I'm 52, perimenopausal, and mother to four kids aged 16 to 34 - plus three grandkids thrown in for good measure. I work four days a week and I've spent the last ten years in the creative industry. I bake my own sourdough and treat the starter with more care than some people give their pets. Twice a week I play pickleball and get my ass handed to me regularly by seventy year olds but yet I persist! And I collect lip gloss like the whole category is about to be discontinued.

I've also put on a bit of weight, and right now I don't want to buy new clothes. Not because I can't afford to - I genuinely can - I just don't feel like it. A cleaner comes through my house every fortnight, because I've got the disposable income and the good sense to spend some of it on someone else scrubbing the bathroom. I love wandering through food markets hunting down things I've never tried before, buying them on impulse because they looked interesting. On paper, I am exactly the customer everyone claims to be chasing: employed, informed, opinionated, and more than willing to spend.

So why does no one want me?

I think of my brain as a browser with a thousand tabs open, and none of them ever properly close. Order your daughter a new laptop, hers just died. Figure out dinner. Father's Day is coming, so is a birthday, that's two lots of presents to sort. You're out of baker's flour, again. Pickleball drills tonight. Your husband is in Melbourne tomorrow, so who's picking your daughter up from training? Somewhere in there I'm also meant to remember my own name. The list doesn't end. It just quietly adds another tab to the pile and keeps humming along in the background while I try to watch TV or scroll reels on the train home.

You'd think all of that would make me easy to sell to. I've got needs stacked a dozen deep, most of them urgent, several of them expensive, one of them, right now, is literally about flour. Instead, brands seem to look at a woman my age and land on one of two options: "empty nester with time on her hands" or "grandmother who'd love a nice cardigan." Neither of those is me. I'd bet neither of those is most of us.

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Maybe that's the actual problem. I'm not one customer, I'm about six of them wearing the same skin - parent, grandparent, athlete, home cook, working professional, and dedicated hoarder of unnecessary lip gloss - and most marketing is built to find a single box and stay in it. Trying to sort me into one demographic is like folding a fitted sheet: technically possible, mostly a losing battle, and everyone quietly gives up halfway through and shoves it in the cupboard anyway.

I get it, sort of. An algorithm would much rather deal with one tidy label than six messy, overlapping ones. It's easier to sell to "new mum" or "retiree" than to a woman who is simultaneously restocking flour, researching laptops, training for a sport she took up 6 months ago, and Googling whether it's normal to cry at dog food ads. But easier for you doesn't mean smaller for me. It just means you've stopped looking a couple of tabs too early.

So is it that I've got too much going on to be worth targeting? Or is it that nobody's actually bothered working out how? Because from where I'm sitting, shopping list in one hand, credit card in the other, ready and waiting, this doesn't feel like a hard problem to solve. It feels like a lazy one.

So instead of trying to fix the box, or label - look at the entry point. Start paying attention to the moments I’m in, and the problems I have. My baker's flour has run out again, but I don’t have time to go and get more before school pickup. Well, look at that, I can afford the price mark-up on an UberEats priority grocery delivery. Moments like this don’t care how old I am, whether I’m a grandma in a knitted cardi, or an up and coming pickleball athlete. More often than not, you’ll find me and twenty two year-old tradies at the same net.