The Business of Fashion Podcast

Mona Kattan has been collecting fragrances for most of her life. That obsession eventually became Kayali — a fragrance brand she built inside Huda Beauty, the global cosmetics company she co-founded with her sister Huda Kattan.

In 2020, something shifted. Mona entered therapy and uncovered a pattern that ran through her entire entrepreneurial journey: she had never built anything entirely on her own. She began to ask herself what it would mean to do something, fully, by herself.

“I am a very collaborative person, but I don’t want to sacrifice my vision,” she says. “Sometimes, in a partnership … having to move both feet in the same direction doesn’t really work if you’re not able to decide on your own. That’s where I realised that if I want Kayali to survive and thrive, I need to create my own path.”

That path was made possible through a complex corporate carve-out that separated Kayali from the Huda Beauty group and brought in General Atlantic in as Kayali's new backer.

Mona joined BoF founder and CEO Imran Amed on stage at The Business of Beauty Global Forum in Napa Valley, California, to pull back the curtain on that corporate split and dive deeper into the realities of building a brand within a multi-stakeholder ecosystem.

Key Insights:
The Operational Friction of Brand Incubation: While incubating Kayali within Huda Beauty provided crucial baseline resources, it created structural constraints. Kattan notes that operating within a shared family framework required sacrificing her distinct product and brand vision to ensure consensus across the broader group.

Structuring a Mutual Corporate Carve-Out: The operational split was catalysed by the need to solve for private equity backer TSG’s eventual fund exit. Mona engineered a simultaneous solution: carving out Kayali into an independent entity with new investment, while allowing her sister Huda to take the flagship cosmetic business private again.

Selecting Private Equity for Long-Term Value: As part of the carve-out, Mona secured backing from General Atlantic, intentionally prioritising non-monetary board dynamics over pure valuation maximisation. Key operational criteria included deal terms that preserved creative freedom, patient alignment on the long-term health of the brand, and seasoned founder-friendly board members.

The Discipline of Multi-Year Operational Planning: To counteract the short-term pressures of the beauty landscape, Mona emphasises the necessity of maintaining a rolling five-to-eight-year strategic timeline. This framework includes a definitive checkpoint scheduled for Q1 2028 to evaluate structural options between an initial public offering (IPO), a sale to a strategic conglomerate, or raising further capital.

Additional Resources:
Controlling Your Destiny: How Mona Kattan Reclaimed Her Voice | BoF
Mona Kattan Is Enjoying Her Freedom | BoF
The Top Trends That Will Define Beauty in 2026 | BoF

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The 2026 World Cup marked an unprecedented milestone for global football, expanding to 48 teams playing over 100 matches across the US, Canada and Mexico. In this special episode of The Debrief, Nike’s vice president of global brand management Helena Thornton joins BoFsenior correspondent Sheena Butler-Young and sports and fashion correspondent Mike Syke to discuss the strategy behind the brand's World Cup campaign, the expansive relationship between football, culture and commerce and what the tournament means at a pivotal moment for Nike.

The episode examines how Nike approached the sport's biggest stage, from the creative thinking behind its 'Rip the Script' campaign — which brought together elite athletes, pop culture figures and cinematic storytelling — to the challenge of building campaigns that resonate in an increasingly fragmented media landscape. Thornton also reflects on how the World Cup fits into Nike's broader brand strategy as the company works to regain brand heat.

Key Insights:
Breaking beyond football fans requires becoming part of the broader cultural conversation. As brands compete for attention with creators, entertainment and other cultural forces, Nike designed its World Cup campaign to extend beyond the sport itself, bringing together elite footballers, athletes and cultural figures to appeal to both dedicated supporters and more casual fans. “Including the sort of that celebrity class alongside the elite footballers and the athletes, because I think that speaks to the more casual fan,” Thornton says.

Long-term community building matters more than tournament marketing alone. Thornton says major sporting events should serve as a catalyst for brand storytelling and momentum rather than the entirety of the brand’s strategy. You don't ever just want to be the shiny object that drops in for the weeks of the tournament and then you leave,” she says. “We really want to make sure that people have unbelievable access to the game... that moment actually really ignites this huge love of the game.” Grassroots investments, like Nike's ‘Toma’ platform, the street football movement, help build deeper consumer relationships than short-lived tournament campaigns.

Nike built its campaign around athlete instinct rather than a traditional sports marketing playbook. Rather than relying on rigid creative formulas, the brand grounded 'Rip the Script' in conversations with professional footballers, embracing emotion, authenticity and intuition as the foundation for the campaign. “We spoke to hundreds of footballers who kept telling us the same thing,” Thornton explains. “They were … just a bit sick of people telling [them] what to do... ‘we just wanna trust our gut.’”

Football creates moments of connection that few cultural platforms can match. The World Cup's global reach made it more than just a sporting event, creating a shared cultural moment at a time when people were looking for connection and optimism. “There's just a passion about the sport…there is just this larger unity right now that I'm seeing from people,” Thornton says. “I think the world just needed this thing to bring us all together and there is no other sport other than football really that truly, truly is the global game.”

Innovation remains central to Nike's broader turnaround strategy. While campaigns like 'Rip the Script' are among the brand's most visible expressions, Thornton says major sporting moments bring together teams across the company to think beyond marketing. “We sit down across all of the different departments at Nike and we talk about these big sports moments, ‘what do we wanna do to totally change the industry again? What is the athlete problem that we're solving for? What innovation can we push to allow an athlete to do something they never even believed that was possible?’”

Additional Resources:
Nike and Adidas Are Taking the World Cup to the Street
The Strategy Behind Nike’s Colossal World Cup Bet
Nike’s World Cup Takeover Is Off to a Hot Start

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The boundaries between technology, wellness and luxury are blurring. Wearable technology is no longer just about tracking steps; it has become a sophisticated tool for lifestyle optimisation, personal health intelligence and a subtle statement of identity. Now, there are more devices than ever to help us in this pursuit, and at the cutting edge is Oura.

Under the leadership of CEO Tom Hale, who joined the company in 2022, Oura has grown from $220 million in annual revenue to $1 billion last year, achieving an $11 billion valuation. Last month, Oura filed for an IPO that could be one of the most significant public market tests for consumer health technology so far.

“We are a health intelligence platform that will redefine the future of healthcare,” says Hale. “Everyone's already got a supercomputer … on their body. There should be a machine intelligence that is personalised and customised to that individual, and a large physiological model that is making predictions about health outcomes in the short term and the long term based on your ground truth of biometrics.”

Hale joined BoF founder and CEO Imran Amed on stage in Napa Valley, California, during The Business of Beauty Global Forum 2026 to unpack how the company plans to build a “large physiological model” to redefine the future of the global healthcare and wellness landscapes.

Key Insights:
The Drivers of the Inflexion Point: Oura has sold 5.5 million rings as of last year, with roughly half of those sales occurring in the last 12 months. Tom Hale attributes this growth acceleration to three strategic moves: shifting focus toward underserved use cases in women’s health (which flipped the customer base to mostly female), entering physical retail to bypass the slow shipping-based sizing process, and becoming the first wearable eligible for pre-tax employee funds via HSA/FSA accounts.

Hardware as an Onboarding Mechanism: Rather than viewing itself through the lens of jewelry or fashion, Oura defines its core commercial category as long-term behavior modification. Within this model, the physical ring functions primarily as the hardware mechanism that drives value and engagement for its subscription service.

Subscription Revenue Benchmarks: Operating on a value-to-price framework tied to a £6-a-month membership cost, Oura achieves an 80 percent retention rate at year one and an increased 85 percent retention rate at years two and three. Factual benchmarks reveal this trajectory outperforms major content subscription platforms like Netflix and Spotify at the same milestones.

Defending Market Share with IP and Clinical Credibility: To maintain its competitive advantage against new market entrants and lower-priced alternatives, Oura relies heavily on an intellectual property moat. Furthermore, the brand protects its premium position through scientific validation, noting that 11 percent of its current ring wearers are medical professionals.

Additional Resources:
Building the World of Health Tech: Oura’s Tom Hale on its IPO and What’s Next
Can Oura Become a Forever Company? | BoF

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For more than a decade, activewear shoppers largely looked to Lululemon and Nike. But as the post-pandemic boom cools and growth becomes harder to find, a new crop of brands is gaining traction.

Smaller labels like SetActive, 437 and Oner Active aren’t reinventing activewear. They’re winning customers through social media, creator-led marketing and a deep understanding of today’s fitness culture where consumers move fluidly through workouts like pilates, Hyrox and tennis on any given week.

In this episode of The Debrief Podcast, retail editor Cathaleen Chen joins senior correspondent Sheena Butler-Young to discuss why these newer brands are resonating, whether their momentum is sustainable, and what their success reveals about the challenges facing industry leaders Nike and Lululemon.

Key Insights:
The era of Lululemon as a status symbol may be ending. "Lululemon in the past two decades effectively cornered the market on activewear as a status symbol," Chen says. "I do think the era of Lululemon as a status symbol is ending ... if you're not going to be a status symbol, what will you be?"

Consumers are craving something new. The rise of brands like Set Active, 437 and Oner Active is being driven less by breakthrough product innovation than by a broader desire for novelty. "The answer that I got overwhelmingly from my reporting is that, honestly, we are just in this moment of desire for newness," Chen says. "People were like, ‘okay, I have Lululemon in my closet, what's next?’"

Founder-led social media is helping challengers compete. Rather than relying on big marketing budgets, many emerging brands are building audiences through creator-style content — from behind-the-scenes glimpses into product development to founders who function as influencers in their own right. "What they have done incredibly well is build organic followings on social media and be able to capitalise on certain TikTok trends," Chen says. “They have the benefits of … the founder coming in every day, trying on the products herself... it makes a big difference in being visible to the customer”.

Activewear is entering its own version of the indie beauty era. As consumers build wardrobes around multiple activities rather than a single sport, the category is becoming more fragmented and open to new players. "What's happening in activewear is very similar to what happened in beauty a few years ago," Chen says. "Where the category was dominated by a handful of brands … but we reached this inflection point where people want something that feels new."

Additional Resources:
The TikTok-Savvy Activewear Brands Stealing Market Share | BoF Professional
Why Every Fashion Brand Thinks It’s a Sportswear Label Now | BoF Professional
The Reign of Leggings Is Over. What’s Next? | BoF Professional

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Fashion’s book obsession is no longer subtle. What started as the occasional literary reference has become a broader wave of book clubs, salon-style events, campaign imagery and products designed to signal that a brand — and its customer — has cultural depth. It’s all happening as reading rates are declining, but the image of the reader has never looked more fashionable.

This week on The Debrief, BoF reporters Haley Crawford and Shayeza Walid explain how books became fashion’s latest flex, and when the trend starts to look less like culture and more like marketing.

Key Insights:


Books have become fashion’s new status symbol: Literature has always inspired fashion, but both reporters argue the relationship has become far more explicit. “We felt like books were being productised by fashion itself,” says Walid. In a world saturated by digital content, books now function as markers of cultural literacy and intellectual identity. As Crawford puts it: “You actually have to take the time to read a book from cover to cover. Fewer people are doing that today, so it is more of a flex to have read the book and actually understand the reference.”

TikTok is fueling an analogue revival: Ironically, fashion’s literary turn is being accelerated by social media. Online subcommunities like BookTok have transformed reading into a visible identity and community marker for younger consumers. “Social media, the stores, the products you’re buying and this analogue signalling, are all coming together,” says Walid. “ I don’t think this is happening in a silo. I think it’s very interconnected to other forms of analogue connection that people are finding nowadays.”

Not every literary collaboration resonates equally: Both reporters argue that the strongest examples are those rooted in genuine engagement with literature rather than surface-level branding. Crawford points to Prada’s collaborations with authors and literary scholars as examples of brands building deeper cultural worlds. Walid highlights Chanel’s funding of a library at a Shanghai art museum. “It was actually creating or funding something which allowed people to engage with books and literature,” she says.

The trend risks losing its cultural power: Fashion using books as a cultural signal is likely to lose some potency if every brand adopts the same strategy. “The ones that have been doing it for quite some time will continue to do so. But those that have maybe slapped a book name on a T-shirt or created a book tote might see less success,” says Crawford. “The second consumers start noticing the corporatisation of this trend, it is going to start to become stale,” adds Walid.

Additional Resources:
How Books Became Fashion’s Favourite Flex | BoF
When Taste Is All Over TikTok | BoF

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