A consumer brand group. Built in Melbourne. Working worldwide.
- Founded
- Melbourne, 2014
- Arms
- Portfolio · Build · Afterglow
- Publishing
- The Glow Report, quarterly
- Team
- 22 specialists
The short version — for the people in a hurry.
- A consumer brand group — we build, own, and advise.
- Operators first. Every recommendation is one we make to ourselves.
- Small enough to stay in the room. Senior enough to run it.
- Published. We write what we practise, every quarter.
- Independent. No fund, no holding company, no media rebates.
- A holding-company agency pretending to be a studio.
- A packaging shop that rebranded itself as "strategy."
- A performance agency that slapped "brand" on the website.
- A fund disguised as an operator.
- A place where decks travel further than the work.
Three arms. One argument.
The holding arm. Consumer brands we have founded, acquired, or taken equity in through Build. We operate each one on a decade horizon, through the same founding group. Australian Glow, and the next.
Retail relationships, supply chain, media. We partner with a small number of outside founders a year who have a product the world wants and no route to the shelves that sell it. We take equity. We stay for a decade.
Branding, retail, and social. Afterglow works on every brand in the portfolio and a small number of outside engagements each year. It is the creative and commercial discipline the rest of the group is run against.
The three arms share a founder, a P&L, and a single published record — The Glow Report. They are not business lines. They are the same argument, told through operating, distributing, and advising.
Glow exists because the best commercial problems are brand problems wearing other clothes — and the only honest way to prove that is to run a business by it.
I spent the first part of my career inside other people's consultancies. I watched enough rebrands get signed off that were lovely and unserious about what the P&L actually needed. I watched enough founders hand over a brand they built and get back a prettier version of a business they didn't recognise.
Glow was built to do the other thing. We would own the work. We would distribute it ourselves. We would only advise outside founders on the things we could already prove inside our own brands. The Portfolio, Build, and Afterglow arms are not a growth strategy — they are how the argument is kept honest.
If you are a founder at an inflection point, or an owner-operator looking for a group to hold your brand for a decade, write. I read every note.
Five principles.
Every consultancy has a philosophy. Most are indistinguishable from each other and almost all of them soften as soon as there is a revenue reason to bend. These five have survived every engagement, every acquisition, and every Build partnership Glow has signed. They are as much rules for what we will not do as what we will.
If a brand decision cannot survive a five-minute conversation with the CFO, it will not survive the year. We run every piece of work against the P&L it has to serve — including our own.
Every recommendation Afterglow makes is one we are already making to ourselves inside the portfolio. The work has to live with us. That changes what we are willing to sign off.
Positioning, pack, pitch, paid ad. If they are not saying the same thing, we stop and fix the source — not the symptom. The three arms exist so the argument never has to change hands.
Most of what matters in consumer happens between year three and year ten. Build holds equity for five years minimum. The Portfolio is a decade. Afterglow engagements are twelve months, not three.
If we know something useful about growing consumer brands, we write it down. Every quarter, in The Glow Report, for free. It is a condition of running the group.
Five is a commitment we can defend to a client who asks us to break one of them — which happens, and where the principle is useful.
Twenty-two people. One building.
CareersA working building in Collingwood, Melbourne.
All three arms operate from the same four-storey industrial building off Smith Street. Afterglow's studio floor. Build's operations floor. A print room, a model shop, a shoot space, and a kitchen that runs properly between twelve and two.
The building was a commitment. It is where we pin work on walls, hang identity in the light we designed it under, and build packaging prototypes at full scale. It is also where we host the quarterly Glow Report launches. You are welcome to visit.
The parts we put on the record.
Recognition
- Brand New Best of 2025
- D&AD Wood Pencil, 2024
- Type Directors Club, 2024
- AGDA Distinction, 2024
- Fast Company Innovation by Design
Press
- Monocle
- The Business of Fashion
- Vogue Business
- It's Nice That
- Inside Retail
Portfolio & clients
- Australian Glow
- Takeoff Skin
- Dr Pickles
- Smile Makers
- Build partnerships
Three doors. One conversation.
If you are a founder at an inflection point, an owner-operator thinking about a home for your brand, or a category partner looking at distribution through Build — write directly. One conversation with the founding team, inside five working days.