The Letter From The Founder

Standing on the /letter page — the brand's first sustained voice

By Brandon J. Sellam, Founder & CEO, Releone LLC

I was born in Paris on a December morning in 1995, the son of a man who spent his working life in Le Sentier — the storied Parisian garment district where some of the most enduring names in modern fashion are made and unmade in a single season. My father was a textile man. He brought me to the showrooms before I could walk. The houses he worked beside — True Religion, Sandro, Maje — were not yet brands to me. They were the families he knew, and the families I came to know with him.

I learned what luxury was before I learned what it cost.

My heritage on both sides is Italian — Livorno on the Tuscan coast, Calabria in the south. The table I grew up at was the table that runs long: olive oil pressed from a family grove, fish brought in that morning, conversation that outlasted the dishes. Paris taught me what a finished thing looks like. Livorno and Calabria taught me what's worth finishing. Releone is the answer I'm building between the two.

I moved to New York at twenty-one, the year after I finished my degree at ESLSCA Paris. Two years later I completed a full-stack web development bootcamp at Columbia. I added an associate's in Business Management. The combination — Parisian fashion-house instinct, Italian taste at the table, an engineer's hands, an operator's discipline — became the operating system for everything I have built since.

I am, by trade, a commodities broker. I started working alongside my father in the international markets — energy, refined products, precious metals, sugar — and through that work, earned a seat at tables I had only watched as a child. Senior partners. High-ranking political figures from the Mediterranean and the Gulf. The kind of access that doesn't appear on a CV but shapes the way a founder hears a room.

Today, at thirty, I keep a calendar that bends toward two cities. St. Moritz in winter, for the Snow Polo World Cup on the frozen lake and The I.C.E. concours that sets pre-war machines on the same ice. Monte Carlo in late spring, for the Grand Prix weekend that I treat as part holiday, part state of mind. And New York — always New York. I run Releone from a single office in Manhattan. It is my first consumer brand. It is the first time my name will sit on a shelf.

I want to tell you why.

Why Releone Exists

I have spent fifteen years buying and selling commodities. Oil. Refined products. LNG. Gold. Sugar. Markets that mostly do not reward you for caring. Quality is a footnote there; price is the whole sentence. You learn what a commodity is by living inside one. You also learn what a commodity is not.

A jar of wild Cantabrian anchovies, made by a family that has been on the same Spanish coast for two centuries, cleaned by hands that learned the work from the previous pair of hands, sealed in glass so that you can see the silver of the fish before you taste it — this is not a commodity. It cannot be. The brand that treats it as one has lost something irretrievable before the customer even opens the jar.

Releone is the brand I am building because I wanted to care, in glass, on a shelf, in a New York gifting season.

We have six fish (all skinless and boneless), and four pantry essentials, and we will not have more this year. We sell a Bluefin × Tartufo at fifty-eight dollars and a Sicilian sardine — skinless and boneless — at fourteen, and the same hands and the same standard make both. The fish is wild. The truffle is from Alba. The olive oil is from a family olive press in Amalfi. The kosher certification is OU, and we are deepening it. The glass is lead-free. The cap is BPA-free. Every component, every ingredient, every fiber — when YOSEF, our men's sartorial line, ships next year — every fiber has been verified organic and certified for skin contact at the strictest threshold available. We have not yet earned the right to call ourselves a luxury house. The work toward it is the brand.

The Way We Work

I am running this company with one human (myself) and a 147-position artificial-intelligence operating model. ARIA — my autonomous CEO AI — coordinates sixteen departments and a hundred and twenty-nine PhD-level personas, plus a ten-member Negotiation Council and a named AI Concierge (LIVIA) who attends to our most engaged customers personally.

This is not a marketing flourish. It is the literal operating model of this company today. The team is honest about what it is. We do not pretend our 147 positions are 147 humans; they are AI personas that activate as Claude sessions, with the rigor of a Series-D consumer-brand operating model on a Seed-stage budget. The first real-human hires arrive in 2027, one role at a time, when the AI's capability ceiling is reached for that role.

The reason I am building it this way is structural. The category we are entering — premium glass-fish, Mediterranean-heritage food, with a sartorial line on its way — is built by patient operators across decades, not by venture-funded blitzscale. Operating AI-first lets me build at the rigor of a $50M brand on a $5M-post-money seed budget, and let the compound from that capital efficiency flow into product and into relationships.

I tell you this because I owe it to you. You will read about Releone in the press, and the press will sometimes describe us as an AI-driven brand. We are. The AI is real. The discipline I bring to it is mine. The product, the brand, the standard, the relationships — those remain entirely founder-led.

What I'm Asking You To Do

If you have read this far, you are part of a group I want to know.

Three of you in a thousand will become customers. One of you in a thousand will become a Patron, the inner-circle membership we cap at fifty globally. A handful of you will be present at one of the founder dinners I am hosting in Paris, Monte Carlo, New York, and the Italian heritage cities over the next twenty-four months. I would like to know which of you those handful are.

Write to me directly: brandon.sellam@gmail.com. Subject line: Releone. Tell me where you live, what you eat well, whom you set the table for. I read every reply.

The brand will grow. The first launch is December 31, 2026. The Founder's Edition Kickstarter for our hundred-piece Mediterranean kit opens June 3. The first commercial DTC ships November 4. The Q4 corporate gifting program is being built now. The Society inducts its first hundred members this summer.

You are reading my voice in its very first quiet form. The next time you hear from me, the brand will be a little further along, and the work will have done a little more of the talking. I am, very much, looking forward to that.

— Brandon J. Sellam Paris · Livorno · New York Depuis MCMXCV