Fourth Lab
PROJECT: Fourth Lab — Editorial Direction, Content Strategy, Creative Production
CLIENT: Fourth Lab, via Studio Cosmati
YEAR: 2025
Fourth Lab is an emerging wellness brand focused on scientifically-backed maternal health supplements and education.
Entering a category where women are often spoken to through simplified, polished or prescriptive language, our work on Fourth Lab’s content and launch strategy posed a few questions: how could an emerging maternal health brand could communicate with intelligence and authority without talking down to the people it exists to serve? How could that thinking could translate into an editorial system that educates meaningfully without becoming another source of noise?
While Studio Cosmati conducted broader market research, Aetia focused on language and storytelling within similar niche wellness brands and communities, looking at how the subject is currently discussed, where audiences feel underserved, which cultural behaviours, anxieties and expectations the brand should choose to respond to within its communication, and which it would intentionally opt out of.
We developed a tone of voice grounded in being intelligent, real, steady and perceptive, then translated the strategy into hero brand copy, messaging, content and creative production guidance. The wider editorial strategy covered Substack, Instagram, Reddit, Pinterest and YouTube, spanning written series, short-form video, visualised conversations, infographics and expert-focused UGC, alongside a multi-phase go-to-market and lean production strategy.
The Fourth Lab team embraced our editorial direction, and invited us to develop and produce a social-first film to launch the brand and its manifesto. Faced with the challenge of having no owned footage to work with, we joined forces with Studio Cosmati to source imagery of mothers from art and photography throughout history, and animated them with stop motion to tell the story of Fourth Lab’s bold stance on motherhood today.
When the brand launched, the response from Fourth Lab’s growing audience spoke for itself – content began to regularly earn comments from a community of women claiming that “you’re that rare account that I enjoy reading here on Instagram. I feel so grounded and connected when I read.” As editorial strategy continues to roll out, our work with Fourth Lab reinforces the importance of educational storytelling that offers depth without distance, accessibility without dilution, and relatability without resorting to the flattened language of influencer culture.
