Eighteen years. A workshop in Brooklyn. Two pairs of hands.
Marianella was founded in 2008 by David Foote and his mother Maria, in a small workshop in Brooklyn. The first products were handmade soaps, cut with a wire-and-dowel tool David built himself, poured in copper pots using formulas Maria brought from her mother and her grandmother in Venezuela.
The brand grew slowly. The first boutique placement happened in 2010. The first press mention, in Vogue, happened in 2012. The first Bloomingdale's placement happened in 2014. The line expanded from soap to lotion to hand wash to body wash to bath products to skincare — all handmade, all in the same workshop, all under the same two pairs of hands.
82 SKUs across six product lines
Stocked at Bloomingdale's BEAUTYSPACE
Wholesale accounts across hospitality, retail, and gift
Press coverage in Vogue, Oprah, Forbes, Allure, WWD
Customers who have been with the brand for over a decade
Still run by David and Maria, with no full-time employees.
Seven figures. Two people. The math stopped working.
Around 2022, the operational weight of running Marianella at its current scale began to exceed what two people could carry. The brand was doing seven figures in annual revenue. The social media cadence had slipped. The email newsletter was arriving once every six weeks if at all. The blog was effectively abandoned. The outreach to new hospitality accounts had stopped.
David tried the conventional solutions first. He hired an agency to run social. The copy did not sound like Marianella. He hired a freelance writer for the blog. The topics she picked were not Marianella topics. He priced out a full-time marketing manager. The numbers did not work. He considered letting the brand shrink. Instead, he started writing prompts.
One weekend. One voice dossier. Eleven luminaries.
The first version was a single fifteen-hundred-word voice dossier David wrote one weekend in 2023. He plugged it into Claude, the underlying model, and asked for a single Instagram caption. The result was closer to the brand's voice than anything an agency had produced in years.
Over the next twelve months, he built it out:
- AURORASocial writer — the first luminary built.
- LUNAEmail writer — Klaviyo flows and campaign cadence.
- ORIONLong-form content writer with ingredient verification.
- ATLASOutreach system for wholesale accounts, with Argus handling deliverability.
- FLUXAd manager — live Meta campaigns with brand-voice creative.
- ZENITHTrend analyst — the niche sources the mainstream services miss.
- SOLRetention system — VIP identification and long-term customer management.
- MINTFinancial analyst — weekly briefs every Monday.
- ASTRAVisual generator — lifestyle imagery in the brand's photographic register.
- BORISExecutive layer — morning briefing, daily coordination across the atelier.
Eleven luminaries. One atelier.