There’s a particular kind of conversation that doesn’t happen in boardrooms or on Zoom calls. It happens when founders admit that something in their business isn’t working the way it should.
The numbers might be steady, the product might be strong, but the brand feels off. It’s not converting, it’s not landing, and no one can quite explain why.
That tension, hard to name, harder to solve, is what sits at the centre of malone—co studio and, more recently, something more intimate: The Foundry Room.
Hosted several times a year in Melbourne, The Foundry Room is not a conference, nor a typical workshop. It’s a small, in-person gathering of established business owners, founders who are already in motion, already building, already carrying the weight of decisions that don’t always have clear answers. There are no panels or stage lights, just a table, a handful of people, wine, antipasto, and the kind of conversations that tend to get postponed in the day-to-day.
A Studio Built on Proximity
The event reflects the way Justine Malone has built the studio itself.
At malone—co studio, the work is less about producing assets and more about helping founders understand what’s actually happening inside their brand; where it’s aligned, where it’s under strain, and what needs to shift for it to grow.
That perspective comes from Malone’s own trajectory. Before founding the studio, she worked across global brands like Brooks Running, Helly Hansen, Gem and Specsavers, gaining a close view of how brands scale in practice, not just how they look, but how they hold together under pressure.
But the foundation was set earlier. Growing up, she spent years sailing around the world with her family on a boat her father built by hand, an experience that tends to surface in how she works today. There’s a familiarity with uncertainty, a comfort in building something before all the answers are clear, and a long-view approach that resists quick fixes.
That same mindset shapes how she works with founders, often at moments where the business is shifting, stretching, or quietly outgrowing its original identity.
When a Brand Starts to Drift
Many of the founders who find their way to malone—co studio arrive with a similar question, even if it’s phrased differently: Do we need to rebrand?
It’s rarely that simple.
More often, the issue sits deeper in the brand ecosystem, in the relationship between strategy, messaging, visuals, content and digital presence. As businesses grow, these elements can drift out of alignment. What started as a clear idea becomes layered, diluted, or reactive. The result is a brand that feels fragmented, even if each individual part appears functional.
This is particularly visible in sectors like wellness, health, beauty and lifestyle, where the emotional connection between brand and audience is central. When that connection weakens, founders tend to feel it before they can diagnose it.
The language around it is familiar: it’s not converting, something feels off, we’ve outgrown what we built.
The Foundry Room as a Working Space
The Foundry Room was created as a response to that moment. Each session brings together a small group of founders for an evening that sits somewhere between a workshop and a conversation. The structure is deliberately loose. There is guidance, but not a rigid agenda. Discussion moves between individual businesses, shared challenges, and broader questions around brand strategy Melbourne founders are navigating in real time.
The focus is practical. How to recognise when a brand is under tension. What signals to look for. How misalignment shows up across content, design and digital channels. And, importantly, what to do next.
It’s less about teaching branding in the abstract and more about helping founders see their own business with greater clarity.
Human-Made, In a Systematised World
Part of what underpins both the studio and The Foundry Room is a broader stance on how branding is approached.
As templated design systems and AI-generated outputs become more common, malone—co studio has leaned further into human-made work as a commitment to depth. Brands are treated as interconnected systems, not collections of assets.
All elements (strategy, design, photography, video, digital) are handled in-house to maintain coherence. When the same team is responsible for how a brand is thought about, built and expressed, the result tends to hold together more effectively over time.
For founders, that coherence often translates into something more tangible: decisions become clearer, messaging becomes easier, and the brand starts to operate as a unified whole rather than a set of disconnected parts.
An Ongoing Conversation
The Foundry Room runs four times a year, but its role isn’t tied to a calendar. It functions more like a checkpoint, a moment for founders to step out of execution and look at the shape of what they’re building.
For some, it’s a way to articulate what’s been sitting in the background. For others, it’s an opportunity to test ideas, hear different perspectives, or simply realise that the challenges they’re facing aren’t isolated.
In a landscape where branding is often reduced to outputs, The Foundry Room shifts the focus back to something less visible but more consequential: clarity. And for many founders, that’s the point where things begin to move again.
For those interested in attending, more information on The Foundry Room can be found here: maloneco.au/the-foundry-room/.
