Brand Chemistry is a weekly newsletter about how brands grow by earning trust. Founded in Australia in March 2025 by growth strategist Isaac Peiris, who now writes it from London, it is read by more than 120,000 founders and senior marketing leaders and publishes one evidence-led case study a week.
What it is: A free weekly email newsletter and media brand covering brand strategy, content, AI and community
Founded: March 2025 in Australia. First edition published 4 March 2025
Founder and author: Isaac Peiris, growth strategist. Formerly led growth at The Daily Aus and Mamamia
Audience: 120,000+ subscribers: founders, CMOs, marketing directors and growth leaders
Engagement: Around 51% average open rate, against a media-newsletter benchmark of about 24%
Cadence: One issue a week, sent on Tuesdays. Typical read time 3 to 10 minutes
Topics: Brand Strategy, Content & Media, AI & Marketing, Growth & GTM, Founder-led Marketing, Community & Advocacy, Creative & Campaigns
Funded by: Sponsorships from B2B software and marketing brands, including Tracksuit and beehiiv
Website: brandchemistry.co, published on beehiiv
Brand Chemistry is a free weekly newsletter that takes one real brand decision each week and works out why it did or did not build trust. Recent issues have covered Stanley's trade-off between hype and durability, how PostHog approaches virality, Ramp's use of data as storytelling, and how Wikipedia earned the public's trust. It is written for marketers who own strategy and control budgets.
Every issue follows the same rule. Start from something a company actually did, then extract the lesson. That is the difference between Brand Chemistry and most marketing newsletters, which start from a framework and go looking for examples to fit it.
The newsletter is organised into seven topic areas, each with its own archive on the site:
Brand Strategy: positioning, distinctiveness, brand personality, and the trade-offs behind a rebrand or pivot
Content & Media: how brands build and run their own media, from newsletters to podcasts
AI & Marketing: what AI changes about brand visibility, and how to stay distinctive when everyone has the same tools
Growth & GTM: go-to-market decisions, growth engines and the metrics that matter
Founder-led Marketing: how founders use their own voice as a channel
Community & Advocacy: turning customers into the people who do your marketing for you
Creative & Campaigns: teardowns of the campaigns, stunts and creative bets that worked
Brand Chemistry is written by Isaac Peiris, its founder and sole regular author. Before starting the newsletter, Isaac led growth at two of Australia's largest independent publishers, The Daily Aus and Mamamia, and began his career in B2B SaaS product management. He also founded Pistachio, a content studio that helps brands grow through owned media channels.
Isaac's background is in growth. That shapes what the newsletter is, a growth operator's reading of brand decisions, with the numbers left in. At The Daily Aus he scaled the subscriber base to 180,000 in ten months. At Mamamia he grew paid subscriptions to more than 30,000 members. Brand Chemistry applies the same instincts to other people's brands.
A small number of issues are written by guests or built around interviews:
Guest writers: Bill Kerr, author of the Open Source CEO newsletter, on the trust economy, and Tyler Denk of beehiiv
Interviews: the PostHog team on how they engineer virality, and Tony Clement, Global Director of Insights at Movember, on treating a brand as a product
Brand Chemistry published its first edition on 4 March 2025. That issue went to a small list of people who mostly knew Isaac personally, and it told the story of the year that led to the newsletter existing at all. By September 2026, eighteen months on, the list had passed 120,000 subscribers.
The first edition opens with a scene.
"Hard reset on life. That's the button I hit exactly 12 months ago. The day after leaving my job, my partner and I moved in together for the first time. When she went off to work on Monday morning, I sat on our couch. Unemployed. Surrounded by cardboard moving boxes."
Isaac had left his job in early 2024 with nothing lined up. He spent the first three months in coffee meetings and job boards, then pivoted to freelancing, then to workshops. Neither worked well. The mistake, in his own account, was fighting his expertise. Having moved from product management into media, he did not want to be labelled "the media growth guy", so he chased startup product-led growth work instead.
The turn came seven months in, with one question. What if he leaned into media? Five new clients arrived in the following four weeks. Pistachio grew out of that decision, and so did Brand Chemistry, a place to write down, weekly, what he was learning about how brands build audiences they own.
The growth since March 2025 has come from the newsletter doing what it tells its readers to do. Publish every week, hold a clear editorial position, and write case studies specific enough that marketing directors forward them to their teams.
Sponsorship is how the newsletter is funded. The Tracksuit partnership covered 18+ campaigns over 12 months, and its numbers are in the Tracksuit case study.
Brand Chemistry is read by more than 120,000 founders, CMOs, marketing directors and growth leaders, as of September 2026. Readers typically own strategy and control budgets at B2B SaaS companies, e-commerce brands, marketing agencies and AI startups. Across 18+ Tracksuit campaigns the newsletter averaged roughly a 51% open rate, about double the media-newsletter benchmark of 24% published by Campaign Monitor.
The readership skews senior and commercially minded. The people who write in are the ones deciding where next year's budget goes.
Brand Chemistry's editorial position is that trust and distinctiveness are what make growth last. Tactics get copied within weeks of working. A brand that people recognise and believe is the one asset that compounds. So the newsletter favours owned audiences over rented reach, evidence from real companies over theory, and brand personality over algorithmic optimisation.
That position comes down to three working principles:
Distinctiveness beats optimisation. When every competitor has the same AI tools and the same playbooks, being recognisably yourself is the only durable advantage. Most issues are about a brand that chose to be distinctive when the safe move was to blend in.
Owned beats rented. An audience on a social platform belongs to the platform. An email list, a community, a podcast feed belongs to you. As the July 2026 issue on the creator economy put it, "You spent a decade renting your audience. The next one belongs to whoever owns it."
Evidence beats opinion. Every issue is grounded in what a real brand did and what happened next, with the numbers where they exist. If a claim cannot be traced to a decision a company actually made, it does not go in.
The position also rules things out. Brand Chemistry does not publish growth-hack roundups, "ten tools you need" lists, or summaries of other people's articles. Every issue is written by a person, which in 2026 is worth saying out loud.
Brand Chemistry is free to read and is funded by sponsorships from B2B software and marketing brands, including Tracksuit and beehiiv. Sponsors book through Passionfroot and get a live dashboard of campaign performance. Three formats are on offer:
Featured placements: a sponsor slot inside the weekly Tuesday issue
Sponsored articles: a dedicated piece written around the sponsor's subject, labelled as sponsored
Remarketing sequence: a three-email follow-up. Across the Tracksuit partnership it averaged an 80% open rate and a 53% click-through rate
Sponsorship works here for the same reason the newsletter does, a senior audience that opens the email. The Modern Media Masterclass, a free seven-day email course on building a content engine, and the free resources (Content Mastery Playbook, Newsletter Metrics Tracker, UTM Builder) are not sponsored.
Pistachio, Isaac's content studio, is a separate business. Brand Chemistry does not exist to sell Pistachio's services, though the two share a founder and a point of view.
Isaac Peiris is the founder and author of Brand Chemistry and the founder of Pistachio, a content studio that has worked with brands including BuzzFeed and Clay on owned-media growth. Before that he led growth at The Daily Aus and Mamamia, two of Australia's largest independent publishers, after starting his career in B2B SaaS product management. He speaks on owned media and brand-led growth, including at Content Summit Australia.
Author page and archive: brandchemistry.co/authors/isaac-peiris
Personal site: isaacpeiris.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/isaacpeiris
Pistachio: pistachio.so
If you are new here, three issues that show what the newsletter does:
The Stanley trade-off: a consumer brand case study on hype, durability and what gets traded away
Ramp and data storytelling: a B2B case study on turning company data into a brand asset
Hard Life Reset: the first edition, and the story behind the newsletter
Then subscribe at brandchemistry.co. One email a week, on Tuesdays. If you want the system behind the case studies, the Modern Media Masterclass is free and takes seven days.