I sat down with Juliet Fallowfield for her podcast, How To Start Up by Fallow, Field & Mason. The episode was about bringing a product to market: everything you have to think through before a thing ever reaches a shelf. It is a question I have lived inside of for the last few years, and saying some of it out loud made me realize how much of building Mujo has been the opposite of what people expect a wellness brand to look like.
So this is the longer version. The parts that did not fit in one episode, written down for anyone standing where I was a few years ago.
Mujo started with subtraction, not addition
Mujo means impermanence. It comes from a Japanese Buddhist idea about the ever-changing nature of things, and it has quietly shaped every decision I have made.
The brand did not begin with a product. It began with a feeling I could not shake as a new mother running on too little sleep and too much pressure, reaching for another coffee that was doing less and less. My interest in adaptogens and functional mushrooms came from somewhere personal: watching my dad through his illness years earlier, and the knowledge of these ingredients that ran through my family.
When I finally built Mujo Ritual, the instinct was not to add more. It was to strip things back. Foundational nervous system support, made from a short list of ingredients I actually understood. That principle, less but better, turned out to be a product philosophy and a business philosophy at the same time.
And to be clear, because people always ask: Mujo is not anti-coffee. You can drink your coffee. The Ritual is simply the cup that does the other work.
The most useful thing I did was talk to strangers
If there is one idea from the episode I would underline twice, it is this: talk to people who do not know you.
Friends and family will tell you they love it. That feedback feels wonderful and teaches you almost nothing. The conversations that actually moved Mujo forward were with strangers. What makes you reach for one product over another. What you care about when you are deciding. Which packaging you would pick up, and which you would walk past.
Those answers shaped the blend, the language, the look, all of it. Customer discovery is not a phase you finish. It is a habit, and I still do it now.
Make it almost risk-free to say yes the first time
A first purchase from a brand you have never heard of is a small act of trust. Early on I decided to carry as much of that risk as I could, rather than leaving it with the person deciding whether to try us.
That meant a genuine money-back guarantee and absorbing shipping costs where I could, so the only thing a new customer was really risking was a few minutes of curiosity. Trust comes before the transaction. If you want someone to try something unfamiliar, you have to make saying yes feel safe.
Stay a student of your own market
The other thing I keep relearning: the way you reached people last quarter is not guaranteed to work next quarter. Channels shift. Costs change. What resonates moves.
I try to stay genuinely open to learning a new way of reaching the people Mujo is for, instead of getting attached to the way that worked once. For a small team, that flexibility is not a luxury. It is survival.
What I keep coming back to
Whatever comes next, the questions stay the same. Talk to strangers. Lower the risk. Stay open. Those three have carried Mujo this far, and I suspect they will carry whatever I build next.
If you want the conversation that started all of this, you can listen to my episode of How To Start Up by Fallow, Field & Mason on Spotify, or find it on YouTube and other podcast platforms. Juliet builds a generous, honest space for founders, and I am grateful she made room for the quieter kind of brand.
With care,
Kinga