Friend Notebooks founder and CCO Lana on why the loudest minds need ritual most- and the collaboration that made it real.
When I arrive, Lana is not at her desk. She's at the team bench - a high-top she's migrated to because she's going through another phase where she wants to be on her feet while she thinks. An extension cord trails across the floor from her actual desk, powering a large Mac that sits beside an open laptop, both running simultaneously so she can flit between tasks as her brain decides to. There is music blasting. There is a fresh espresso, a cold one she forgot about yesterday, a water bottle, and a protein milk- all within arm's reach, none of them finished.
She doesn't carry a notebook. She carries eight, crammed into a chunky folio covered in accidental pen marks from a habit of clicking her pen on and off without noticing she's drawing on the cover. Beside the folio, a stack of five graph notebooks exploding with handwritten notes her team says are illegible and make her look like a conspiracy theorist. She insists they all make perfect sense and are all essential.
On the rug below her, three of her team are sprawled out mid-debate about a timing clash between a system migration and a campaign launch. Lana is contributing to this while also, apparently, preparing to give an interview about ritual. This is how this office works. Everyone reading each other's energy, adjusting in real time.
Which is what makes it so striking when, mid-sentence, she stops. Sets her protein milk down. And starts speaking ritual.
Because when Lana talks about ritual, something shifts. She slows down. And you realise that for her, ritual isn't a departure from the chaos. It's the thing that makes the chaos survivable.
"When you are operating with the kind of mind that is that loud, that incessant, the inclusion of elements of ritual is nigh-on essential to be capable of functioning," she says. "How do you bring order to a scattered headspace? How do you function when your brain works better with routine… but loathes the idea of it? The answer is ritual. It's intent."
This is the woman behind Made For Ritual - a limited edition collaboration between Friend Notebooks and Luna Tea Co. that, by her own telling, was never really planned. It just arrived.
The notebook at the centre of the collection, Weekly Rituals, had been in development for over a year before the collaboration even entered the conversation.
Lana had been circling the concept for a long time. Friend Notebooks already offered tools for mindful journalling, for planning, for creative reflection, but nothing that tied them together into a weekly rhythm. Nothing that asked how you were actually going before asking what you needed to do.
"We had notebooks for all the individual pieces," she says. "But we didn't have the one that sat at the centre and helped you approach your week in a way that felt authentically you. Not what your job says you need to achieve, your own energy and needs."
Weekly Rituals was how she filled that gap. A notebook built around a three-part weekly framework: your external environment (lunar cycles, weather, the moments unfolding around you), your internal psyche (mood, sleep, joy, the rituals keeping you together), and your physical nourishment (movement, nutrition, hydration). Three layers of reflection before a single task is written down.
The team at Friend Notebooks had already been living this philosophy before the notebook gave it a name. Lana describes an office culture built on reading each other's energy; adjusting the shape of the day to meet the people in it, rather than the other way around.
"If Jasmine can tell I lacked the stamina to make breakfast that morning, we move our morning briefing to the coffee shop and order poached eggs," she says. "If Aubiene is having a lethargic day on the couch and feeling bad about it, I check in on her cycle and point out that she's in her luteal phase, not failing."
The notebook, she says, has elevated what was already intuitive into something more deliberate. "We're all now individually taking the moment to reflect on how we can turn up for ourselves, our family, and ultimately the team we show up for each day. We can structure our days better when we know what is influencing our rhythm. And make sure we're achieving the kind of balance that ultimately results in more impactful work, and more enjoyment of the entire process."
As the notebook neared its final print-ready phase, Lana began thinking about how to position it- not just as a product, but as a feeling.
"When I thought about how that might look, I pictured what these moments of ritual and intention should feel like. And in my mind there was no brand that was already doing that as powerfully as Luna Tea Co.”
She and Elaine - Luna Tea Co.'s founder, an archaeologist turned tea blender who hand-crafts literary-inspired loose leaf teas from her studio in Newcastle - had been DMing for a while. Mostly about hobbies and a mutual admiration for what the other was building. But when Lana floated the idea of a collaboration to coincide with the notebook launch, Elaine was immediately on board.
"We gabbed excitedly for another week or so over the internet before I actually got on a plane and went down to Newcastle to visit her in her studio to get serious about the launch," Lana says. Then she laughs. "To be fully transparent, we spent absolutely zero time discussing the launch. Elaine is such an interesting human and so easy to talk to that we spent the entire time talking about life and books and adventures."
They left that visit having discussed none of the practicalities and all of the important things. "We were both 100% confident this was serendipity. The universe had put us into each other's path and we couldn't wait to dive into the project together."
What emerged is Made For Ritual- a gift set Lana describes as "a ritual starter pack." An invitation to carve an intentional space in your day, your week, or your month, and fill it with reflection.
The notebook is the cornerstone. But a ritual needs more than paper - it needs a sensory anchor, something that tells your body it's time to slow down before your brain catches up. That's where Luna Tea Co.'s Autumnal Equinox blend comes in.
"Think magical fae bonfire rituals," Lana says. "Earthy, spiced, grounding, rejuvenating." We chose it deliberately - equinox is inherently a time of rebirth, of balance tipping from one season into the next. "We want people to use the tea as an anchor tool for themselves. The moment you smell it, the moment you pour it, you're already in the ritual."
The final element is a gold zodiac pendant that laces onto your notebook folio. "We want these sets to feel personal. Intimate. To make you take a moment to reflect on yourself and your place in the celestial world on any given day. So it was important to us that everyone could select the pendant that most reflected them."
Only 150 sets exist - a number dictated not by marketing strategy, but by Elaine's hands. Every single tea is hand-blended in her small Newcastle studio. And because the twelve zodiac pendants can't be predicted in demand, caution shaped the run. "We hope our audience can appreciate the small batch, artisanal nature of this collaboration," Lana says, "and the partnership with another brilliant small Aussie studio."
I ask Lana what ritual looks like in her own life — away from the brand, away from the notebooks.
"Morning espressos," she says. "Time put aside every night before bed to read about a flawed, morally-grey character I probably have an unhealthy attachment to." She grins. "Even things like a two-step evening skin routine that feels manageable even on my hardest days."
It's a small list. Deliberately so. And it speaks to the philosophy at the heart of everything she's built: that ritual doesn't need to be elaborate or aspirational. It just needs to be yours. Something you return to. Something that holds even when the rest of the week won't.
"The entire notion of tactile, analogue notebooks and journalling is inherently ritualistic," she says. "The act of taking a moment to sit and write it down."
I ask her, finally, what she hopes someone feels when they unwrap a Made For Ritual gift set for the first time.
"I hope they feel a sense of grounding," she says. "When they see our romantic little prose on the gift card, flip through the notebook to uncover the unique illustrations we've crafted for every single page, and crack open that jar for the first time to get that first waft of lemongrass and ginger?" She pauses. "I hope it makes their heart feel the same sense of warmth, and calm, and balance that we crafted it to embody."
It's a big hope for a small box. But then, that's the point of ritual — finding something enormous inside something quiet.
