Dont Start a Clothing Brand. Start a Red Light Therapy Brand!
Three nights ago I was kinda stressing and had no idea what product category I was going to do a deep dive on this week.
Then a good ol’ healthy doomscroll led me down a landing page funnel for a red light therapy mask.
I cant remember what pain point it triggered but that copy was so damn good I almost convinced myself I needed a $470 glowing face mask.
But my never ending curiosity and pocket watching lead to a quick Particl search through my Claude connector…
The numbers were insane! (& I found my topic for the week =)
CurrentBody, does $7M a month on a single $470 face mask. ONE MASK!!!
S/o Particl for data
Then I looked at the rest of the market.
The market is projected to double by 2033. There is so much room to build a great lifestyle business here!!!!
What's Actually Wrong w/ This Category:
Open any red light therapy brand's site. You'll see:
Red and black color scheme or heavily clinical feel
Product names like “MitoPRO+ Panel Series v2.55”
Stock photos of someone meditating…
Spec sheets that read like a microwave manual
These brands got Bill Nye on the design team. Or it’s dropshippers going too deep on the medical proof side.
It's the same mistake the supplement aisle made before Athletic Greens, Ritual, Gruns and a dozen other brands rebranded the whole shelf.
Right now red light therapy is sitting in 2010-era supplement aesthetic.
Most of the companies in the space are still just selling hardware. Nobody has built a brand on top of it yet.
The One Outlier
Higher DOSE is the only brand in the lane playing a different game. Look at their lineup:
$449 red light hat
$599 red light shower head
$674 infrared dog bed (should’ve included this play 2 newsletters ago)
$2,500 bundle called "The Longevity Pro Ritual"
They went wide and lean more towards a lifestyle brand. Now they can sell mats, blankets, saunas, eye masks, pet beds, whatever.
The panel companies can't pivot to that as easily. They painted themselves into a corner the day they decided to compete on lumens and wavelengths.
ZOOM OUT! This isn’t just red light therapy
Red light therapy is one slice of a much bigger trend. Biohacking globally is around $56 billion and projected to roughly triple by 2034.
Cold plunge, sauna, peptides, sleep tech, wearables, supplements, longevity skincare.
Every one of those categories has the same shape red light therapy does. Engineering-led brands, no real consumables layer, no real lifestyle plays, no clean accessible price points.
The pattern of gaps repeats across the whole biohacking shelf.
try to really digest these numbers & projections….
Four Open Lanes I'd Actually Build Into
I’m spinning 7 other plates but if I were starting one of these tomorrow:
1. The lifestyle play (broader, or sharper). Higher DOSE proved this works once. There's room for a second lifestyle brand pointed at a totally different aesthetic. Masculine and minimalist, or post-natal mom, or sport and recovery, or skincare-obsessed Gen Z. The audience is going to care more about whose life this fits inside than the specs.
2. The refill play. Every brand in this space sells one-time hardware and then disappears. There's no consumable layer. Be the first to sell the serums, gels, and post-treatment skincare that pair with the device. Hardware becomes the trojan horse for a beauty and wellness consumables business with real LTV.
3. The accessible play. CurrentBody charges $470 for a face mask. The category needs its Native, its Quip, its Hims. The brand that brings price to $99 to $149 with great packaging and design and pulls in everyone who was curious but priced out. There's a much bigger market under that price point that nobody's serving with a brand they actually want on their counter.
4. The niche-down play. The category is currently treating "red light therapy" as one big audience, and it isn't. There's a women-only brand to build (different form factors, different scents, different aesthetic), an athlete-recovery brand (gym-bag size, post-workout positioning), a sleep-and-recovery brand, a dermatologist-led brand, a hair-growth-only brand. Pick the slice nobody owns and own it cleanly.
Weapon of the Week: The Particl + Claude prompt
Gathering all this data took me about 20ish minutes. Here is the cheat-code:
Connect Particl to Claude (it's in the connector directory) and run this anytime a category catches your eye:
I want to assess the [CATEGORY] market on Particl as a brand-building opportunity.
Pull:
Total monthly online revenue for the category
Top 10 brands by revenue with their monthly numbers
The top-selling SKU for each of those brands and what % of brand revenue it represents
Average price points across the category
Any brand whose product naming, site design, or positioning looks meaningfully different from the rest
Then tell me:
Who's dominant and why
Where the white space is, what positioning, price point, or product layer nobody owns
What 3 brand archetypes from other categories would map cleanly onto this one
The single biggest open lane I should pressure-test
Any sub-audience inside the category that's currently being lumped in with everyone else
Be skeptical. If the data looks soft, say so.
Run that on any category that catches your eye in a doomscroll. You'll either confirm it's saturated, or you'll find a gap like the one above.
The job isn't to come up with ideas. The job is to find the place where the data and the white space meet, and you can do that over a coffee with Particl.
And of course to close out another Thursday brief….. a weekly quote from The Muse himself:
Till next time soldier,
Carson
P.S. If you made it this far, here is my weekly beg to subscribe to my brand new YouTube channel. !!!!!
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