The Weekly: Sydney Sweeney’s Prediction Market and the Generation Beauty Forgot

0:01Coming up in today's episode, I'm absolutely shooketh Sydney Sweeney. She is in fact an investor of Novik. Do you remember the ad campaign? She's sitting on the edge of a basketball hoop looking very sexy and naked. Huge developments in this story. We break down exactly what is happening in the prediction market thanks to Sydney Sweeney. And we will also be discussing a new-ish beauty brand that launched two years ago in the US and has just launched in the UK, serving up until now a pretty underserved demographic of women 40 plus. We'll be asking what Sarah Creel is getting so right and why this is a demographic of consumers that have been so left behind for so long.

0:43Hi and welcome to The Curve Weekly where we read the finance news so that you don't have to. I'm Sophie Woolwright, ex-television and radio producer who was sick and tired of not understanding the economy, how to grow my wealth, so we started this podcast. And I'm Emma-Louise Boynton, a writer, broadcaster and recently published author who focuses on opening up conversations we are typically taught not to have. And today I'm filling in for Vic Harris. But before we dive in, we've got a quick word from today's sponsor.

1:12Strong returns in one year. I mean, you could say luck. but strong returns over 10 years that's a track record find out more about Generate's 10-year track record and see their disclosures in the show notes remember though track record does not guarantee future returns so I've just been instructed to say hi Sophie how was your holiday so I'm gonna do as I was told and say hi Sophie how was your holiday you're looking glowing thank Thank you so much. I just want to actually say, before we were recording, Emma asked me that, and I said, ask me, I'm like, I had the best time. You know, sometimes working remotely can be a bit of a nightmare.

1:53You can't find air con. You can't find Wi-Fi. You can't find a desk. You know, and it's a disaster, and you think it's going to be great, and then all of a sudden, it's not. It was so good. I'm like, I think doing one week like that every year is the dream. Sometimes I think when you just take yourself out of your usual context, it just sparks your creativity. I can find I'm almost like some kind of desperate to work because I'm out of my usual like day to day, like rat race, like routine. And I get such good ideas. And I get I kind of end up doing much better work than if I was just sitting at my desk in London being miserable.

2:28I agree. I think remote working or being a digital nomad is so glamorized. And when you do it, I actually don't like it. I actually love a routine. I like having a base. But doing a week was amazing. I agree. I could not be. It's a novelty. Totally. It's a novelty break of it. I already told you that phone dying was not ideal. But I will say. Brated. The rice worked. But your phone's back. It's back. She's back in action. She had two days in rice, and she is back to her lovely self. Wait, that actually works. I know. I thought it was a total old lifestyle. So, yeah. No, it works. Wow. Okay, so you've come back from holiday, reset, rested.

3:09You've got a really nice glow about you. You look well. Yeah, I'm feeling great. But I'm also in the green because I mentally spent£1 ,000 on a new phone, but I haven't had to. So she's feeling good. Oh, my gosh. That is real karma. Mm-hmm. That is like, actually, you didn't get any money back. Or you didn't earn any money. No. But actually not spending that money, I mean, it is. It puts you into... Kind of. It's kind of like a neutral. You know how I stay in neutral? Yeah. By getting, like, freebies. I feel like you stayed in neutral. I would say... Would we say neutral? I would say we're in denial a bit at the time.

3:45Listen, a denial shade of green. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're fine with that. I'm loving that. Yeah. I'm so glad you had such a nice time. Thanks. Do you have any questions you want me to ask you? Oh, okay. you could ask how my weekend was how was your weekend? so Sophie my weekend was actually amazing very different I was at a very sweet literary festival called the Henley Literary Festival as I was doing a talk about my book Pleasure the Reclamation of My Body out now and it was actually really momentous for me because I used to volunteer at literary festivals, cultural festivals across the UK basically all the time So from about kind of 17, 18 years old, I was a cute little nerd who wanted to go and see smart people talk about their art.

4:28But I could not afford to buy all the like hundreds of tickets I legitimately wanted to purchase to see everyone. So I would just volunteer at festivals like all over. Like, you know, if there was a festival on, you best believe I was on the door being like, hi, welcome. So cute. So precious. Like I really look back. I was also fucking crazy at certain points. So I really look back on that version of me and thank God, you absolute blessed child. But one of the festivals that I really loved was Henley Literary Festival because I started working there. Henley Literary. Henley, yeah. It's a very cute little town.

4:59It's like an hour outside of London. And I started volunteering there at 18 and I went back honestly like every year for more than five years. And I got promoted. I was like lead volunteer, like putting out the chairs, being in charge of the volunteers. Then I would occasionally get to introduce the authors. My first experience with a mic and a stage and a little kind of quivering of the voice. I got really nervous. Obviously a foreshadowing of what was to come. my favourite place in the world is a stage with Mike but I also harboured this seemingly very wishful dream that I would one day go back as an author so this year, 16 years after I first volunteered at Henley I went back as an author so it felt like a really special kind of momentous moment on my like journey to being a writer.

5:39Also a really good reminder how long it takes to get to where you want to be Oh my gosh, I would say I'm glad I didn't know how many years it would be Good things take time and a lot of it A lot of the attitude towards a career shift or whatever your dream is or the pinnacle of what you would consider success within something you're trying to achieve can be really frustrating sometimes to look around and feel like everyone's winning all the time. And actually the time and energy and graft it takes to actually do something like that. And it's not as though you haven't worked hard over that time.

6:12It's been 16 years of hard work. Totally. And also building other stuff in that time. But I think, you know, my friend Charmaine always talks about thinking about like your work as a body of work, as opposed to individual pieces of work that you expect to be like that one hit wonder that propels you to success. Because I think often we hear stories of success of like, oh, they did that one thing and it just launched their career. Oh, they did that one thing and they were really we see the overnight success. But what we don't see is the 10 years behind that. And we'll kind of talk about this, I guess, in the second story we're covering today.

6:39but I really like that idea of like our working lives being building a body of work that over time delivers us to the place that we're meant to be I can't wait to dive into these stories one of which I don't understand at all so I cannot wait for you to tell me okay yeah so we've all seen Sydney Sweeney the latest ad campaign if you haven't seen it she is sitting sort of naked on the top of a basketball hoop she's holding balls up at the end of the ad saying you know it's just sports. Just sports. Just sports. Novik is just sports. So they wanted a show. Just sports. I have watched it so many times, and I'm embarrassed to say I have seen it, I would say it at least eight to nine times.

7:23Her boobs are unreal. They are so incredible. Phenomenal. Her body is like, I don't know if they've already seen a body like that before. I mean, even when she's sitting on top of the basketball rig, I had to pause it so many times to be like, oh my God, the underboob. Like just the way, her body's amazing. The underboob is, my boobs are such different sizes. The underboob on one side is so different to the underboob on the other. So like seeing, like really the curvature. Did you see she actually just put out a new one this morning? Yes, I did. It was like a part two of it. Yeah, basically to doubling down because she's had so much backlash of people on the internet basically saying you're doing such a disservice to women in sport by hyper-sexualizing this idea of women in a kind of sporting context so she's had such backlash and being sydney sweeney she does not care and she has doubled down can you tell me why though because i was really interested to learn about this well it's funny you say that because when i saw her post this part too i thought i wonder if that was always in the content plan though or if it was added you know because it is it is almost a carry on or a recap the first but then i reckon there's i what she is good she is the queen of rage baiting she doesn't care she knows what is going to garner our attention and like it listen for what it putting aside the kind of feminist or like squirming that I think it evokes in in all of us for what it set out to do which was to generate huge views huge publicity and you know to start uh you know internet discourse it succeeded on all fronts like massively it's been one of the most talked about stories the past couple weeks So is her American Eagles campaign.

9:00Totally. She knows how to rage bait. I mean. And she knows how to rage bait. And then she leans in. And I think that's her particular form of genius. Because a lot of people would then, you know, I'm so sorry. They'd issue an apology. They'd be back. She doesn't. She just goes, leans in. It's like, obviously this was like, you know, that wasn't my attention. She doesn't care. Yeah. I mean, I just would not have a skin thick enough for that. Because I almost feel as though she's going against the entire female population with what she's saying and the way that she's responding. But anyway, the thing behind this marketing campaign and the biggest story that I didn't realize is that Sydney Sweeney is actually an investor in Novick.

9:39I didn't know this until I researched it. And I was like, God, of course. She is a creative director. She was involved in planning how this was marketed. So she – So smart. It's so smart, isn't it? I mean, she is profiting from this business growing. It's nearly worth$2 billion, which is just months after they did a last round of funding. So, I mean, essentially, for anyone that's missed what the prediction market is, a lot of people talk about this as glorified sports betting. And Novik is a prediction market platform. Exactly. So there's a few different ones. There's Kelsey, which you may have heard about.

10:18There's three or four kind of major players. I hadn't even heard of Novik before. I don't even know how to say it properly. Sorry, I would be so curious, though, if anyone listening had heard of this platform before Sydney Sweeney came along. I had never heard of them. They'd never been – I mean, obviously, it's not necessarily my area of media that I read about. But to me, they were like – I didn't – No, so I hadn't heard of them either. And I thought it was almost this initial, hey, like launch campaign. We're launching. It's been around since 2021. so it's still quite new it's new but there's all these other platforms that are production market businesses and trading platforms that are emerging and becoming quite common and well known so since Sydney Sweeney decided to put her boobs and her just sport it's quite fun to say I keep on being like just shoehorn in another little thing so since Sydney ended up going and doing this campaign which has just absolutely provoked I mean the entire internet our bit of the internet I wonder if there is a kind of alternate internet that we're not a part of that's super right wing that's actually been like oh my god love Sydney's so empowering so weirdly someone the other day was saying to me they were comparing with their boyfriend a reel that had gone viral and the comments they saw compared to the comments that they saw was different so they saw all these like ragey comments and people being like this is so stupid and I was like oh my god the algorithm's fully the algorithm is fucked absolutely missing with us we live in different worlds we do it's not algorithm so I reckon what we're seeing in response to Sydney's and obviously the media that we're consuming is probably going to be more kind of centrist left-leaning.

11:49It's all going to be like, oh, Sydney Sweeney, this is anti-feminist. There is a whole tranche of the social media sphere and more kind of right-leaning platforms that are probably celebrating it. So what impact did she end up having? The company has grown to having more than 250 ,000 users in the US. 250 ,000? Yeah. So to give context, it's not as though this is like a tiny little platform that's got a few users. so there's more than 6.5 billion that's been traded in contracts so it's it's not small money yeah and the september campaign with our gal has really brought this whole company into mainstream conversation objectively so whether or not it's for positive or negative reasons it's catapulted this business into an entirely new market that they didn't have access to so she is an equity investor and she's also a strategic partner so she's involved in the creative direction she may have even come up with this whole idea which is if she did I have to just put my hat off to her and say she's a marketing genius I don't love it but it's clever the amount that she owns I couldn't find I don't know if it's public how much of the business she actually is involved in but the premise of being an investor as everyone knows is that if this gets more users more money on platform She is making money.

13:10In terms of the campaign and what it did, so it's had a 900 % increase in the brand mentions following the campaign. 38 million views on the Instagram reel, the OG one, so not the one that just came out. Like, crazy. Yeah, so according to the Forbes, like, seek metrics, they look at, like, you know, how something's been almost measured across the different, like, social platforms. so the average brand mentions for the business before the campaign were around 392 and they've now increased to 4 ,633 in the four days following the campaign and that will just continue going up for that period in which because I mean that's four days after so that was obviously in the like immediate but then you had all the think pieces that would have come out in those days so that's also going to be a long tail end to that to those impressions and I imagine would just drive that number up even more.

14:01I mean, essentially, they're killing it. And for probably the business that was slightly behind us, you know, even the fact that you'd heard of Polymarket and Kalshi, they will be giving them a run for their money at this point. And I was interested to see that the founder of the company said in the aftermath of the ad that the company is really hugely supportive of women's sports and never intended to portray anything else. And I'm like, really? oh it's good really so funny are you oh my gosh but yeah they're just like doubling down all which is to say this campaign has been from a marketing standpoint so regardless of what you think of in terms of the impact on the portrayal of women in sport the kind of feminist reaction to the sorry it shouldn't just be feminist the general reaction to how sydney swing we portrayed women's role in sport so putting that aside from a purely commercial perspective this campaign has been a huge success so it's driven up is it's driven up the value of the company yeah it is driven up the social media impressions i guess the interesting thing with that is what does that look like long term does the visibility of the company mean that it's going to continue to attract more and more users or is this kind of a kind of flash in the pan but i guess if she's an investor this is like a long-term partnership which is the difference between doing a one-off campaign with someone like just using her face let's just say i think her boobs will be the balls that we see on social media promoting the just sports for a long time to come great line sophie all right that was an absolute banger that was a slam dunk no but um it's the fastest growing you know prediction market there is right now and so they've done multiple raises as you can imagine it's really tech heavy there's a there's a lot of money being pumped into this business so while you can see okay, there's like six, six and a half billion going through it in terms of contracts.

15:53The amount of money that they've spent on growing, marketing, et cetera, expanding is huge. But they have reportedly quadrupled their valuation to two billion. And that's just in four months. So when someone goes to market, like, you know, they've done several funding rounds. Basically, when there are institutional investors, that's where it's starting to go mainstream, right? So they've gone through series a series b that is almost like where the price has been stricken so the last time people put money in there's a valuation that's the money that they give and in the last four months according to all of the stats that you're seeing online and how much it's growing it's quadrupled since that point so if they were to then go to investors now and be like hey guys Sydney chuck in a few more million it's you can now only get a quarter of what you could four months ago she negotiated something like being able to buy totally if you want to You can see my nipples, just so you know.

16:43You have to give me a really good rate in perpetuity. But so please can you explain to me what a prediction market is? Because before this episode, I tried to do some more research into that. And honestly, I felt like I was reading articles in different languages. I could not understand even the bare bones of this. So can you please explain in really, really simple language? So what I want to start with is saying this is not a new business or a new business model. interestingly it's been around since 1988 and it was created as a place for people to essentially gauge the presidential election vibes so in a similar way to how it's being used now to almost understand what is the cultural undertone for big events whether it be politics whether it be literally anything the prediction markets now they've evolved a huge amount and now it's like it's covering all different almost like outcomes that are being predicted so whether it's sports politics big events but it's out in regards to the US election so it was essentially the idea that like rather than relying just purely on polls you could use collective views of people putting money behind what they thought was going to happen so it's almost like a temperature check for what are the people thinking what are the people saying so that's kind of where it came from originally so it's literally like doing a mass survey saying what does everyone think is going to happen in relation to insert big cultural events.

18:08So a prediction market is essentially a marketplace where people trade contracts based on the outcome of future events. Let's do a sporting example because I think that that's a really good way to get your head around it. So if we pretended that the All Blacks team in England were playing rugby, you could buy a contract, which is like a trade. So kind of like if you were buying a share of a business, you're buying a contract. I have my little pocket of money and I'm going to go and spend my in the green money to buy this contract. Yes. Betting that the All Blacks will win. All Blacks, yeah. Good bet.

18:40Let's be honest, it's probably quite ugly. Let's imagine it's a pound or a dollar. Okay. And you're putting like 0.60 down that you think the All Blacks will win. If the All Blacks win, the contract pays a dollar. So I get a dollar? No, because you put down 60. So you're getting 40 back. So I'm at 40 profit, but I get my 60 back. Yeah. So you get the dollar, but you're only making 40. Yeah, still winning. Yeah, winning. In the green. Whereas if the All Blacks lose, you don't get anything. So you lose your 60. Okay, fine. So there's like two sides of the same coin is essentially what's happening.

19:11And how different is that to how gambling typically works? So with a sports bet, let's say the same thing was happening and you were betting on the All Blacks versus England. You only either win or lose when the game finishes, and there's a clear outcome. The difference with these contracts is that you can actually trade at different times. So it might be halfway through the game, and you could place a contract. contract so someone else does that make sense it's basically really similar to how bonds work or even how you buy a share where you're kind of constantly trading so you it's just so different to a black and white win or lose outcome where it's like I'm putting down here's five because I think all blacks are going to win and you have to wait till the end of the game or like if you're betting on sports like um horse racing you know you can't halfway through the race change who you're going to change horses because actually based on your new knowledge, you're going to swap.

20:05So obviously you'll get a lesser amount. So it might be really obvious at halftime that, I don't know, say All Blacks are five up and England is five zero. You can still go, I'm going to buy a contract for the All Blacks winning, but it might be you're paying 75 rather than 60. So the reason that it's different and that they're arguing that it's not as clear cut is because it actually does kind of work in the way that other financial products or markets work. So, yeah, so it's interesting because actually CalShare and like quite a few of these platforms are banned in lots of states in America because it is like, objectively it looks like sports betting.

20:46It is, but kind of is. Well, yeah, what this whole conversation is bringing up and made me really think about is, We've got all these different avenues to trade, different types of assets. You've got bonds. You've got the stock market. You've got crypto. Are prediction markets going to become a part of Wall Street, a part of the mainstream place in terms of, you know, if someone looks at their portfolio, they've got bonds, they've got crypto, they've got shares. are they also going to be trading outcomes? And that's an asset that is just so normal and commonplace that it's actually just kind of a, you know, it's like a well-known, financially regulated, quite reputable way to invest.

21:27And it's just interesting to look at whether or not we think that's true. And the way that you can kind of figure that out is if you actually look at the people that are investing in these businesses, like investment banks and hedge funds are starting to explore the prediction markets which is a massive like big green flag that says that it's it's looking like institutional finance is getting involved in the markets use binary contracts which allow essentially you're betting against other users and thus that kind of the value is being constantly reset depending on supply and demand so you're kind of you and all your prediction peers are essentially setting the like trading value whereas when you're gambling the like value is set by the house well you're betting against the house you're guessing against the house so there's something even in that it's a marketplace in the same way that a stock market is because if you wanted to sell an amazon share and i wanted to buy it i have to be there to buy it from you you're not actually buying it directly from the company so in the same yeah that's a really simple way to think about it is the distinction between betting is that sports betting you're betting against the house and actually in this case you're trading against other people.

22:37Would you do a prediction? What is the terminology? What would I say? Would you place a bet? Would you predict? Buy a contract? Would you buy a contract? That sounds so sexy. Lame, doesn't it? I don't know. I mean, I should do it for research purposes just to see. Should we do some before the next session? Maybe. Should we buy some contracts? There's going to be a sexier way of doing with this. 10 pounds. Not more than 10 pounds. I come back next week. Are you in the red or the green? I'm so far in the red. I've lost all my savings. But that's the thing, you could get addicted to it. I can see myself getting addicted.

23:10And I think the thing that's more addictive with this type of investment comparatively to stock market investing, and maybe that's just because it's my approach and how we've spoken about investing on the curve, I don't go and check stock all the time. I'm not so involved in a company's earnings. I'm not obsessed with being so up-to-date that I'm going to be consciously making new decisions, whereas what I think the prediction market leans into is it's cultural relevance. So people are excited by reading about, involved in these conversations, which means that the frequency in which you would be trading or buying contracts would be increased, which lends itself more to day trading or gambling, which is where if you have an addictive personality or you don't set clear boundaries with yourself, you could, it could be quite dangerous.

23:54It me, it me. I can just see you turning into a little like gamer. Oh, I'm like worried. And coming up after the break, we're going to be discussing the financially forgotten generation and how one beauty founder is cashing in by creating a brand designed to fill this void. I'm very excited for this one, but first we have a quick word from today's sponsor. Okay, so any KiwiSaver provider can have a good year, but how can you tell if they're a really good provider from the one that just got lucky? And honestly, that's consistency. A provider might be able to get a 20 % return one year, but that could actually just come down to one or two investments performing unusually well rather than a consistent investing skill.

24:35So what you want to look out for is if a fund performs over a long period of time. See Generate's performance and disclosures by using the link in the show notes. And thanks Generate for making this episode of The Curve Weekly possible. This is a story that I stumbled across the other day while reading the paper and immediately stuck out to me because it feels so obvious, but just not a lot of people doing it. So New York-based beauty founder Sarah Creel has launched her eponymous beauty brand, Sarah Creel Beauty in the UK and in Ireland. So it just launched in September here after hitting major retail placement in the US since its 2024 launch.

25:12So it is relatively new. It is targeting women over 40 and the brand really is testament to the fact it is good business to be catering to an often overlooked older demographic of women who have money to spend. Now the beauty editor at The Guardian, Sally Hughes, said in her piece which talked all about this brand and is how I found out about it that she very seldom dedicates an entire column to a single brand but felt kind of compelled to do so because of how exceptionally good and smart the Sarah Creel beauty brand is. She said I think Sarah Creel is worthy of the inches, which I think says a lot.

25:50Sally Hughes has been writing about beauty for many years. First and foremost, how many brands do you know, beauty brands, that cater specifically to women who are 40 plus? The only one I know is Trini London. Oh, yeah, Trini. And she has been around for about five years now. Yes, but I don't feel, even though Trini is older, the like, advertorial around the brand doesn't feel like it's, To me, actually, the brand doesn't feel like it's very specifically catering to 40+. I don't know if I've seen any beauty brands that have really clearly tried to target that generation. Trini, she started the brand when she was 50.

26:25So obviously the formulations and the way that she was, even in the weekend, I was asking Luke's mum what her makeup was before we recorded this. And she said it was Trini and she loved it. And she bought it because she really likes Trini. She finds her really funny. But also she's obviously representing a different generation. we are so obsessed with youth and how we look and all beauty products are generally trying to target people who feel insecure about getting older there's generally like the beauty industry in general has been created around that and so the images and everywhere we look feels like there is such a disconnect between products that are being created generally everyone you see using them is super super young what Sarah Carell is doing is actively going against that and to your point at the start when i saw the story i thought the same thing i thought it's just the most obvious yeah business ever and it got us thinking how enormous this entire generation is and how underserved it is in terms of businesses products and and just like it's enormous how much money could be made in this space and i think you're right to say i mean so much beauty and so much beauty advertising happens online now where we know you see lots of young influencers who are you know advertising moisturizers serums etc they're kind of dewy skin and it kind of makes sense therefore that beauty brands would target young people because young people congregate online and there's a kind of direct consumer like you know chain there but who has cash older women like the generation before so kind of 40 50 plus are the last generation that have typically out earned their parents they've done better our generation isn't out we're not out earning our parents yet you know our economic um fortunes are looking so great there's 64 of gen x women and 74 of burma women which i feel is perhaps like not the right or correct terminology but where they have felt underrepresented when it comes to product and advertising and you're so right more than seven and ten women from both age groups so gen x and boomer said they'd be more likely to purchase from brands that featured people of diverse ages in their ads really what this is to me is just everyone is sick and tired of seeing 15 year olds using moisturizers and actually not only is there not products that are being targeted to a generation as you say that's been forgotten but everyone and this is even millennials 76 percent of millennials want this too so there's this collective feeling of we are bored of focusing on gen z why is everyone obsessed with this generation and actually zoom out and look at the people who have the money the cfos of the household.

29:12Like if you also, if you look at Gen X, that was a lot of our parents' generation. And there's probably people listening to this that also are in that generation too. They were sort of the last ones on the cusp of there being quite a lot of men that work and women that stay at home. It's almost financially impossible to not have two people working these days. But that generation specifically were the ones that were told to save to budget, but they were in charge of the spending. So they weren't taught really how to grow wealth or invest, but what they are in charge of is consumer spending. So it's like if they've got the most money and they have the most power of where that money's going, why on earth have there not been so many other businesses pop up left-hand center?

29:57It's just such an obvious white space. But I think what is so wonderful about the story, and this is what really kind of why I gravitated to it so much, is that Sarah Creel's own story really tells us everything we need to know about why this business, why now, and how she was particularly able to make the most of what feels like such a glaringly obvious business opportunity. And that's because she started working. So she's been in beauty for decades. So she started working on the counter at Clinique and then spent three decades, that's three decades, 30 years, working her way through some of the most demanding creative environments in beauty.

30:33Bobbi Brown, Tom Ford Beauty, Prada Beauty. And in 2018, I did not know this, but 2018, she co-founded Victoria Beckham Beauty, which we talked about with the former Spice Girl herself and served as CEO until 2022. All of which is to say she has spent decades amassing a really deep, insightful understanding of the beauty space, really understanding the customer, understanding what products are on offer, building a business with Victoria Breckham, which we know has been a huge part of the business's kind of revival. And she noticed in that time that there was this underserved demographic within beauty consumers.

31:12But before starting a business, she surveyed 2000 women to validate her assumption that yes, it was an underserved audience. They didn't feel like they were getting products that were, you know, targeted at, you know, wrinkling skin. Like my mum, for example, often smudges like, you know, like mascara smudges or things smudge. And of course, it's because your skin is not retaining or using product in the same way when you have less or more collagen. It makes so much sense. Totally. And so she saw that opportunity, surveyed 2 ,000 women, and in response, 99 % of them came back and confirmed what she already suspected, that age-specific formulas and real representation of beauty were both critical and almost entirely absent from the market.

31:50And then she was able to really hit the ground running with her own beauty brand. And I think this, for me, is a story both about an underserved demographic and a really good business opportunity. but also one it kind of flies the face of a lot of our bait and assumptions about what a founder looks like and who a founder is today I feel like we're constantly bombarded with the idea of a founder being young and beautiful I mean maybe not beautiful but there's a kind of we really valorize youth in terms of entrepreneurship we have you know things like Forbes 30 under 30 which are giving cultural accolades the idea of like starting businesses young like the younger the better and actually you know there's a lot to be said for accumulating wisdom market understanding knowledge of your consumer being your consumer and then starting your business slightly later in life which I don't think we really talk about enough well even back to what you said at the beginning of this podcast the idea that your career is a body of work and you're collecting things along the way I wrote actually on the plane on the way back to the UK about how I think that we're just getting our timelines so wrong.

32:57I wanted to put something on Substack about this because if you were then to look at almost the way that we put pressure on women to find the love of their life by 30, to be married, to have kids, to all this stuff, for me, having met someone much later in life has meant that I'm in... Not much later in life. Yeah, but I am in 35. A lot of people say you should do that by 25. I'm not saying I'm old, but I guess my point is just in the same way... It's not the classic timeline. Yeah, and my communication skills, my confidence, what I'm attracted to I'm so much more in tune with the older I am I think the same could be said for your career and amassing all these skills and experience over time to get to 50 and start a business I would way rather back if as someone who's 50 and has all of this experience experience totally business experience brand experience etc and there's this really toxic narrative that youth equals success or youth is the ultimate goal I wanted to look into it I wondered if there was a correlation between businesses started by older founders being more successful because i was like is you know the accumulation of experience actually doesn't and there was a study by mit in 2019 so it's a little bit old but it's still 2019 where researchers calculated a mean age of 45 among the 1700 founders um they looked at of the fastest growing new ventures they found the batting average for creating successful firms rises dramatically with age I quote a fifth year old founder is 1.8 times more likely to achieve upper tail growth than a first year old founder they wrote oh I love that how amazing is that and it's so cool I also think in a society that puts such a premium on youth and beauty and a lot of pressure around that particularly for women because obviously then there's you know bring in conversation around biology kids everything I just think it's so inspiring hearing stories like this like about like Sarah Creel's company and then actually seeing that that kind of you know validated by data that actually we have our whole lives to achieve incredible things.

34:52It's not all bunched into these like 20s and 30s and we're always running out of time. Actually, we have until, you know, decades. This not only highlights the exact same way that we talk about investing, as in invest in your niche, invest in, you have a specific lens on the world and you see opportunities differently to someone next to you because of the extracurricular, the sports you play, the things you buy, the people you spend time with, your lens and what you see as popular, whether it's a product or a consumer or what people are talking about, that's really unique because you see things differently to a 50-year-old guy who's investing their money.

35:30So you see opportunities in different businesses as an investor, but also potentially owning businesses. For example, if you are 50 and you're seeing all your friends go through menopause and they're feeling incredibly underrepresented and there's no products that are helping them get from A to B or, you know, for whatever reason, that is also so unique. You have this, you have this perspective. I'm, I'm excited for things that I haven't experienced in life yet because I think I'm going to stumble into these problems that I want to solve for myself and for other people. Like what it made me think is, you know, you look at the flow apps that were created by guys and they are period trackers that men spotted a niche or like a white space and created this huge business from it.

36:16My point is like be the woman that spots an opportunity and don't just because you're 55 think that you're not in a position to start a really incredible business. 100%. That's serving an audience that maybe doesn't have what they need. Totally. There would have been so many people who looked at the beauty space and I for sure have felt like there's just all these brands popping up left right and center in the beauty space if you zoom out and you look at total addressable market which every investor asks you about you know like how big is your term it's basically the idea of who do you think you can sell to when we were raising capital a lot of people were saying well there's all these competitors it's like we're creating something for half of the population you know financial knowledge there's three other people doing it it's not that big a deal look at the beauty space it's so oversaturated if you were to come up with an idea targeting a generation that has so much more money to spend there's so few competitors you actually could I mean raising capital for this I'm not saying would be easy but it's just a really good reminder in the same way we follow shape or we become these like we follow what everyone else is doing with investing yeah the same with business ideas you have a unique perspective start like zooming out a little bit I feel like we are beginning to see more I mean one we're seeing more women-led businesses en masse which is great but we're seeing more women-led businesses catering to typically underserved audiences have you seen other examples of businesses that kind of similar to this are tackling kind of age-old problems women that just have gone so underserved for so long I was thinking about this and looking into you know why do we sell beauty products to such a young audience why do we then have people using those products that, as you say, look 15, and zoomed out and was thinking, gosh, what are the opportunities that are in this space?

38:05And I came across a stat that I thought was just like quite baffling, that the commercial opportunity within perimenopause and menopause was valued at$231 billion. Billion? As in with a B? $24 billion. $231 billion. What? And that's across so many different categories within it. Like, I've not experienced menopause or perimenopause and I also don't have friends that I've spoken to about this what I feel is starting to happen I don't have a specific example of like one business or businesses and maybe we're at the forefront of this and this will take you know 50 years to actually come into fruition but I feel as though we've now started talking about about money and investing and how women need to take control of their finances more women are now working higher earners than men like that that's all happening we're then investing in businesses we're realizing there's all these gaps in in all different generations um in all different spaces because there's been such a lack of female founders and then you know what we're doing with the fund we're investing in businesses that are high leadership teams or founded by women you know once we have more women starting to think about these opportunities or look around them and spot opportunities create businesses that flywheel will be so impressive because you'll have women that have their own money to invest in businesses that are started by women that are serving women you know we haven't been in that position before I mean that's just like one stat like but over 200 billion dollars to me if I was in that space and I knew what I was like I had different I don't know whether it's like hot flushes or I was struggling to sleep whatever rather than creating more collagen products or more retinol products or more stopping getting older products I would be trying to think about what would make my life more comfortable what i actually need right now that i can't currently buy or that or the what's available to me is deeply unsexy and makes me feel fucking geriatric exactly when actually what i'm going through is really normal and yeah i recently actually saw a new i think it's a skincare brand that was specifically targeted at mothers with like really sexy packaging great branding and i mean i just saw it kind of through a bit of a doom scroll but i saw it advertised and then just read a little bit about it it was like for so long products that have been focused or like advertised to newish mothers have felt kind of quite like surgical almost like just really deeply unsexy whereas this brand has come in being like sorry you haven't like lost your old identity you haven't like suddenly become this like you know dispensable old like past your use by date exactly you haven't passed a use by date you actually still feel good and totally and here's a brand that meets you where you're at And I think that's the opportunity that we're really discussing here is, you know, wanting to see more brands like this beauty brand, which are meeting women at every stage of their life where they're at.

40:58And the best people to create those brands are women who themselves have firsthand experience of the problems that we face at each point in our kind of various life cycles. I don't know if you've heard of this terminology. I actually hadn't. But the sandwich generation, have you heard of that? So it's basically saying that Gen X women are at the peak of their earning and spending years, but they're nicknamed the sandwich generation because they're often having to care for millennials and Gen Z children as well as taking care of their parents and the boomer generation. So as a result, a lot of their spending decisions are spanning all these different generations.

41:36You know, it's like, what do I buy for my grandchild? Or what am I buying for my daughter? And what am I buying for my, you know? And they have the most money. So it's just like such an exciting place for innovation around all sorts of categories, like tech, healthcare, groceries, beauty. Like I think in general, if you are looking around feeling a bit stuck or you're thinking you don't have what it is that you need, if you can start to put a lens on of firstly, like does this exist and can I find it somewhere? if not honestly start researching into whether or not you can create it and one thing just to add to that is we started this conversation talking about how a lot of beauty brands have ended up targeting young audiences because young audiences are online so much and so a lot of the kind of social media first advertorial has been targeting young people because that's where young people mostly are but I also just looked up more and more older people are also online now also using social media with a greater frequency with me which means for brands including new brands where socials is a kind of obvious place to start when you're advertising your audience is increasingly there too so it's not just you know gen z and millennials scrolling away don't worry meta has successfully captured the attention of older generations as well and there was a recent yougov poll which found that more than 50 of adults age 55 and older use social media at least once a week with many reporting frequent smartphone scrolling and digital engagement i mean if my parents had anything to go by my dad is addicted i'm so glad we brought this up my dad is addicted so addicted to his phone i couldn't believe it however if you're a entrepreneur looking to target people it's worth like just know they're all on there they're all online now so there's also there's no excuse your audience is online and they need your products so just go out there and create them Yeah, yeah, yeah.

43:30It's my takeaway from that story. But it'll be really interesting to see. So Sarah Creel, her beauty brand going back to the start, has just launched in the UK after a very successful two years in the States. So it'll be interesting to see how the brand is received, how it does here. Look, if anyone listening is, you know, 40 plus and can't access these beauty products and you want to place an order, send it to me in London. I will do a giant suitcase worth of makeup haul back to New Zealand. I'm going back for summer if anyone needs me to bring it back. The Curve Women. I will do it for you. You are going to absolutely regret promising that, Sophie.

44:05I don't know. I'm like... Sorry, when you're at the airport and you are sweating profusely because you have this ginormous overweight suitcase filled with... Makeup's light. Maybe don't go for foundation. Go for like eyeliners. Go for light. Just have a suitcase of eyeliners. You're going to get stopped in search. It will look suspicious. It will look real suspicious. Like this is some sort of illicit trading of eyeliners. maybe someone in Australasia needs to just create this business then yeah or should just take a hint listen look at how far she's moving she'll be there if Emma works in the beauty space I would just like jump on this I'd be doing a little I love that it felt like such a kind of galvanizing piece to read that was a reminder I think for both of us that the best is yet to come the best is yet to come someone said the other day your 40s are your best yet and I thought I can't bloody wait and I'm so glad I haven't done yet I heard that about 50 so listen oh brilliant brilliant thank you so much Emma and for anyone who would like to read your book let's promote it again you mentioned my book The Reclamation of My Body it is out now and actually it really speaks to a lot of what we've been talking about just now it talks about how women have historically been disconnected from our bodies we've been kind of shamed about our desires our sexual needs and wants and it's a book about how we reclaim our desires how we reconnect with our bodies in order to live lives because we can be sexy and feel lots of pleasure into our 30s, 40s, 50s.

45:27I plan on it in my 80s. Aided, no doubt, by my book. Yeah. Have a read. It's out in Australia and New Zealand. Yes. Okay, we'll link it in the podcast show notes. Amazing. And we will see you on Friday for... Oh, so exciting, Emma. Sorry. That was probably sound like an orangutan through your microphone. Friday's episode, we're talking about Labgron versus natural diamonds. It's a really funny episode. Can I cast my vote? Yeah. Labgron all the way. Oh, really? Interesting. I'm looking at a Labgron engagement ring for myself. Okay, love that. the size that I can get for a lab grown custom made female founded jewellery brand ring is like a hundred times bigger than what I'd get if I've got real diamond and listen I'm more is more is more is more oh I love that so I'm all lab grown where do you start?

46:11well you'll have to listen to this episode oh listen I'll be tuning in on Friday I cannot wait as I peruse yeah no I loved this conversation my mind has changed a lot on this since researching and then talking about it, but you'll have to listen. Oh my gosh, well, I will tune in. I can't wait. Bye, Sophie. Bye. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Curve. Feel free to leave a comment to let us know what you thought. We always love hearing your feedback. New episodes are out Monday, Wednesday and Friday. So make sure you're subscribed to be notified whenever a new episode drops.

46:41In the meantime, we're around on social so you can find all the links in the show notes. Hope you have a great week and we will see you for the next episode. Okay, quickly, The Curve was created to empower and educate you about investing, but we are not financial advisors. Our platform exists for educational purposes only and it doesn't provide personalized investing advice for your individual needs and should not be relied upon to make an investment or financial decision. And always remember to do your own research before making any investment or financial decision. We're here for any knowledge and support you need but the final call is always yours.

47:12And thanks for being here. You got this. Yeah, we know you got this.