Kindly do not forward. If there’s someone that you believe should be part of the Palette family, we’d love to be introduced.
Hi there,
Some of the most enduring consumer companies of the next decade are being built right now.
Why? Consumers are more selective. Attention is fragmented. Customer acquisition is expensive. Household budgets are under pressure. In markets like these, products don't win because they're well-funded. They win because people genuinely want them.
The companies breaking through today aren't benefiting from favorable conditions: they're earning their success by building products consumers can't easily replace. Tough markets reward discipline. Sharper positioning. Stronger retention. Capital efficiency. Operational leverage. These aren't nice-to-haves anymore; they're the foundations of enduring businesses.
History tells the same story. The best long-term companies are rarely built during easy times. Challenging markets strip away excess and reveal what actually matters: products customers return to, brands they recommend, and business models capable of compounding for years.
We're already seeing that discipline rewarded.
In the first half of this year alone, Unilever acquired Grüns for $1.2 billion just three years after launch after the company raised only $55 million. Danone acquired Huel for approximately €1 billion, with its founder still owning roughly half the business at exit. Church & Dwight acquired Miss Mouth's Messy Eater for $325 million despite virtually no outside capital. Advent acquired Salt & Stone for roughly $500 million. On the public markets, Once Upon a Farm debuted at a $724 million valuation and has continued to trade strongly, standing out at a time when many venture-backed consumer IPOs have struggled.
These outcomes matter not because of their size, but because of what they represent. The market is rewarding businesses with genuine consumer demand, strong unit economics, disciplined execution, and efficient growth. In other words, companies creating real value, not simply consuming capital with a pretty brand.
At the same time, AI is fundamentally changing the economics of company building. Today's founders can reach meaningful scale with smaller teams, lower burn, and dramatically greater leverage than any generation before them. The result is a new generation of consumer companies: technology-enabled, capital efficient, and resilient by design.
That's what excites us most about consumer today. The companies emerging now aren't making incremental improvements to existing categories. They're reimagining how people eat, shop, age, stay healthy, and live. And if history is any guide, many of tomorrow's defining consumer brands will trace their origins back to this exact moment.
Rana & Nina
**Kimba** is reimagining sleep through a novel combination of AI-personalized scent therapy, wearable data, and beautifully designed hardware, creating a system that measurably improves both sleep quality and how people feel when they wake up.
The company was inspired by founder Ben Fuxbruner’s own experience with severe insomnia following a combat injury. Rather than building another sleep supplement, pharmaceutical, or meditation app, Kimba takes a fundamentally different approach: delivering real-time scent interventions during sleep based on biometric data from wearables.
Why scent? It’s the only sense with a direct pathway to the limbic system: the part of the brain responsible for emotion, memory, and stress regulation. That gives Kimba a unique ability to influence sleep and mood without disrupting sleep itself.
The early results are compelling. Double-blind clinical studies and wearable-validated data have shown meaningful improvements across key sleep metrics, including sleep latency, total sleep time, REM sleep, and overall sleep efficiency. In practical terms, users fall asleep faster, sleep more deeply, and wake up feeling better, without pharmaceuticals, behavioral friction, or added effort.
But Kimba’s ambition extends far beyond sleep. The company is building what could become the world’s largest proprietary dataset on the relationship between scent and human performance, with future applications across focus, energy, stress management, recovery, and emotional wellbeing.