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- The idea hiding in plain sight
Hey, Danny here 👋
I popped in and out of some SXSW sessions in London this week. Anyone else go?
Highlights for me included David Fischer from Highsnobiety on old-school luxury vs “new luxury” (memory lane: I first met David in 2018 at a Courier cover shoot in Berlin which involved me throwing sneakers at him inside a shop); a panel with the team from indie watch brand Christopher Ward; and Charaf Tajer, the founder and creative director of fashion brand Casablanca.
I also surreptitiously dropped a few For Starters biz cards around (guerrilla marketing, innit) only to have a FS subscriber and friend immediately WhatsApp me with a photo of them. Busted. 😬
In this issue:
Inspiration ➠ Dog care, disrupted
Advice ➠ Steal this fashion idea
Ideas ➠ Turn a bike into a biz
Tools ➠ Simply sublime
FS Community ➠ Beautiful desks
👋 For Starters is a weekly email for starting the business of your dreams. It’s written by Danny Giacopelli, former editor of Courier magazine and host of Monocle’s The Entrepreneurs podcast.
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📬️ Tell us your business dreams → [email protected]
➠ Get inspired…
There’s a new pet care company in town and it really, really (like, really) doesn’t look like the others. London-based friends and designers Angelina Pischikova and Karina Zhukovskaya have just launched mud, and their first creation is a dog wash product. The two starters explain the idea behind mud and why most brands in the pack miss the mark. 🐩
FS: Was mud years in the making or a spontaneous idea?
We met about eight years ago while working on a creative project and quickly became friends. Since then, we’ve always wanted to build something together. We tried various side projects — dinner pop-ups, photo shoots, even tried to launch condoms.
Then Chester came into our lives. He is a terrier with a lot of energy. He’s the kind of dog who barks at everything, chases squirrels, rolls in fox poo, and mostly dislikes other dogs. Despite the chaos, we love him for who he is. I even chase squirrels with him, because I know how much joy it brings him.
He became a part of our friendship. And as more of our friends got dogs, they became part of our daily conversations too. But we started to notice something: we didn’t see a single dog brand out there that felt like it was made for dogs we know. Instead we saw that whole world of spotless, well-behaved, highly aesthetic dogs on social media. But that’s not what real dogs are like. We didn’t see anyone celebrating the messy, instinct-driven spirit that makes dogs… dogs. No brand that embraced the real side of dog ownership. So we decided to create one.
FS: Your approach is refreshingly the opposite of what most pet brands do!
Our approach was more about what we didn’t want to be. We literally made a deck that had two slides: THIS (dog running freely) NOT THIS (dog in a handbag).
Naming was a big moment. We spent ages going back and forth. And when Karina messaged me: how about mud? That was it. The brand embraces the mess and its visual identity reflects that.
FS: Has it been a steep learning curve?
We both came from creative backgrounds. We know how to design, build ideas, and bring meaning. But launching a brand is a whole different game. Unlike client projects where roles are defined, we had to handle everything ourselves. From finding packaging suppliers to developing a formula with chemists, organizing photoshoots, shooting ourselves, building the website.
We were supposed to launch in October last year… didn’t happen. So many things went wrong we could honestly make a whole TikTok series out of it. But that also means you get the freedom to create something that truly reflects our vision. mud™ is all us.
FS: What are you most excited or worried about?
We launched just 2 weeks ago, after spending 18 months developing one thing — The Everyday Wash for Dirty Dogs. It’s a pH-balanced, odour-neutralising dog wash made with oat, aloe, panthenol, and bioenzyme odour-fighting tech. It smells like… nothing. On purpose. Because dogs don’t want to smell like a candle shop. They have 300 million scent receptors. Most washes are hell for them.
What’s been surreal is how positive the response from people has been so far. We feel like we created something people wish existed. What’s wild is... it didn’t. Until now. Also two weeks in and we’ve already been awarded at D&AD 2025. Unreal. Especially for a female-led, self-funded start-up built entirely in-house.
We're buzzing with ideas. Future products, limited drops, collabs. So yeah, watch this space.
FS: What’s on the wishlist? Dream collabs?
Louise Glazebrook’s The Book Your Dog Wishes You Would Read genuinely reshaped how I think about dogs and our relationships with them. Real care isn’t about making them fit into our world, it’s about helping them thrive in theirs. She’s our dream ambassador. We’d love to team up with her to educate more people and make more dogs a little happier.
Also: people like Lydia Pang and FKA twigs. That rebel energy that they have. And they’ve got dogs too 🙂
But really, we want to connect with anyone who gets it. If you're reading this and it feels aligned with your vision — hit us up.
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➠ Get skilled…
What happens when five brothers and sisters set out to grow a fashion brand? If they do it right, with a strong aesthetic, quality materials, and somehow manage to avoid family quarreling in the process, it might look something like Spanish menswear brand unfeigned. One of those siblings – María Gomez, in charge of the brand’s look and feel – shares her advice for starters…
My brother Rafa, the eldest sibling, used to run a successful footwear company. Before the pandemic, he wanted to build the perfect wardrobe; something super comfortable he could wear across seasons. I was doing production and side jobs in fashion advertising, and he convinced me to start a new business with him. We’ve since dragged in our other siblings! Quino does sales, Carmen does finance, and Juanma is on logistics. We’re about 15 people total today.
From the beginning it wasn’t just about the quality of the product – it also had to be really sustainable. We decided to get lots of certifications and we had to convince our factories, so it’s been an interesting journey.
Since then the brand has grown in the right way. I can’t say it’s been fast but the steps we’ve taken were the right ones. And they’ve allowed us to build a solid base of loyal customers and gather as much feedback as possible. We’re in around 70 multibrand stores around the world today. We opened our own shop in Madrid in 2022 and in Paris in January. And we’re finally growing our online presence. The exact opposite of how it usually works in fashion!
Working with family is an advantage because our best relationships on earth are with our siblings. Everyone has their own area of the business, so you don't have to put your nose in what they’re doing. We rely on and respect each other so much.
We realised we don’t have to market the sustainability aspect so hard. At the end of the day we’re a fashion brand. We have a very cool, contemporary, minimalist product, but we were always talking about sustainability and certifications and blah blah blah. People were like, “We don't care, it’s fashion.” After two or three collections, we understood that the sustainability stuff is added value. First our customers see unfeigned and love how it feels, and on top of that they’re like, “Oh, they’re also making this locally with the highest quality recycled fabrics.”
The same thing happens in the food industry. “This is good for you.” Okay, but how does it taste? In fashion it’s the same. “Does it fit well? Do I look good in it?” Only then do people usually care it’s made in Portugal and the fabrics are recycled or organic. That’s secondary.
You have to believe in your product. It doesn’t matter if it’s a sculpture, a painting, a song, a book. If it’s a t-shirt, you have to be wearing it because you are the one who is responsible for what you’re offering to the world. You are the best ambassador for your product. If you don’t see yourself as a potential customer of your own product, then don’t offer it to the market. If you’re not sure, there’s no point in doing it.
Madrid is such a booming city now. Everybody wants to come here and see the scene. But to be honest, we were born as an international brand. A lot of people who come to the store are like, “You guys are Spanish? We thought you were from Sweden!” And it’s true – the name is hard to pronounce and our communications are in English. But we love it here and we’re so proud to be here.
I love running brands and aesthetics. I really like Bandit and the store they have on Bleecker Street in New York. On Running is doing amazing things, connecting so many facets of your world together. That didn’t happen before. We also love brands from Japan and Korea, such as Document, which is really special.
Growing a business is actually like running a race. You have to believe you’re going to finish… because otherwise you won’t!
María Gomez | unfeigned
↙️ Maria’s market gap ↘️
“The biggest problem of clothing brands, no matter how big or small, is stock. You have to create a certain amount every season and you’re usually going to have deadstock left in the warehouse. I think there’s a potential gap here for a business. There are lots of platforms doing vintage, but I haven’t seen many with newer items listed. And sure, brands host archive sales, but they do it by themselves. If there was a platform that helped sell your deadstock, with a good price for the brand and a nice margin for the platform, that would be amazing. You’d ship them the clothes and they’d take care of everything.”
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➠ Good ideas
👕 US-made tees. A t-shirt made entirely in the US is hard, but not impossible. Look at the journey of Nashville-based Imogene + Willie.
🚲️ Biz on two wheels. I stumbled upon Ferla, a California-based bicycle/cart company, and I’m loving the creativity. They can whip up a biz-on-wheels concept for you – anything from a ‘cold brew bike’ to a ‘vending bike’.
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➠ Smart links
🛠️ Resources
Sublime. I’m a card-carrying member of the MyMind cult, but this new tool looks cool, too. They call it ‘the knowledge tool that sparks creativity.’ 🧠
📚️ Reads
They’re 15. Wait Until You Read Their Newspaper. The Ditch Weekly, a paper by middle and high schoolers on Long Island, is covering the Hamptons from a new angle. NYT
The Consumer Trends Food Feelings Matrix. We asked thousands of Americans to rate 96 food and drinks, from almond butter to whiskey. Here are the healthiest and funnest. The New Consumer
The State of SEO in 2025. Detailed
A Step-by-Step Guide to Starting a Vending Machine Business. Vending machines might seem like super unsexy and plain businesses. But, say some entrepreneurs, the simplicity is what makes them so appealing. Inc
“Things get pretty crazy later on”: How sauna became London’s hottest activity. The Londoner
🧠 Findings
74% → The percentage of new webpages that feature AI content. 2.5% of pages are “pure AI”, 25.8% are “pure human”, and 71.7% are a mix. Just like Waymo’s self-driving cars will make streets safer but less fun (let’s be honest), ChatGPT will make web copy clean, but soulless. → One silver lining: we’re entering a golden era for em dashes—the most distinguished of punctuation marks 🧐
🙃 Fun
🫖 Spill the (tiny) tea: Check out Le Picabier, a single-person, outdoor, micro tea room in the mountains north of Kyoto.
🏆️ And it’s time to nominate a project for The Tiny Awards, celebrating the best of the small, poetic, creative, handmade web.
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➠ FS community
Who doesn’t love voyeuristically peeking at the spaces of creative people? It’s partly why Architectural Digest’s home tours are so viral and why Apartamento is so popular.
In 2020, For Starters subscriber Ryan Gilbert launched Workspaces.xyz, a newsletter featuring images of people’s desks, studios and creative spaces, along with a short interview and a list of the tools they use to get shit done.
Read the interesting journey he’s taken with the newsletter as a creator and also check out his other newsletter: H1 Gallery, “a collection of the best marketing headlines on the internet.”
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