From NOON to night ☀️🌙

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From NOON to night ☀️🌙

Focus, chill, sleep, repeat

Grow to Market

May 26, 2026

Happy Tuesday. This week, we’re sharing:

How a creative director and two scientists built the supplement section’s best-looking, best-working brand
Whimsy is the new wellness, beverage as snack, a China mall’s viral eating contest
A quick poll 👇

If there's something missing from the list, just reply or drop a comment. Thank you!

Meet Jane Kate Wong, CEO and co-founder of NOON, a cognitive wellness brand where neuroscience meets plant science.

Jane was a creative director at a global design consultancy in New York. Fun job, interesting work, demanding hours.

Then she hit a wall. Her doctor’s solution was two weeks of steroids. Hard pass.

That sent her down a path of adaptogens, nootropics, and a supplement aisle full of products that looked clinical and performed worse.

Together with naturopathic physician Dr. Julie Hwang and neuroscientist Dr. Christine Wong, she built the formulas from scratch. Then designed a holistic brand to match.

Eighteen months in, NOON sold over 19,000 units its first year, has customers reordering as many as six times, and just landed in 878 Target doors nationwide.

00:11 - The minds behind NOON
03:11 - This actually works, this is shockingly good
07:17 - Our whole thing is helping people find their best baseline
11:04 - Sleep is our bestseller by 20%
14:31 - Going into 878 Target doors
18:52 - People order at least 5-6 times
21:42 - Do less, but make it more impactful

$250K: Total investment, self-funded and friends and family
19,000+: Units sold in year one (exceeding their first run)
878: Target doors for their nationwide launch

Format is the first thing a customer experiences. NOON started as a tincture. Bioavailable, effective, and deeply confusing. How many drops? On the tongue or under it? The brief for their gummy came from everything the tincture wasn’t: fun, shareable, low barrier to trial. “Everyone knows what a gummy is. You don’t need to give them more education.” The product that’s easiest to use is the one people will use.

Build margin in from day one. You’ll need it. NOON targeted mid-80% gross margin on DTC from day one. A four-month lead time, shipments from Asia, a 30% tariff. None of that is unusual. But all of it erodes margin fast… and it compounds. “Starting with a good margin is very important because it just goes downhill from there.”

Experience > explanation. Try explaining functional mushrooms and it falls on dead ears. Instead, NOON showed up in places where the product could be experienced: outside the sauna at Othership, sample kits at Pop-Up Grocer, a corner at Remedy Place. The goal wasn’t to educate. It was to become part of someone’s routine. Once you have that, no explanation’s needed.

Do less, but make it count. Year one is ‘yes’ to everything: every event, every retailer, every opportunity. And that’s great. You’re testing the market and collecting data. But you can’t move if you’re spread across 40 things at once. Year two is learning from that and going deeper on the two or three things that worked.

Every CPG company is a media company. “If I were to redo this, I’d do the whole build-in-public thing a lot sooner,” Jane says. “’Build and they will come’ doesn’t happen anymore. There are too many products on the market.” What’s your story? Why are you the best person to create this product?

Market signal → People don’t come back because of product. They come back because of habit. Brands with retention figured out a moment, a format, a routine that makes repurchase automatic.

The routine is the product

Jane spent two years figuring out how to make NOON stand out in market. Here’s what she discovered:

Moment: Is it attached to something they already do? If they have to create a new behavior, most won’t.
Format: Is it the most frictionless version? People come back to the easiest option, not always the best one.
Delight: Is it something they look forward to? Things like taste, texture, packaging make the experience worth repeating.
Price: If they have to think twice about the price, the habit breaks. Find their repeat purchase ceiling.
Shareability: Do they tell anyone about your product? Word of mouth is retention’s compounding interest.

Meta overbilled you last month. You just don’t know it yet.

This week’s partner Dash.fi audited $20M in ad spend and found 5-33% in billing discrepancies across the board. Misallocated budgets, inflated metrics, out-of-geo ads you paid for that never reached your customer.

To put it into perspective, if you’re spending $50k/month, that’s up to $15k gone. Every single month.

Most founders find out too late. Or never.

Dash.fi catches it automatically. Flags every discrepancy, recovers the difference, and gives you 3% back on every ad dollar on top.

This isn’t a better credit card. It’s a margin recovery tool that happens to be a credit card. See what Dash.fi recovers for you.

Get a free 5-minute demo

Brami raises $33M in Series B: The two-ingredient brand is the fastest-growing pasta in the U.S.

Gen Z no longer shops by aisle: When mood, need, and occasion replace snacks, meals, and beverages.

Beverage as snack? For consumers who “snack” on beverages, 46% pick soft drinks, 32% sip fruit juice, 26% reach for coffee, and 15% pour a glass of milk.

Most frequent shopper: Men shop more frequently than women (1.6 trips a week vs 1.4) and Gen Z outpaces millennials (6.7 trips a month vs 6.1)

Whimsy is the new wellness: “I got this really cute coffee machine, made little sprinkles and all these things that were just for me.

Vote for a farmer. The 2026 Friend of a Farmer Choice Awards are open through May 29, 12:00pm EST. Your vote helps direct $1,000 grants to farmers.

Chinese mall turns secret classroom snacking into viral eating contest: That’s all.