We build, own, and advise
the next decade of
consumer brands.
Glow is a consumer brand group. We build and operate a small portfolio of owned brands. We advise external founders on brand and marketing through Afterglow, our agency. We publish the record through The Glow Report. Three arms. One argument about what good looks like.
Contents.
Vol IV · Q2 2026
A portfolio of owned brands, an agency for external founders, and a publication of record. Each with its own discipline; together, one argument about consumer brand.
The portfolio.
Brands Glow owns & buildsOperator-led consumer brand group. Read the thesis.
The agency.
Afterglow · Brand · Retail · SocialEight external engagements a year, on invitation.
The publication.
The Glow Report · Vol IVRead by 42,000 founders, operators, and investors. Subscribe.
Modern consumer brands grow on three levers. Most agencies pull one.
Brand decides what the business stands for and why it wins.
Retail decides whether customers ever meet it at all.
Social decides whether they come back, talk, and bring others.
We run all three as one coherent move — the only way they compound.
Brand is the only line item on a consumer balance sheet that keeps earning interest after you stop spending on it.
Afterglow. Three practices. One coherent move.
Afterglow is the branding and marketing agency inside Glow. It works on Glow's owned brands and on a small number of external founders each year. Most rebrands fix the wrong thing. Afterglow is built to fix the right one — and carry the consequence through to the shelf, the screen, and the room.
Four engagements. Four different shapes of business.
Afterglow takes on a small number of external engagements each year. Each one a different theory of how a brand carries a business into its next chapter. Detailed case studies behind each.
Not a blog. A publication.
The Glow Report runs on a quarterly masthead — essays, field notes, research, and an annual index of the consumer brands we believe are compounding. Read by 42,000 founders, operators, and investors who would rather think in decades than quarters.
The compounding brand.
Why brand is the only marketing asset that behaves like equity — and why the founders we watch most closely abandon it, on average, eighteen months too early. A case for treating creative direction the way a CFO treats a balance sheet.
Read the featureThe Glow 100, 2026.
Our annual ranking of the hundred consumer brands compounding the fastest — weighted on signal, stamina, margin, and share.
The nine retail beats worth owning.
We mapped every trigger, aisle, and decision between category entry and conversion across 112 brands. Here is what only the best ones own.
The economics of taste.
Taste is the single most underpriced form of advantage left in consumer, and most investors will not fund it until it is already priced in.
The tyranny of the performance dashboard.
Some of the worst consumer decisions of the last decade were made in defence of a ROAS number. A case for owning the denominator, not the ratio.
Why founders give up at month eighteen.
A pattern we have now watched, verbatim, in 23 founder-led consumer companies. The cliff is not performance. It is patience.
Creative direction as capital allocation.
Every creative decision on a brand is a capital decision. A case for treating the CD seat like a CFO seat — and compensating it accordingly.
Four volumes. Forty-three pieces. A ten-year brief on modern consumer brands.
The Glow 100.2026
A hundred consumer brands we believe are compounding — ranked on signal, stamina, margin, and category share, against the same framework we run on our own clients.
Afterglow takes on founders who are building something that should exist.
The agency is small by design. A handful of external engagements a year, alongside the brands Glow owns and the ones it is building. Ambitious, consumer-facing, at a moment of real change — that is the kind of company we are a very good fit for. We would rather say no than say maybe.
I started Glow because the best commercial problems are brand problems wearing other clothes — and because the only honest way to prove that thesis is to run a business by it.
So we build brands of our own. We distribute and scale them through our own channels. And we work with a small number of outside founders each year through our agency, Afterglow. The operating work, the advisory work, and the publishing sit under the same roof on purpose. One argument, told three ways.
That is the only kind of company we know how to run.
A small group with consequential footprint.
If you are at an inflection point, write directly.
Glow takes on a small number of outside engagements each year through Afterglow, and partners with a smaller number still through Build. No forms, no funnels — one conversation with the person who will lead the work.