“Back for its fourth year in partnership with The Standard, the AXA Startup Angel competition has again searched the UK for the next great startup or small business. With £25,000 in funding and mentoring from our AXA Angels for the top two winners, we had more entries than ever. As the 2025 competition closes, we’re excited to introduce one of our two top winners: Main Squeeze, founded by Princess Ebi.”
It’s getting realer and realer.
Main Squeeze won the AXA Startup Angel award last month, and our shoulders have not come down! It feels great to have a resonant story, reputable validation and much-needed professional support.
Moonlight is now a team of 11 people working collaboratively between Lagos, Ibadan, Enugu, Abuja, and London. We’re developing two businesses: Main Squeeze, a compression socks brand and Fable, a consumer software product.
Here’s how its going.
Main Squeeze
We’ve made a lot of progress with the socks this year:
Designed and produced our first 2 SKUs.
Sold hundreds of pairs to great reviews and press.
Built a distinct brand and significant follower growth.
Registered trademarks in the UK and US.
Registered as a Class I medical device in the UK.
Explored 3PLs and optimised our logistics cost.
Up-skilled in performance marketing and Shopify development.
Achieved our desired customer acquisition cost.
And most recently, won the AXA Startup Angel award.
With some gas in the tank, the rest of this year will be about execution. We’ve learnt so much from our collaborations with influencers, consultants and marketing agencies; now it’s time to grow.
Our goal is to increase mental and physical availability by improving content, SEO/AEO performance and kicking off in-person activations. We’re also planning to launch on Amazon and one online retailer.
Fable
Fable is live, and we’re rolling out slowly.
When we first started working on this, the category for “apps that take long-form text and convert it to short-form audio” didn’t exist. Now it does—which means there’s real demand for what we’re building.
We’re not inventing a new use case, but we can do it better.
Our chances come down to three things: the podcasts need to sound like something you’d actually want to listen to, they need to actually help people learn, and we need to find people who are desperate for this exact thing.
If you have articles piling up, or you’re just curious to hear what the podcasts sound like, try Fable: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/fable/id6737436331.
Everything else
Besides Main Squeeze and Fable, we’ve shipped a dozen consulting projects this year — from new brands and websites to fully-featured software products.
Our art projects are moving slower but steadily. E Dey Happen episode 3 is nearly done. The first issue of wuruwuru magazine ships Q4, and Album Cover Bank is due back online after a migration.
This is the last Recap for the year. We’ll continue to share case studies and one-off essays, but the next studio update will come next year. By then, we should have a lot of interesting progress to share.
Until then,
Cheers!
The moon lights the way 🌕