How Find My Mood Began.

For most of my career, I worked in customer success — first across Asia, then Europe — watching how large companies decided which products, which partnerships, which people were worth their time.

The job taught me something nobody puts in a strategy deck: the companies that lasted weren't the ones that sold the most. They were the ones whose customers had chosen them on purpose, and kept choosing them, year after year, without needing to be convinced again.

Everyone else was just renting attention. A discount here, some urgency there, a constant push to buy one more thing. It worked, for a quarter. It rarely worked for a decade.

I started noticing the same pattern outside of work, in my own life. The things I actually loved — the ones I bought again without thinking twice, the ones I carried back from Korea for friends whether they'd asked or not — were never the ones anyone had talked me into. They'd simply earned it, quietly, over years.

That's when I understood what I actually wanted to build.

At the time, that felt like an odd thing to build a business around. Choosing better doesn't scale the way buying more does. It's slower. It asks more of everyone involved — the brand, the retailer, the person deciding what to bring into their life. But it's the only version of growth I've ever actually believed in.

So Find My Mood didn't begin as a plan to bring Korean brands to the UK. It began as a question I couldn't stop asking about almost everything — a product, a friendship, a purchase, a life:

Does this actually belong here?

That question is still the only one we use. It's why we turn down more brands than we take on. It's why the Journal exists at all. It's why "more" was never on the list of things we were trying to become.

We didn't set out to build a company around a question. It just turned out to be the only one worth building around — and, four years and a great many conversations later, it's still the one we come back to, no matter what's changed since.