About Hostile Brands
FOUNDER & CHIEF INNOVATION STRATEGIST, HOSTILE BRANDS
Kelly Rhoades is the Founder & Chief Innovation Strategist of Hostile Brands. She spent 30 years in the beauty industry learning the difference between what gets attention and what earns repeat business.
Today, she applies that commercial instinct across categories, evaluating existing concepts, creating new product and brand opportunities, and developing proprietary intellectual property with a clear reason to exist.
Hostile Brands is built on a simple principle: ideas deserve more than launch enthusiasm. They deserve commercial clarity, strategic discipline, and a reason for the customer to come back.
BEAUTY WAS THE PROVING GROUND, NOT THE BOUNDARY.
Thirty years in beauty taught Kelly how customers interpret value, how positioning shapes demand, how products earn trust, and why attention alone cannot sustain a business. Those commercial principles do not belong to one industry. They apply anywhere a product, platform, or brand must give someone a credible reason to choose it and return.
THE OPERATING PHILOSOPHY
Hostile Brands does not begin with what is trending. We begin with the customer tension, the market opening, and the commercial role the opportunity can realistically play.
Make the commercial call before more time, capital, inventory, or attention follows the wrong idea.
Every opportunity must solve a recognizable problem, fulfill a meaningful desire, or occupy a credible market opening.
Attention may produce trial. Sustainable value requires a reason for the customer to come back.
WHAT KELLY BRINGS TO THE TABLE
Commercial intelligence
Cross-category product innovation
Customer and market-opportunity identification
Naming and positioning
Brand, product, and portfolio architecture
Proprietary intellectual-property development
Licensing and partnership strategy
Commercialization planning
ADVISORY BOARD
Hostile Brands is advised by experienced operators and specialists whose expertise strengthens how we evaluate opportunities, develop concepts, and make commercial decisions.
Danielle Deutsch
Founding Principal, Liora Advisory
Danielle Deutsch brings more than 20 years of hands-on process engineering and package design leadership to the Hostile Brands Advisory Board. As Founding Principal of Liora Advisory, she combines technical rigor with deep manufacturing knowledge to support founders developing skincare, haircare, cosmetics, and wellness brands.
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Simon French
Fragrance Strategist | Founder, Perfumistics
Simon French brings 50 years of fragrance-industry experience to the Hostile Brands Advisory Board. For the past 14 years, he has led Perfumistics, working across independent brands, fragrance creators, and technology companies. His experience spans specialist training, interim management, cost-savings programs, M&A, and fragrance strategy. His guiding principle: avoid the three M’s: Me Too, Mundane, Mediocre.
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MOHAMMED EL-GASIM
CO-FOUNDER & BOARD MEMBER, CELLCLAR CIC
Mo El-Gasim is a builder with more than 14 years of experience spanning healthcare, business development, biotech, and social impact, united by a refusal to accept that opportunity should be gated. He is Co-Founder and Board Member of CellClar CIC, a biotech social enterprise working to democratise access to scientific research and infrastructure. His foundation is in medicine and neuroscience, with a BSc (Hons) in Medical Neuroscience and earlier medical training in Ukraine and Sudan. He advises the way he builds: rigour paired with humanity, and a bias toward opening doors rather than guarding them.
LinkedInJOHN W. TIERNEY
QUALITY, REGULATORY & MANUFACTURING STRATEGIST
John W. Tierney brings decades of experience across quality, regulatory affairs, manufacturing, product validation, and operational leadership in highly regulated industries. He currently serves as Director of Quality and Regulatory Affairs at THG – Bently Labs, following senior quality and operational roles spanning cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, nutraceuticals, ingredients, and consumer product manufacturing.
His career includes leadership as Director of Quality at Oxygen Development and NeoStrata/J&J, as well as plant management experience overseeing the operational realities behind bringing products from specification to scalable production. His expertise spans quality systems, GMP, FDA and cosmetics regulatory requirements, product and process validation, CAPA, supply chain, laboratory management, and multiple ISO and food-safety standards.
John brings a critical commercialization lens to Hostile Brands: not simply whether a product is compelling, but whether it can be manufactured consistently, validated appropriately, scaled responsibly, and supported by the quality and regulatory systems required to succeed in market.
START WITH THE OPPORTUNITY.
Choose the pathway that best reflects what you are evaluating, creating, exploring, or seeking to advance.