Two Geeks + a Bench
Annie Graham is a Cosmetic Scientist and Co-Founder of Atomic Pom Labs. She formulates skincare, haircare and Body Care. Annie is an ingredient geek and texture whiz.
Dr. Diego Lapetina is a designer, digital genius and Co-Founder of Atomic Pom Labs. With a Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Psychiatry he has deep insight into branding and design. His focus is in the beauty niche where he designs for successful brands and founders.
Episodes
12 episodes
The Chatbot Has Never Heard of You: What 135 AI Experiments Reveal About Getting Cited by ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini
Your customers stopped Googling you. They're asking ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini instead — "what's the best clean moisturizer for sensitive skin?" — and the AI answers in full sentences, with brand recommendations. If your brand isn't in that an...
The Psychology of the Sale: Why Sequence Matters More Than Your Product
Why do great products fail?Let's look at James. He spent 11 months pouring his life into a product launch. By every internal metric, he nailed it. The software was genuinely better, faster, and easier to deploy than anything else in its ...
The $50,000,000 Blindspot: Why Smart Brands Go Invisible
Why do brilliant marketing strategies, beautiful visual identities, and tight investor pitches routinely fail? In this episode, we pull back the curtain on a truth that nobody in the branding industry likes to admit out loud: consumers don’t ch...
What Is Cognitive Branding? The Psychology Behind Why Your Brain Chooses One Brand Over Another
Have you ever spent six figures and eighteen months on a stunning new visual identity, only to see zero impact on your conversion rates? The branding industry has been solving the wrong problem for fifty years. By treating brand identity as a d...
Most Turnkey Providers Are Factories in Disguise. The Turnkey Partner That's Actually on Your Side Is a Different Animal Entirely.
Turnkey partners that own manufacturing assets have a built-in conflict of interest — their revenue depends on filling production lines, not on your brand's outcome. Three recommendations reveal the bias: arbitrary MOQ pressure, format lock-in ...
Starting a Skincare Brand? Here’s the Safest Way for First-Time Founders to Launch.
67% of beauty startups fail in their first year — not from bad branding, but from signing the wrong manufacturing contract before they understood what they were agreeing to. In this episode, we unpack why first-time skincare founders keep falli...
The Content Stack: Why Most Brands Burn Money on Ads—and the Framework That Fixes It
Marcus had everything a founder dreams of: a real skincare brand, loyal customers, and $5,000 to finally scale. He hired a freelancer. Ran Meta ads. And watched it all evaporate in 11 days—with just 11 sales to show for it.He blamed the...
Texture as Branding: How to apply Sensory Science
Your logo isn't your brand—your texture is. In this episode, we unpack the neuroscience behind why touch bypasses rational evaluation and goes straight to the brain's emotional center, creating brand memories that no visual identity can match. ...
The Neural Architecture of Beauty
Why do some beauty brands command a premium while others—with better formulas—fail on the shelf? This episode dives into the "Neuro-Design" of packaging, moving beyond simple aesthetics to explore the biological data that dictates consumer trus...
And Another Brand Dies
The beauty industry is very good at launching brands. It's terrible at keeping them alive. In this episode, Diego breaks down why the indie beauty playbook is structurally broken — and why chasing trend is not a legacy strategy. From the wa...
