Newsletter · · Ashutosh Agarwal

Thrive Causemetics, Banza and Beyond Yoga Founders on Building Brands Slowly - Brand Voices - Week of September 21, 2026

Brand Voices for the week of September 21, 2026: consumer founders from Thrive Causemetics, Banza, Beyond Yoga and Parker Thatch on how their brands were built on podcasts this week, plus the consumer read on peak functional food, a 2.2 billion dollar CPG valuation, Beyond Meat's slide, Starbucks scarcity drops and Airbnb's housing fund.

Brand Voices

Week of September 21, 2026: The $150 Days Behind the Billion-Dollar Shelf

This week's consumer founders built beauty, pasta, and apparel brands one dollar at a time, even as the grocery aisle races toward "peak protein" and overnight $2 billion valuations. Here's what the people who actually built these brands said on podcasts this week.

The throughline this week was patience. Four founders sat down to tell the long, unglamorous version of how their brands got built: the dry-cleaner sewing machine, the wine bottle used as a rolling pin, the $150 sales days that felt like a win. It's a striking contrast to what's happening on the shelf right now, where a two-year-old company just raised money at a $2.2 billion valuation and every legacy brand from Folgers to Optimum Nutrition is bolting "protein" onto whatever it already sells.

In Their Own Words

Karissa Bodnar, Founder & CEO, Thrive Causemetics

Bodnar went deep on How I Built This about turning a purpose-driven side hustle into a beauty brand she now describes as a $150 million business, and the years of near-zero sales it took to get there.

The origin: while working in product development at L'Oréal, her college friend died of cancer at 24. That pushed her to build a cosmetics company with a give-back mission (the name is a play on "cause-metics"). Her first product wasn't lipstick. It was false lashes engineered for people who'd lost their natural lashes, plus a latex- and paraben-free waterproof lash adhesive she developed working with oncologists and ophthalmologists because chemo patients "absolutely cannot have latex on their skin."

The hard numbers she shared:

  • She poured in about $100,000 of her life savings and put roughly $20,000 into the first production run, funding the rest by working a full-time job at Bulletproof Coffee. "I wiped out my entire life savings."
  • It took three years to develop a lash adhesive that actually worked.
  • For years sales were tiny and online-only. Then in November 2016, right before Black Friday, an ad she filmed on her iPhone for a waterproof eyeliner went viral off the back of customers commenting. Sales went "from zero to 30 million in a matter of months"; within seven days she went from a $5,000 day to a $100,000 day, with no employees. Friends, family and local student groups packed orders until midnight.
  • The most telling part for anyone watching the funding frenzy: Thrive was profitable and past $30 million in revenue before she ever took outside capital. When she finally did, she wrote her own term sheet with a lawyer and kept majority ownership and control: "Nobody can tell me if we're going to sell the company."

Her line on operating with no money and no time: "Scarcity drives focus."

(How I Built This with Guy Raz, "Thrive Causemetics: Karissa Bodnar. How $150 a Day in Sales Turned into a $150 Million Beauty Business with a Mission," Sep 14, 2026)

Brian Rudolph, Co-founder, Banza

Rudolph told the story of building Banza, the first-ever chickpea pasta, from apartment experiments into a brand now sold in more than 25,000 stores, and the reputation scare that nearly undid it.

It started around 2013 with a personal problem: he was sensitive to wheat and, after cutting it out on his dad's advice, found his chronic sinus issues cleared up. Working as the first employee at a Detroit tech startup through Andrew Yang's Venture for America fellowship, he started tinkering with chickpea flour at home. His inspiration was explicitly a brand on this newsletter's radar: "I want to do in pasta what Chobani did in yogurt. That would be the dream."

The scrappy details:

  • His first piece of equipment ("my first CapEx") was a ~$30 Atlas hand-crank pasta maker off Amazon. Before that he was rolling dough with a wine bottle and cutting it with a knife, waking up at 5 a.m. before work "blasting country music" while his roommate thought he was crazy. Chickpea flour and binders all came from Bob's Red Mill.
  • He raised $17,000 on the crowdfunding site RocketHub, which unlocked another $10,000 from Venture for America.
  • A spot on the CNBC show Restaurant Startup landed him an investment from Joe Bastianich (the restaurateur behind Eataly), who "ripped open a box of pasta and threw the pasta everywhere on the table" during their negotiation. That got Banza into Eataly and the Midwest grocery chain Meijer.
  • Within five years of launch, Banza was the fastest-growing pasta brand in the U.S.

The gut-punch he opened the episode with: about ten years in, a health scare/PR crisis hit and sales fell 30% week over week. What stuck with him wasn't the number. It was a customer who called him crying because she was scared to feed it to her kids: "my identity had been wrapped up in this idea of I create healthy food… and to then get messages from people on the internet who don't even know you that are accusing you of [trying to kill them]."

(How I Built This with Guy Raz, "Banza: Brian Rudolph. The Chickpea Pasta That Nearly Turned to Mush," Sep 21, 2026)

Michelle Wahler, Co-founder & former CEO, Beyond Yoga

Wahler returned to How I Built This as a guest advisor, and she used the platform to push back hard on the standard startup playbook. She co-founded the women's activewear brand Beyond Yoga, grew it slowly for about a decade through yoga studios and department stores, sold it to Levi's for roughly $400 million in 2021, and stepped away in 2024. She now runs an investing and mentorship platform called Quince Hill and teaches a class on company culture at USC.

Asked what common startup advice is "a bunch of BS," she didn't hesitate:

  • "I don't think you need to raise money. And I feel like everybody tells you that you have to… a lot of people come in with an exit plan and you don't need to do that." Her point: bringing on investors changes what a company optimizes for. "You don't have to be the next Anthropic and you probably won't be. But there's nothing wrong with building a smaller, sustainable business that gives you the freedom to live your life."
  • Her operating mantras for founders: "under promise and over deliver," and win back a lost customer or partner one at a time: "don't reach out to the second one until you've won the first one back."
  • Her hardest-won lesson from 20-plus years of building: focus. Her husband and business partner used to tell her not to chase the next idea until Beyond Yoga owned its core one. "What you say no to is almost more important than what you say yes to. So don't forget to say no."

(How I Built This with Guy Raz, "Advice Line with Michelle Wahler of Beyond Yoga," Sep 17, 2026)

Irene Chen, Co-founder, Parker Thatch

Chen walked through the very long, very pivot-heavy road to building the customizable leather-goods label Parker Thatch, on the founder-story show Dear FoundHer.

The brand started around 2001 as an e-stationery idea, essentially Paperless Post before that existed, which was "very too early." When nobody would pay for digital cards, she pivoted to physical stationery, then to home goods, then finally to bags in 2009 when her husband figured out how to print and customize on cotton.

How the first bag actually got made, with no funding:

  • The first sample and pattern were cut by the woman who hemmed her pants at the local dry cleaner (a Fashion Institute graduate). The fabric was the heaviest canvas from Joann's, bought with a 50%-off coupon; the leather handles were strips cut at a saddle store. She made 10 bags, mailed them to magazine editors she'd cultivated for years, and landed in the holiday gift guides: "how you make your whole entire year" in a pre-social-media world.
  • A pivotal early customer was Kate Spade, who bought the canvas bag, became a friend, and told Chen to try it in leather, the change that "propelled our company forward as an actual handbag."
  • The brand was originally called IOMO, but "no one could pronounce" it; they renamed it Parker Thatch after her two kids so customers could actually spell it and find it.
  • Her deliberate strategy today: limited runs with small-capacity factories, so a customer's bag isn't the same one everyone else has. She argues people can feel the difference in something cut by hand: "humans have this innate connection with things that are made by a person."

(Dear FoundHer, "She Bootstrapped Her First Bag at a Dry Cleaner Before Getting Press," Sep 15, 2026)

Consumer Read

What this week's brand voices, and the CPG chatter around them, signal about the consumer:

1. "Peak function" is here, and even Folgers is chasing it. The clearest read comes from the CPG podcast Express Checkout, whose whole episode asked whether we've hit "peak function": protein, prebiotics, and "boosts" bolted onto everything. The evidence is piling up: Folgers is launching its first-ever functional instant coffees (protein, focus, boost with added B12 and prebiotics) in November; Optimum Nutrition put out a non-alcoholic beer with 10 grams of protein; and Thorne, just acquired by P&G for $3.8 billion, launched a "protein optimizer" supplement meant to help you digest your protein, which the hosts dubbed "supplements for your supplements." Their sharp take: when legacy players build these functions in-house instead of acquiring, it means function has gone so mass-market it's "just not sexy anymore." (Guy Raz made the same observation from the other side on the Banza episode: protein is now "in chips, snacks, bread, cereal, candy, ice cream, soda, even water.")

2. The money is still frothy at the top, and brutal in the middle. On the frothy end, Express Checkout flagged that David (Medici Brands), founded in 2024, just raised $250 million at a $2.2 billion valuation, on pace to be the fastest CPG company ever to cross $2 billion. On the brutal end, Beyond Meat has now posted six straight quarters of revenue decline, including a ~15% drop last quarter to its lowest total in seven years, and is facing a Nasdaq delisting threat. The hosts were sympathetic but blunt about its scattered new "Phytosphere" launches. It's a barbell consumer market: buzzy better-for-you newcomers raising at nosebleed prices while a first-mover that went mass-market gets left behind. (Note the contrast with the founders above, who mostly refused outside money entirely.)

3. Brands are turning the store into an event. Two data points on experiential retail and scarcity marketing: Starbucks, under CEO Brian Niccol, released a $40 limited-edition Snoopy glass this week that sold out almost instantly, hit the top of U.S. Google searches for 24 hours, and is being resold online for around $200. One shopper reportedly lined up at 2:15 a.m. for it (The Rundown). McDonald's has run the same "sneaker-drop" playbook with Grinch socks. The logic: manufacture FOMO so people have a reason to physically walk into the store and buy something while they're there.

4. Big consumer brands are playing offense on their soft spots. Airbnb, long cast as a villain in the housing-affordability debate, is committing $250 million to a "Housing Accelerator" that provides gap financing for affordable and mixed-income projects. Its first check was $6.4 million for ~200 units on a long-vacant Austin site (Rich Habits). CEO Brian Chesky's framing: "I've just lived in the crosshairs of the number one political issue in most major cities in America, and I can't stare at the problem for much longer without Airbnb trying to offer up some solutions." Meanwhile Liquid Death founder Mike Cessario went the opposite direction of his usual shock-marketing, teaming with spirits giant Sazerac on a deliberately tame canned sparkling wine called Mr. Fancy, a bet that a "boring," approachable brand can win now that everyone copies the outrageous playbook (Express Checkout).

Quote of the Week

"There were many days where we had no sales. Having a $150 revenue day, I felt like an absolute baller."

Karissa Bodnar, founder of Thrive Causemetics, on the years before her beauty brand went viral, How I Built This with Guy Raz (Sep 14, 2026)