) Introduction and Katherine’s journey into Francis Henry

(05:00) Early ambition and shifting career paths

(10:00) From PR at Neiman Marcus to entrepreneurial curiosity

(15:00) The origin of Francis Henry and the Excel brand list

(20:00) Discovering international baby brands and unmet demand

(25:00) Launching online during the pandemic

(30:00) Growing through pop-ups and early customer reactions

(35:00) Why brick-and-mortar retail still matters

(40:00) Hiring, delegation, and learning to let go

(45:00) Balancing motherhood and entrepreneurship

(50:00) Bootstrapping, funding decisions, and staying lean

(55:00) Redefining success across life and business

(01:00:00) Final reflections and advice for founders

Referenced in This Episode

• Building Francis Henri from online to brick-and-mortar retail

• Entrepreneurship during COVID and business resilience

• Multi-brand retail strategy in children’s fashion

• Bootstrapping vs. fundraising decisions

• Hiring, delegation, and early-stage team building

• Work-life balance as a founder and mother of three

• The future of in-person retail experiences

• Global sourcing of children’s clothing brands

New episodes drop every Monday and Thursday.

Be bold. Be real. Be anomalous.

Follow for more Be Anomalous stories, conversations, and behind-the-scenes.

Instagram | LinkedIn | YouTube | @iamsaimenon

This week felt different, not because it was easier, but because I could finally see it clearly. My son had spring break, and it also happened to be my birthday. My husband and I are always working to balance careers and childcare, to carve out real time with him. This week, that balance tilted toward me. My husband carried a heavier load at work and felt the weight of missing out. I had more flexibility, and so I had more of our son.

And here’s what struck me: a year ago, maybe two, I would have said I have to take care of him this week. A quiet resentment buried in the phrasing, the kind you don’t even notice until it’s gone. This week, without really planning it, I noticed myself thinking differently: I get to be here with him.

Watching my husband grieve the moments he was missing made it real for me. Time with a child isn’t a given. It isn’t owed. It’s a gift, and like most gifts, it’s easiest to take for granted right up until the moment you can’t have it.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying every day is easy. Some days it does drive you a little crazy. But the mindset shift doesn’t ask you to pretend otherwise — it just changes how you hold it. It invites you to be in the moment rather than enduring it.

And once you see it, you can't unsee it. It starts to reach into everything. I get to work out. I get to do my work. I get to be with my family. None of it is guaranteed. All of it is precious.

That’s been my realization this week: Savour it. Take the chance. You don't know how long you get to do any of it.

Reframe Your Mindset

• Notice the language you use Start by just catching yourself. When you hear "I have to," pause and ask: Is this actually something I chose, or something I'm lucky to have? You don't have to force a reframe every time; just noticing builds the habit.

• The subtraction exercise. Imagine the thing is gone. The school pickup, the work meeting, and the dinner to cook. Who would you be without it? Often, what feels like a burden is actually evidence of a life you built: a job, a family, a home. Subtraction makes the invisible visible.

• Anchor to the “why” behind the “what.” Instead of thinking about the task, think about what it represents. Driving your kid to practice = you have a healthy child who gets to play. Paying bills = you have a home and a life running. The task is just the surface; underneath is the meaning.

• Change the story you tell others. When someone asks how your week was, notice if you lead with a complaint or with gratitude. You don't have to pretend it was perfect but try ending on what you were glad to have, even in a hard week. How we narrate our lives shapes how we experience them.

Gratitude isn't pretending the hard days don't exist. It's making sure the good ones don't pass unnoticed.

What I’m Reading

Grit — Angela Duckworth (Finishing)

This one really stays with you. It breaks down the idea that success isn’t just about talent; it’s about consistency, resilience, and showing up even when it’s hard. What I’ve been reflecting on most is how grit isn’t always loud.

A Different Kind of Power - Jacinda Ardern

It reflects on her journey into leadership and the personal values that guided her time in office.It explores how empathy, resilience, and compassion can redefine strength in politics and inspire a more human-centered approach to power.

What Else Dropped This Week

Off Script

How Shahezad Left IT to Build Cousins Burger (Lessons on Scaling & Risk)

Under the Hood

He Started With $1,000, One Customer, and a Mediocre Product. Two Years Later, He Sold for $100 Million.

Note to My Future Self

The practice is simple, even when it isn’t easy. Notice the language. Anchor to the meaning. Show up for the ordinary moments as if you know because you do know, that they won’t last forever.

“I have to” keeps you surviving your life. “I get to” lets you live it.

That’s the whole shift. Two words. One choice. Made again and again, on the hard days especially.

Be bold. Be real. Be Anomalous.

— Sai Menon

In July 2015, Moiz Ali bought a domain name on GoDaddy. It was his birthday.

He had $1,000 of his own money and one idea: a natural deodorant people might actually buy online. Twelve days later, he launched a website. There was no product in hand, just 3D-rendered images of a deodorant stick he hadn’t manufactured yet. He planned to take orders first, then figure out the supply.

Day one: one sale.

He nearly shut the whole thing down.

The Setup: A CVS Aisle and an Unreadable Label

Moiz Ali was 30 years old and had already sold his first company, Caskers, a craft spirits e-commerce business he’d started with a law school friend. That exit was seven figures. Comfortable money, not retire-forever money. He was looking for his next move.

He found it reading the back of a deodorant can while standing in a CVS aisle. Aluminum Zirconium Tetrachlorohydrex. Isopropyl Palmitate. Cyclopentasiloxane. He couldn’t pronounce a single ingredient. His sister was pregnant at the time and asking questions about the chemicals in her Dove deodorant. And he’d noticed something else: natural deodorant was the number one product on Etsy in 2015. A real market, mostly being served by small artisan makers out of their home kitchens.

The mainstream natural options that existed felt clinical or ineffective. There was a gap: a natural deodorant that worked, looked premium, and didn’t require you to identify as a health food person to buy it.

In Ali’s own words, his goal was to do what Whole Foods did to food, but to the deodorant category. Not something “very hipster or grungy, but something mainstream.”

He went on Etsy, found the best natural deodorant makers, and asked if any of them would white-label their product for him. It took dozens of rejections before one person agreed to a woman making deodorant in her hobby room in Southern California. He placed his first small order.

Then he launched.

The Launch: No Product, No Photos, No Guarantee

He launched the website with zero deodorants in hand and no photos of the physical product. Instead, he found someone to 3D render the product to use as images on his site. He wasn’t sure people would shop for deodorant online, so he treated the launch as a test; he would order the deodorant once he made sales.

He decided on the price of $12 a stick by working backwards from his costs. Six dollars to manufacture, three dollars to ship, one-fifty in packaging. The math pointed to $12, two to three times the price of drugstore deodorant. He didn’t discount his way in. He set the price that made the business work and bet that the product would justify it.

Day one: one customer. Ali was deflated. Then a connection helped get Native bumped onto Product Hunt’s front page. Day two: dozens of orders. He called his manufacturer and placed his first real production order. He packed and shipped those early sticks himself.

His reaction to a friend asking what he knew about deodorant captures everything about his approach:

“I know nothing, and in six months, I’m going to become one of the world’s leading experts on deodorant. I’m just going to spend my time learning, and I’m going to figure it out.”

The First Year: One Employee, Thousands of Emails

For the first year, Ali was the only employee, handling everything himself.

The product, by his own admission, wasn’t very good. It was powdery, hard to apply, and occasionally had a consistency problem in the summer heat in May 2016. As temperatures rose, the deodorant started melting to the consistency of lotion. Rather than quietly recall it, he stopped production, rushed an improved formula that had only been tested on a dozen people, and got it to market as fast as he could.

What saved him wasn’t the formula. It was his relationship with customers.

Ali emailed every single customer for the first two years of the business with the same message:

“You just got a stick of Native deodorant. Love to know what you think about it. If you love the product, please leave a review on our site. If you don’t, reply to this email and tell us what you don’t like, and we’ll try to fix it.”

The complaints came in consistently for the first year: too powdery, too hard to apply, too many oils. He listened. He iterated. The repeat purchase rate, which tells you whether people are actually satisfied, started at around 20%. It climbed steadily to 50% as the product improved. He bought deodorant from every competitor and noted every detail that made them better. The formula changed dozens of times.

Native went from a couple of hundred dollars in revenue per month in July 2015 to $75,000 in revenue per month by January 2016, and it was still just Moiz. By May 2016, they were doing $100,000 a month.

“I wish Silicon Valley didn’t glorify massive fundraising rounds as much as they do,” he later said. “People don’t respect how much one person can do.”

The Growth Engine: Discipline Over Flash

As revenue grew, Ali built each piece of the business the same way he built the product: methodically, based on what the data actually said.

Pricing held firm. He never discounted. The $12 stick gave him a real gross margin enough to invest in customer acquisition while building toward profitability. He understood early that the economics of DTC only work if you know your customer’s lifetime value and never spend more than that to acquire them.

Subscriptions compounded. He built a subscription option offering customers 15% savings with multiple delivery interval choices. This turned episodic buyers into predictable recurring revenue, compressed his payback period on customer acquisition spend, and gave the business a foundation that looked genuinely attractive from the outside.

Advertising was measured, not sprayed. He tracked every Facebook and Instagram dollar against long-term customer value, not just first purchase. When he found a channel that worked, he doubled down. When a conference in San Diego introduced him to better Facebook advertising techniques, he came back and grew 400% in 60 days.

Retail was ignored — intentionally. Costco called. Whole Foods called. Every major retailer you can imagine called. He turned them all away. He had a just-in-time inventory system for DTC that could barely keep up with demand; he never had excess product to ship to brick-and-mortar retailers. He stayed focused on what was working.

The revenue progression tells the story clearly: January 2016, $50,000 in monthly revenue. June, $250,000. November was the first $1 million month. The following November, $5 million.

Within 18 months of launch, Native had $13 million in cash in the bank. By the time P&G came calling, it was generating close to $1 million in EBITDA per month.

The Exit: $100 Million, 2.5 Years In

In November 2017, Procter & Gamble acquired Native for $100 million in cash. It was P&G’s first acquisition in nearly a decade, and until the deal closed, Native hadn’t sold a single stick of deodorant outside its own DTC website.

Ali hadn’t set out to sell. But the business was at an inflection point; every major retailer in America wanted in, and scaling into retail would have required a different kind of company: more capital, more inventory, more infrastructure. P&G could provide all of it.

For P&G, the acquisition made strategic sense on multiple levels. They were under pressure from activist investor Nelson Peltz to acquire on-trend brands rather than just cut costs. Native offered a beachhead in the growing natural personal care segment, a proven DTC playbook, and something P&G couldn’t manufacture internally: authentic customer trust built on a genuinely better product.

Ali stayed through early 2020. By the time he left, Native was doing $60 million a year in Target alone and had become the third best-selling deodorant brand in the store behind Secret and Dove. P&G extended the brand into body wash, hair care, and lotion. The $1,000 birthday bet had become one of the most successful consumer brand exits of its decade.

What It Actually Teaches

The Native story gets told as a fairy tale, a guy with a great idea who got lucky with timing and cheap Facebook ads. That’s comfortable, so you can get off the hook.

What Ali actually did was execute a set of principles with unusual consistency and discipline.

He launched before he was ready and used reality to course-correct, rather than spending months perfecting something in private before exposing it to customers. He priced for margin from day one and never flinched, because he understood that discounting is how you build a business that can never become profitable. He treated every customer email as product research. He ignored every shiny retail opportunity until the core business was undeniably working. He built a subscription model not as a marketing gimmick but as a genuine retention mechanism that made his unit economics legible to anyone looking at the company.

And he did almost all of it alone, for longer than most founders would tolerate.

The lesson isn’t that you had to launch in 2015 to build Native. The lesson is that there is another Native launching today, and the founders building it are probably being told they should raise more money, open more channels, and move faster. Most of them won’t need to do any of those things.

They’ll need to do what Moiz did: make something people actually want, listen until they’re sure of it, and have the discipline not to complicate what’s working.

If this was useful, please share it with anyone who needs to hear it.

New Article drops every Tuesday.

Be Bold. Be Real. Be Anomalous.

Episode Description

In this episode of Be Anomalous, Shahezad joins me for a conversation about reinvention, risk, and what it really looks like to build something from the ground up without a blueprint.

Shahezad is the founder of Cousins Burger, a fast-growing restaurant brand that started from a single, reluctant decision to show up at a food festival.

Today, it’s a multi-location business generating millions in revenue.

But what makes this story interesting isn’t just the growth.

It’s how unexpected it all was.

Shahezad spent over two decades in IT, building a stable, predictable career. Entrepreneurship was never the plan. In fact, growing up, he was told he wouldn’t succeed in business at all.

And for a long time, he believed it.

But over the years, through small wins, moments of curiosity, and experiences that quietly built his confidence, that narrative began to shift.

Until one day, he decided to try something different.

What followed wasn’t a perfectly planned transition. It was messy, uncertain, and filled with moments of doubt.

From figuring out how to cook at scale, to managing teams, to learning how to build a brand through storytelling and social media—Shahezad built Cousins Burger in real time.

And he did it differently.

Instead of chasing rapid growth, he focused on building intentionally.

Instead of following industry norms, he leaned into creativity, community, and culture.

And instead of optimizing just for profit, he started redefining what success actually meant to him.

This conversation goes beyond restaurants.

We talk about fear, identity, scaling, and the tension between comfort and ambition.

Shahezad also shares how he’s using storytelling and AI to build his brand, why he’s selective about growth, and what it takes to build something that actually lasts.

This episode is for anyone who’s ever felt like they were starting late…

or questioning whether they’re “cut out” for something more.

If you’ve ever stood at the edge of a decision and wondered if you should leap,

This conversation is your reminder that you don’t need certainty to begin.

🎧Listen to the Episode

[Spotify] | [Apple] | [YouTube]

What You’ll Learn

• Why Shahezad left a 24-year IT career to start Cousins Burger

• How a single food festival turned into a multi-million dollar business

• The concept of “golden handcuffs” and why it’s hard to walk away

• How to scale a business without losing quality or control

• Why storytelling is one of the most powerful tools in business

• How Shahezad is using AI to create content and grow his brand

• The importance of choosing the right partners and team

• Why success isn’t just about money—and how that mindset shifts over time

Favorite Quote

“A bird does not worry about the branch underneath it breaking… because it trusts in the strength of its wings.”

A reminder that real security doesn’t come from what you hold onto, it comes from what you’re capable of building.

Favorite Books

📖 Roald Dahl collection

📖 The Da Vinci Code — Dan Brown

Stories that shaped imagination, curiosity, and a love for storytelling.

In This Episode, We Cover

(00:00) Introduction and Shahezad’s unexpected journey

(05:00) Growing up with limiting beliefs about entrepreneurship

(10:00) The food festival that started at Cousins Burger

(15:00) Early challenges and learning the business from scratch

(25:00) Scaling the brand and building the right team

(35:00) Using storytelling and AI in marketing

(45:00) Redefining success beyond money

(50:00) Lessons on growth, risk, and decision-making

(55:00) Final reflections and advice for builders

Referenced in This Episode

Cousins Burger and restaurant scaling

Entrepreneurship and career pivots

Storytelling in business and brand building

AI in content creation and marketing

Partnerships, hiring, and team building

Redefining success and long-term vision

New episodes drop every Monday and Thursday.

Be bold. Be real. Be anomalous.

This week, I was listening to a conversation with Michelle Obama, and she shared a moment that made me think.

She described the time her mother was close to the end of her life. And in that moment, her mother said, “This went by fast.”

Michelle asked, “What did?”

Her mother said, “Life.”

Even she felt it went by quickly after living an incredible life. And she said it with peace, not regret. That hit me deeply.

It made me want to pause. So I went through my photos over the years. And it put a real smile on my face.

Here’s what I noticed: around my birthday, I usually feel this immense pressure. The weight of getting older, of goals I haven’t reached, of time passing. There’s a quiet shame that comes with that.

But this time, something shifted. When I changed how I looked at things, I stopped measuring what I hadn’t done and started seeing everything I had actually lived. The moments that were never on any goal list. The things that happened anyway, and mattered.

And I smiled.

It might seem morbid to think about death. But thinking about death makes you think about life, really think about it.

A life that feels like it went by fast is a life worth living every single day.

So take time for gratitude. Spend your time with people who care about you, and who you care about.

Make your life worth living.

What I’m Reading

Grit — Angela Duckworth (Finishing)

This one really stays with you. It breaks down the idea that success isn’t just about talent; it’s about consistency, resilience, and showing up even when it’s hard. What I’ve been reflecting on most is how grit isn’t always loud.

Caste — Isabel Wilkerson (Starting)

Starting this next. It dives into the hidden structures that shape inequality across societies, beyond race or class alone. I’m curious to see how it reframes the way we think about systems, identity, and power, and what it reveals about the world we move through every day.

What Else Dropped This Week

Off Script

How Melissa Built a Beauty Brand for the People the Industry Overlooked

Under the Hood

The Quiet Profit Machine: How Store Brands Are Reshaping Retail

On My Reading Desk

1. Shoe brand once worth $4B closes all stores, avoids bankruptcy

2. The secret to mastering AI is getting the division of labor right

3. When AI Vendors Fail: Lessons From The Sora Shutdown

4. Apple’s ‘Nice Guy’ Heir Apparent

Note to My Future Self

Look at the photos. Look at the moments that never made it onto any goal list, yet there they are. That is your life. And it is more than you gave yourself credit for.

That’s what you want. A life that moves. A life that, when you look back, makes you smile without even trying.

So on the days the pressure creeps in, come back to the photos. Come back to the people. Come back to the moments that weren’t planned but happened anyway.

Those moments are not detours. They are the life.

You are not behind. You are exactly where you are supposed to be.

Be bold. Be real. Be Anomalous.

— Sai Menon

Walk into any Costco, and you’ll find it almost immediately: the Kirkland Signature label, displayed across everything from coffee to cashmere. At first glance, it looks like a house brand something to grab when you’re watching your wallet. Look closer, and you’ll find it’s made by Starbucks, Duracell, or Jelly Belly, sold at a fraction of the national brand price, and generating an estimated $60 billion in annual sales. That’s more than Nike.

The store brand, also called private label, is no longer a value proposition. It’s a profit engine, a loyalty machine, and increasingly, an existential threat to the brands that helped build the retail industry in the first place.

Store brands now account for roughly one in five consumer packaged goods sold in the United States, a share that has grown every year for the past decade. Understanding how they work and what they do to everyone else on the shelf has become essential for anyone tracking the modern retail landscape.

The Economics of the Shelf

To understand why store brands are so powerful, you need to understand where the money goes in a typical consumer goods transaction.

When a national brand sells a product, the manufacturer covers production costs, then adds significant marketing and advertising spend, often 15 to 25 percent of revenue, to build brand awareness that justifies a premium price. On top of that, the manufacturer pays the retailer slotting fees: essentially, rent to occupy shelf space, particularly prime eye-level real estate. By the time the product reaches the consumer, the retailer’s margin is typically 15 to 20 percent.

A store brand changes every one of those variables.

The retailer contracts directly with a manufacturer, often the same manufacturer making the national brand, which removes the marketing spend and slotting fees, and keeps the price lower for the consumer while capturing dramatically higher margins for itself. Where a national brand yields a 15 to 20 percent margin, the equivalent store brand often yields 35 to 55 percent. The retailer owns the shelf, so there is no auction for placement. The product goes where the retailer wants it.

The consumer wins too on price. Store brand products typically come in 20 to 30 percent cheaper than their national brand equivalents. For a household buying groceries every week, that gap compounds into meaningful savings. Retailers have learned to use this positioning deliberately: lower prices on store brand staples can be what gets a shopper through the door, and then through the rest of the store.

How the Major Players Execute

Not every retailer approaches private label the same way. The most sophisticated operators have developed distinct strategies that reflect their customer base, category mix, and competitive positioning.

Costco: The Membership Multiplier

Kirkland Signature is probably the most studied private label program in the world, and for good reason. Costco has built a brand so trusted that shoppers actively seek it out, the inverse of the traditional private label dynamic, where house brands compete on price because they lack brand pull.

The formula is deliberate. Costco caps its markup on any item at 15 percent, a policy that forces it to source with exceptional efficiency. It also contracts with best-in-class manufacturers. The Kirkland Signature batteries are made by Duracell; the coffee was long roasted by Starbucks, which means the quality is genuine. The result is a membership that renews at over 90 percent annually, driven in significant part by the value Kirkland provides.

The store brand doesn’t just generate margin; it is the reason people come back.

Target: When Private Label Becomes a Brand

Target’s approach is philosophically different. Where Costco uses Kirkland to deliver value, Target uses its owned brands to deliver aspiration.

The retailer has built more than ten owned brands, several of which exceed $1 billion in annual sales. Cat & Jack, its children’s apparel line, generates more than $3 billion a year. Threshold is the home care brand. Good & Gather has quietly become a credible grocery label. They are positioned and marketed as brands in their own right, with their own aesthetic and identity.

The implication is significant: Target’s owned brands can command comparable prices to national brands while still delivering higher margins, because the retailer controls the full value chain.

Safeway and Kroger: The Tiered Approach

Traditional grocery retailers have taken a more systematic route. Rather than building one signature brand, they run multiple tiers simultaneously: a value label for price-conscious buyers, a mid-tier for everyday quality, and a premium or organic label (O Organics, Simple Truth) for shoppers willing to pay up. Each tier competes with a different national brand segment, meaning the retailer captures margin at every price point rather than just one.

Store brands now account for 25 to 30 percent of grocery units sold at these chains, and the margin differential versus national brands has been a meaningful driver of profitability even as food inflation has complicated the broader business.

What This Does to National Brands

For the brands sharing shelf space with a private label competitor, the consequences range from uncomfortable to existential, depending on the category.

The most immediate pressure is positional. Retailers control shelf placement, and as their own brands grow, the incentive to give national brands prime real estate diminishes. Products slide from eye level to ankle level. SKU counts get trimmed. In some categories, national brands that fail to maintain volume get delisted entirely.

The second pressure is financial. To retain prime placement, national brands pay slotting fees, and as store brands expand, the negotiating leverage shifts. The retailer now has an alternative to offer shoppers. The national brand needs the shelf more than the shelf needs the brand.

The third, and subtlest, pressure is perceptual. When Kirkland Signature batteries sit next to Duracell, made by the same factory, the brand premium becomes harder to justify. Consumers who experience the equivalence firsthand rarely forget it.

The threat varies sharply by category. Commodity goods, such as paper towels, dish soap, canned goods, and pantry basics, are the most vulnerable. The functional difference between a national brand and a store brand equivalent is often minimal, and price sensitivity is high. Premium, identity-driven categories are more resilient. Nobody buys private-label perfume as a status signal. Dyson doesn’t lose much sleep over a Costco competing vacuum. Stanley and Starbucks have built communities where the brand itself is part of the product’s value.

The Rebalancing of Retail Power

For most of the 20th century, retail power flowed toward the brands. The companies that built consumer desire: Procter & Gamble, Nestlé, Colgate, and Unilever effectively dictated shelf terms to retailers who needed their products. The late 20th century began shifting that balance as Walmart and then Amazon demonstrated what scale could do to supplier leverage.

Store brands represent the latest, and perhaps most structurally significant, shift in that balance. They give retailers not just scale leverage but category independence. The retailer no longer just sells brands; it competes with them. It has learned, often from the brands themselves, how to manufacture, market, and distribute, and it has done so while capturing the margin that previously went elsewhere.

The national brands that will survive this era are the ones that stand for something a retailer cannot replicate: a genuine innovation, a community, an identity, a service. Everything that is merely functional is, eventually, a cost to be optimized away.

New article every Tuesday.

Be Bold. Be Real. Be Anomalous.

Episode Description

In this episode of Be Anomalous, Melissa joins me for a conversation about identity, motherhood, and what it really looks like to build a company that challenges an entire industry.

Melissa is the founder of a K-beauty brand designed specifically for melanin-rich skin, but what she’s building goes far beyond skincare.

It’s about representation, science, and rewriting who beauty is actually for.

But the way she arrived here wasn’t linear.

Melissa grew up between cultures, Caribbean, Italian, and French, moving across countries and learning to adapt to different environments from a young age. That exposure shaped her curiosity, her worldview, and ultimately her ability to bridge gaps that most people don’t even see.

She started her career in high fashion, working closely with brands, models, and creatives. From there, she launched her first startup in swimwear, learning the realities of building a business from scratch, from sales to logistics to partnerships.

After stepping away and going back to school to sharpen her business skills, Melissa began connecting the dots that would eventually lead to her current company.

It started with a realization:

K-beauty, one of the most innovative industries in the world, wasn’t built with melanin-rich skin in mind.

And then it became personal. When her daughter told her, “I’m not pretty because I’m brown,” everything changed.

That moment became the foundation of what she’s building today. But this conversation goes far beyond beauty.

We talk about what it means to build something rooted in purpose, the realities of fundraising, and how to navigate entrepreneurship while raising a family.

Melissa also shares how she approached product development from a scientific perspective, why she chose to work directly with Korean labs and the government, and what it takes to build credibility in an industry that wasn’t designed for you.

This episode is for anyone building something that challenges the norm — especially if you’ve ever felt overlooked by the very systems you’re trying to enter.

If you’ve ever questioned whether an industry was built for you… This conversation is a reminder that sometimes the answer is to build your own.

🎧 Listen to the Episode

[Spotify] | [Apple] | [YouTube]

What You’ll Learn

• Why K-beauty hasn’t historically worked for melanin-rich skin

• The science behind skin differences and why “one-size-fits-all” products fail

• How Melissa validated a global market gap before building her brand

• What it really takes to fundraise in a competitive, saturated industry

• The importance of representation in both branding and product development

• How to build a team that truly understands your customer

• Why being close to your market matters more than online data

• The reality of balancing entrepreneurship and motherhood

Favorite Quote

“You can have everything — but not at the same time.”

—Betty Friedan

A powerful reminder that balance isn’t about doing everything at once, it’s about being intentional with where your energy goes in each season.

Favorite Book

📖 Pachinko — Min Jin Lee

A deeply moving story that follows generations of a Korean family, exploring resilience, identity, and the strength of women who carry everything forward.

In This Episode, We Cover

(00:00) Melissa’s identity beyond work and growing up between cultures

(05:00) Discovering K-beauty and realizing the gap for darker skin tones

(10:00) The moment her daughter said, “I’m not pretty because I’m brown.”

(15:00) Building a brand rooted in science, not just marketing

(20:00) Why representation in beauty still falls short

(25:00) Lessons from her first startup and learning business the hard way

(30:00) Building the right team and choosing the right co-founder

(35:00) Moving to Korea and working with labs + the government

(40:00) Understanding where customers actually shop and how they behave

(45:00) Fundraising, strategy, and building in a saturated market

(50:00) Balancing entrepreneurship, motherhood, and personal life

(55:00) Final reflections on purpose, impact, and building for the next generation

Referenced in This Episode

K-beauty and global beauty standards

Melanin-rich skin and dermatology insights

Startup fundraising and early-stage strategy

Building a beauty brand from scratch

Representation in consumer brands

Entrepreneurship and motherhood

Global market expansion and cultural positioning

New episodes drop every Monday and Thursday.

Be Bold. Be Real. Be Anomalous.

I finished The Next Day by Melinda French Gates last night, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.

The book touches on the end of marriage in two different stories. Once through death, and once through divorce. They’re not the same kind of loss; the pain is different, the aftermath is different, but in both, life continues. You move on. What stayed with me is how honestly she sits with that.

It got me thinking about my own culture. Divorce isn’t common where I come from (it’s becoming more accepted), slowly, but the older generation, especially, a lot of those marriages probably should have ended, but didn’t. Not because things were good, but because nobody wanted to put that on the family. I used to understand that reasoning. Now I’m not sure I agree with it. Staying in something that isn’t working isn’t protecting anyone, not the people in the marriage, not the people around it. I think choosing to leave, when that’s the right choice, takes its own kind of courage.

But honestly, what I kept coming back to wasn’t even about marriage specifically.

It’s this: you can’t lean too heavily on anyone. Not your husband, not your kids, not your friends. Not because they don’t matter, they do, but because people change. Everyone is, in some way, a passing cloud.

The only person who is always there is YOU.

So I keep coming back to this to find the quiet. Sit in it. Listen to yourself. What do you want? What are you feeling? What are you becoming? Because here’s the thing, even you change. You’re not the same person you were five years ago, and you won’t be the same person five years from now. So self-knowledge can’t be something you figure out once and set aside. It’s something you have to keep coming back to.

That’s what this week has been for me. A reminder to check back in with myself.

Methods to Find Yourself

I started thinking about what it actually means to check back in with yourself, as a practice. Something I can do regularly. Because the noise doesn’t stop on its own. The world doesn’t pause and say, take a moment, find yourself. You have to carve that out.

So here are the things I’m bringing into my life, as commitments.

Write

There is something that lives underneath your thoughts that you don’t know is there until you start writing. Journaling isn’t about documenting your day. It’s about excavating yourself. You put pen to paper, and things surface feelings you hadn’t named, patterns you hadn’t noticed, truths you’d been too busy to sit with. You don’t know what you actually think until you write it down.

Try it. You’ll surprise yourself.

Meditate

Meditation is another way to listen to yourself. Or maybe more accurately, a way to stay still. We are so used to moving, filling, doing. Meditation is the practice of stopping and just stopping the running. That capacity to just be to sit inside the quiet without immediately reaching for a distraction, is rarer than it sounds.

Read

Reading is solitude that doesn’t feel lonely. A good book pulls you out of the noise of your own life and somehow, in doing that, helps you see it more clearly. It slows things down. And right now, slowing down is exactly the point. It has transformed me.

Walk Without Distractions

Just walk out into nature. There is something about moving through the world in silence that shakes things loose. Some of the most honest conversations you will ever have are the ones you have with yourself on a quiet walk.

Sit in the Quiet

This one is the simplest and somehow the hardest. Just sit in the quiet. We have trained ourselves to fill every gap, to reach for something the moment stillness arrives. But the quiet is where you hear yourself. Really hear yourself. What you want. What you’re carrying. What you’ve been avoiding. It’s all in there.

What I’m Reading

The Next Day— Melinda French Gates(Finished)

I recommend this book; it’s an easy read. Personally, I found it enlightening to see how someone like her can embrace change and go through it so publicly. She has written about her experiences beautifully.

Everything Is Tuberculosis— John Green (Currently reading)

This book explores the history and global impact of tuberculosis (TB). The book explains how TB has shaped societies, medicine, and public health, while also highlighting the inequalities that affect who gets treated and who doesn’t. Excited to dive in.

What Else Dropped This Week

Off Script

How Priya Built Punar with Purpose — and Took It to the Oscars

How to Turn Strategy Into Action, Natalie Trotta on Building a Consulting Career

Under the Hood

The Art of the Brand Collab: Why Some Partnerships Work and Others Blow Up

On My Reading Desk

1. Every AI gives you the same answer—that should worry you

2. How Apple became Apple: The definitive oral history of the company’s earliest days

3. AI is creating the first generation of cognitively outsourced humans

4. How This Founder Grew Her Brand’s TikTok Shop Revenue 10x in Just 1 Year

Note to My Future Self

No matter what happens, no matter what ends, what changes, what catches you off guard, you have to move forward. That part isn’t a choice. But whether you move forward knowing yourself, whether you stay connected to who you are along the way, that part is entirely up to you.

I’d rather move forward with myself than leave myself behind in the process.

Be bold. Be real. Be Anomalous.

— Sai Menon

One of the biggest ways to access customers from two different worlds is through brand colloboration and it is the age-old marketing technique used by business owners of any size. While I was recently reading an article about Glow Recipe's collaboration with Beautyblender, it got me thinking which collabs work and which don’t. What are some of the principles to follow?

How a collab actually works

Think of it like a strategic friendship with a purpose.

When two brands collaborate, they’re essentially saying: you have something I don’t, and I have something you don’t, so let’s combine them, and both come out ahead. That something could be an audience, a distribution network, a technology, a reputation, or simply a cultural moment.

At its most basic level, a brand collab is a value exchange.

What makes it different from just buying what you need is that a collab keeps both brands intact and independent. You’re borrowing each other’s strengths for a defined period, for a defined purpose, and then you each walk away having grown.

The business mechanics that sit underneath that simple idea are contracts, IP ownership, revenue splits, exclusivity terms, and exit clauses. But the instinct that drives the best collabs is much simpler: find a partner whose strengths fill your gaps, make sure your strengths fill theirs, and build something neither of you could have built alone.

6 Types of Brand Collaborations

1. Co-created products: Brands design and launch something new together.

2. Joint marketing campaigns: Brands team up on shared promotions to reach a wider audience.

3. Sponsorships: One brand supports another’s event or initiative for visibility.

4. Content collaborations: Brands create content together to engage their audiences.

5. Licensing agreements: One brand allows another to use its IP for co-branded products.

6. Influencer partnerships: Brands work with influencers to build trust and reach.

Two that got it right

Nike + Apple: when hardware meets movement

In 2006, Nike and Apple released Nike+, a sensor embedded in a shoe that synced with an iPod to track your run. It sounds obvious in retrospect, but at the time it was genuinely new: a sports brand and a tech company creating an entirely new product category together.

The partnership worked because the audience overlap was precise, athletes who were already buying both brands, and because each company contributed something the other couldn’t replicate on its own. Nike knew runners. Apple knew software and hardware miniaturization. The result wasn’t a logo slapped on a limited-edition sneaker; it was a product that changed how millions of people exercise. It eventually evolved into the Apple Watch’s core fitness identity.

The lesson: the best collabs create something that genuinely wouldn’t exist without both parties.

Doritos + Taco Bell: a billion tacos

When Taco Bell and Frito-Lay launched the Doritos Locos Taco in 2012, it became one of the fastest-selling items in fast-food history, with over 1 billion units sold in the first year. The premise was almost comically simple: replace the taco shell with a Doritos chip. And internally, it was met with plenty of skepticism. Executives questioned whether the idea was too gimmicky, too niche, too weird for mainstream America.

Development was a grind; it reportedly took three years just to get the shell right, with engineers struggling to transfer the Doritos’ signature dust coating onto a taco shell without it crumbling or flaking off.

But it beat every odd stacked against it. It worked because the brands occupied the same moment in a person’s life. Taco Bell and Doritos are both late-night, casual, unapologetically flavor-forward. The product also created a new reason to visit Taco Bell at all, meaning both brands drove traffic to each other without cannibalizing anything. What looked like a stunt turned out to be one of the most successful food collaborations in history.

The lesson: the most unlikely-sounding collabs can outperform the safe, polished ones because when the fit is instinctively right, customers don't need to be convinced. They just get it.

Two that fell apart

Starbucks + Kraft: the billion-dollar breakup

In 1998, Starbucks partnered with Kraft to distribute its packaged coffee into grocery stores across America. By most measures, it worked. Kraft was good at distribution, sales grew, and Starbucks coffee found its way into millions of homes. But by 2010, Starbucks had outgrown the arrangement and wanted to control its own consumer packaged goods future. So it walked away from the contract early. Kraft refused to go quietly and sued. In 2013, an arbitrator sided with Kraft and ordered Starbucks to pay $2.76 billion, one of the largest contract dispute payouts in consumer goods history.

The lesson: a collab that works commercially can still end in disaster if the exit isn’t handled right. Always know how you’re getting out before you sign on how you’re getting in.

Gap + Kanye West: the deal without guardrails

In 2020, Gap and Kanye West (now legally Ye) announced Yeezy Gap, a high-profile partnership meant to reinvent Gap’s relevance and bring Ye’s design vision to a mass audience. It collapsed in 2022 amid public disputes, missed timelines, and a breakdown in the relationship, culminating in Ye making increasingly erratic and harmful public statements.

The failure had multiple dimensions. Structurally, the deal gave enormous creative control to a single individual with no formal accountability mechanisms for reputational risk, no morals clause with real teeth, and no contingency plan. When Ye’s public conduct became brand-toxic, Gap was stuck. There was also a fundamental tension between Ye’s instinct to create scarcity and chaos (products dropped in garbage bags, delayed releases) and Gap’s need to run a predictable retail operation.

The lesson: always include an exit. Any deal involving a single personality needs contractual protection against the possibility that the person becomes a liability.

Conclusion

Successful collaborations are the ones that truly understand how customers think and shop—and make that experience easier. But for that to happen, the partnership has to be intentional and well thought out, especially in a time when technology and consumer behavior are constantly evolving.

For more in-depth analysis, stay tuned.

New Article drops every Tuesday.

Be Bold. Be Real. Be Anomalous.

Episode Description

In this episode of Be Anomalous, Priya Ravindra joins me for a conversation about curiosity, self-belief, and building a business rooted in values in a world that often rewards speed over intention.

Priya’s journey is anything but linear.

She grew up in India, shaped by strong women, deep-rooted values around fairness, and an early belief that speaking up wasn’t optional. As a teenager, she moved to Australia to study engineering, eventually finding herself in tech as one of the only women coding in the room.

But the company she’s building today didn’t begin in tech.

It began with a question.

During the pandemic, as consumption skyrocketed, Priya found herself wondering: Where does all of this go? What happens to the clothes we buy, wear, and discard?

That curiosity led her down a path into textile waste, sustainability, and eventually into building Punar, an ethical brand working with recycled materials, conscious production, and a mission to rethink how we consume.

But this conversation goes far beyond sustainability.

We talk about growing up between cultures, navigating gender inequality across countries, the realities of building a business from scratch, and why visibility and speaking up are essential, especially for women founders.

Priya also shares the behind-the-scenes of entrepreneurship, the failed samples, delayed shipments, self-doubt, and the resilience it takes to keep going when nothing is guaranteed.

This episode is for founders, builders, and anyone trying to follow a path that doesn’t come with a clear blueprint.

If you’ve ever felt pulled toward something you couldn’t fully explain yet, this conversation is for you.

🎧 Listen to the Episode:

[Spotify] | [Apple] | [YouTube]

What You’ll Learn

• How curiosity can turn into a business

• Why self-belief is built through action, not confidence

• The realities of building a sustainable brand from scratch

• How to navigate being the only woman in male-dominated spaces

• Why speaking about your work is not ego, it’s a responsibility

• How flexibility in execution can unlock unexpected opportunities

• The importance of community and “finding your tribe” as a founder

• Why ethical and sustainable businesses require both conviction and strategy

Favorite Quote

“Everything you seek is inside of you.”

A reminder that the answers, the clarity, and the direction we’re searching for externally often already exist within us — if we’re willing to trust it.

Favorite Book

📖 Atomic Habits — James Clear

A powerful framework for understanding how small, consistent actions compound over time — and how real transformation doesn’t come from drastic change, but from steady, intentional shifts.

In This Episode, We Cover

• (00:00) Introduction and Priya’s early life in India

• (05:00) Moving to Australia and entering engineering

• (10:00) Being one of the only women in tech

• (15:00) Understanding gender inequality as a global issue

• (22:00) The curiosity that led to sustainability

• (30:00) Starting Punar and learning textiles from scratch

• (38:00) Early failures, product development, and persistence

• (45:00) Building a brand through storytelling and community

• (52:00) From B2C to B2B — evolving the business model

• (58:00) Sales, visibility, and speaking up as a founder

• (01:05:00) Mistakes, delays, and learning resilience

• (01:12:00) Advice for founders building unconventional paths

Referenced in This Episode

• Sustainable fashion and textile waste

• Ethical production and circular design

• Gender inequality in tech and entrepreneurship

• Founder mindset and resilience

• Building mission-driven brands

• Community and collaboration in business

Resources Priya Mentioned in This Episode

• United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

• Founder communities and women-led business networks

New episodes drop every Monday and Thursday.

Be Bold. Be Real. Be Anomalous.

Act I: The pitch that started everything

Emma Grede didn’t have the birth lottery. Raised by a single mother in East London, she saved wages from a paper route to buy fashion magazines, glossy, airbrushed worlds that felt a million miles from her own life. But instead of being bitter about that gap, she became obsessed with it.

At 26, she founded ITB Worldwide, her own entertainment marketing agency in London. Over the next decade, she built relationships with some of the biggest names in fashion and entertainment and eventually relocated to Los Angeles, where an opportunity of a lifetime awaited.

In 2015, at Paris Fashion Week, she was introduced to Kris Jenner. She fixed a meeting, and Emma walked in with a single, focused idea.

“I wanted to take a pain product something women genuinely struggled with and solve it. Denim was that product.”

She pitched the idea to Khloé Kardashian, and something clicked immediately. “I pitched her that idea and a light bulb went off in her head, and she literally finished my sentences,” Emma recalled. “I knew in that moment that Khloé was the person I wanted to work with.”

Two women from very different worlds found themselves finishing each other’s sentences over a shared frustration. That alignment was the seed of everything that followed.

Act II: The launch that broke records

Before Good American officially launched in October 2016, Emma and Khloé hosted a casting call at Milk Studios in New York. They hoped maybe 10 women would show up. Around 5,000 came.

That wasn’t a fluke. It was a signal and proof that the market they were targeting was enormous, underserved, and hungry.

On launch day, Good American went live online and at select Nordstrom locations. In the first hour, they recorded $1 million in sales. By the end of the day, another million. It was the largest denim launch in history.

$1 million in the first hour. The largest denim launch in history.

This was a well-thought-out strategy. It was a brand that had identified a real problem, built a genuine message around it, and showed up with the receipts to prove they meant it. Good American launched with sizes 00 through 24, the widest range in the industry at the time.

Act III: The order they said no to

Within weeks of launch, a major retailer came calling with a significant wholesale deal. It could have accelerated the brand’s growth overnight.

There was one condition: they would only carry sizes 0 through 8.

Emma and Khloé said no.

Before working with any retail partner, they had established a non-negotiable rule: any store that carried Good American had to stock its full-size range and display it in one place, with no separate “plus-size” floor.

“We’re going to have a company based on a set of principles, because we don’t want to negotiate every step of the way.”

For a brand that was just weeks old, turning down a major retailer was a genuinely scary decision. But it told the world and its customers exactly who Good American was. When they said they were inclusive, they were backing it up with actual business decisions that cost them real money.

Act IV: From jeans to a movement

After launch, the founders studied their data obsessively. In 2018, they noticed that 50% of their returns were coming from customers in sizes 14 and 16. The fashion industry had historically jumped from 14 to 16, leaving a gap.

Good American created a size 15.

That decision illustrates something profound about how they operated: they listened to what customers were telling them through their behavior, not just their words. They responded with a product solution.

That same year, they expanded beyond denim into activewear and ready-to-wear. The brand expanded its retail footprint to include Nordstrom, Saks, Bloomingdale’s, Anthropologie, and H&M. In 2023, it opened its first physical store at Westfield Century City in Los Angeles.

Today, Good American employs 120 people and generates over $200 million in annual revenue.

The real lesson from Good American

Here’s what most people get wrong when they study a brand like Good American: they look at the outcome and reverse-engineer a fairy tale.

Had a celebrity co-founder, a perfect launch, which would lead to a multi-million dollar business. But that’s not what happened. What actually happened was messier, slower, and far more instructive. A retailer said no to the full-size range, and they walked. Khloe Kardashian gradually stepped back from promotion, and they built anyway. A category expansion didn’t land the way they expected, and they went deeper into their product instead of wider into hype. And when the business hit walls, Emma Grede did what she had always done: got closer to the customer and let the data show her what to do next.

“I didn’t know what could go wrong and so I just got on with things that right now would seem scary or stupid.” -Emma Grede

You will make the wrong bets. You will expand too fast into a category your customers aren’t ready for. You will rely on something, a platform, a person, a moment of trend, that eventually shifts. Every brand makes these mistakes. The ones that survive aren’t the ones that avoided those mistakes. They’re the ones that built something real enough underneath to outlast them.

You need to be like Emma Grede, the one who knows the customer, holds the line, and keeps building long after the glamour of day one has faded.

In this episode of Be Anomalous, Natalie Trotta joins me for a conversation about nonlinear careers, curiosity, and what it really looks like to build a path that doesn’t follow a script.

Natalie describes herself as someone who translates strategy into action — helping founders and leadership teams take the ideas in their heads and turn them into something real.

But the way she arrived there wasn’t linear.

Natalie grew up in Ohio and knew from a young age that she wanted to build a life in New York. That intuition eventually led her to Pace University in the financial district, where she began building a career across multiple industries.

Over the past decade, she has worked across fashion, beauty, tech startups, neuroscience research, climate initiatives, and higher education, gaining a rare perspective on how different industries operate and how innovation actually moves from idea to reality.

After completing her MBA at Columbia Business School, Natalie eventually launched her own consulting practice, working with founders and emerging brands to turn big visions into executable strategies.

But this conversation goes far beyond career milestones.

We talk about curiosity as a career compass, the power of staying in motion when you don’t yet know the destination, and how working across industries can become one of your greatest strategic advantages.

Natalie also shares the practical systems she uses to run her consulting business, how she structures her days to stay productive when no one is managing her time, and why quitting the wrong things can be essential to focusing on what truly matters.

This episode is for anyone navigating career uncertainty, exploring entrepreneurship, or trying to figure out how to turn their ideas into something real.

If you’ve ever felt pressure to follow a traditional career path, this conversation is a powerful reminder that the most interesting careers are often the least linear.

🎧 Listen to the Episode

[Spotify] | [Apple] | [YouTube]

What You’ll Learn

• Why nonlinear careers can become a strategic advantage

• How to translate big ideas into real execution

• The real value of an MBA and when it makes sense

• How Natalie built her consulting business through relationships and network

• Practical systems for managing your time when you work for yourself

• Why curiosity can be a better career guide than rigid planning

• How founders can stay resilient when things don’t go as planned

• Why quitting the wrong things can unlock real progress

Favorite Quote

“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

— Maya Angelou

A powerful reminder that impact often has less to do with titles or achievements and more to do with how we show up for others.

Favorite Books

📖 Quit — Annie Duke

A compelling exploration of why strategic quitting is often necessary for meaningful progress.

📖 Big Magic — Elizabeth Gilbert

A thoughtful look at creativity, courage, and learning to follow curiosity without fear.

📖 10x Is Easier Than 2x — Benjamin Hardy & Dan Sullivan

A counterintuitive approach to growth that challenges how we think about scaling work and ambition.

In This Episode, We Cover

(00:00) Introduction and Natalie’s early ambition to move to New York

(05:00) Growing up in Ohio and building independence early

(10:00) Internships, early career exploration, and learning across industries

(16:00) Moving from fashion and beauty into tech and innovation

(20:00) Why Natalie decided to pursue an MBA at Columbia

(28:00) Lessons from business school and building a powerful network

(32:00) Starting a consulting practice and formalizing the business

(36:00) Systems for productivity and time management as a founder

(42:00) Working with founders and translating strategy into action

(47:00) Reframing failure and learning from uncertainty

(50:00) Advice for anyone trying to figure out their next step

Referenced in This Episode

• Consulting and founder strategy

• MBA career paths and executive education

• Startup and founder productivity systems

• Career pivots across industries

• Building a consulting business

• Time management for entrepreneurs

New episodes drop every Monday and Thursday.

Be Bold. Be Real. Be Anomalous.

This week, one question kept sitting with me:

how much discipline and consistency is actually normal?

It started with a post I came across online. Someone had written that sticking to a routine at every moment is neurotic. And honestly? A younger version of me would have agreed.

There was a time when I saw structure as a kind of rigidity. Something that got in the way of being spontaneous, or flexible, or just easy to be around. So when the late night came around, I’d stay. When someone needed me to show up somewhere I hadn’t planned for, I’d rearrange. When the choice was between my early morning and someone else’s comfort, I usually chose theirs.

Each compromise felt small. Collectively, they added up to something I didn’t have a name for at the time. Now I do:

I was consistently putting myself last and calling it being easygoing.

Protecting My Habits

The habits were always there. Protecting them was the hard part.

Waking up early. Sleeping early. Eating well. Moving my body. Simple things, but they require guarding. And guarding them comes at a social cost.

Being disciplined means being the person who says, “I can’t make it, I have to be up early for my workout.” It means declining invitations. Being unavailable. Sometimes being misunderstood. And when you’re younger, that friction feels too expensive.

So you give in. You show up to things you hadn’t planned for. You skip the workout to prove you’re not rigid. You break the sleep schedule so no one thinks you’re antisocial. And each time, it feels like a small sacrifice for the sake of the relationship, not a pattern.

But it is a pattern.

If I can show up for other people without question — rearrange my day, lose sleep, push through why can’t I show up for myself with that same reliability?

We extend enormous grace to others. We honor their time, their events, their needs. We rarely question it. But the commitments we make to ourselves? Those are the first ones to go.

That asymmetry stopped making sense to me. And once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it.

Skipping an event to stick to your routine is not antisocial. It’s self-respect.

I don’t mean this as an excuse to be rigid or unavailable. I mean it literally: keeping a promise to yourself is an act of respect toward yourself.

People who don’t have structure often find it threatening in others. Not maliciously, but your consistency holds up a mirror they weren’t ready to look into.

You don’t owe anyone an explanation for going to sleep early. You don’t need to justify prioritizing your health. And you don’t need to frame your own self-care as an inconvenience and then apologize for it.

What I’m Reading

10% Happier - Dan Harris(Currently Reading)

The book follows journalist Dan Harris after a live-TV panic attack prompts him to explore meditation and mindfulness. He shows that training your attention helps quiet the constant chatter in your mind, making you calmer and slightly happier about “10% happier.

This American Woman - Zarna Garg (Currently Reading)

The memoir is a sharp, funny, and deeply personal reflection on identity, resilience, and what it means to claim your own voice in a country where you’re constantly told who you’re supposed to be.

What Else Dropped This Week

Off Script

How Shai, One of the Youngest U.S. Diplomats, Became a Startup Founder

Under the Hood

You Don’t Need VC Money. You Might Need VC Money. Here’s the Truth.

On My Reading Desk

1. Forget KPIs: Vibes, community, and culture are how to build a brand in 2026

2. Adobe CEO to Step Down as Company Faces Intensifying AI Battle

3. Create & Cultivate Founder Jaclyn Johnson Opens Up About the Hidden Costs of Scaling Too Fast

4. Replit CEO Says Its New AI Agent Can Vibe Code a Startup From Scratch

Note to My Future Self

Discipline is not the enemy of freedom. It is the structure that makes freedom possible.

And the next time someone implies your consistency is excessive — pause and ask yourself: who does agreeing with them actually serve?

You showing up for yourself is not neurotic. It never was.

Be bold. Be real. Be Anomalous.

— Sai Menon

Thanks for reading this week’s debrief. If this resonated, share it with someone who needs the reminder