Australian Glow.
From a founder's side project to a category-leading export brand in 11 markets.
A three-year engagement across every practice we run. We rewrote the positioning, rebuilt the packaging system for retail-grade scan speed, modelled the CAC-to-EMV conversion for every channel, and pitched the buyers that got it into Ulta, Priceline, and Boots. The numbers that matter moved.
- Category
- Premium skincare & self-tan
- Engagement
- Brand · Retail · Social
- Timeline
- Dec 2023 — present
- Stage at start
- A$14M revenue, DTC-led
- Stage today
- A$78M, 11 markets
By late 2023, Australian Glow was a top-three self-tan brand on Shopify in Australia and a heavy spender on TikTok. The product was excellent. The community was real. The P&L, on paper, looked healthy. But the founder had a problem she did not yet have the language for: the business had hit its ceiling on DTC, and every attempt to translate its digital performance into bricks — Priceline, Chemist Warehouse, Ulta, Boots — had either been rejected outright or softly shelved.
The buyer feedback, when it came back, was polite and fatal: the shelf set was confusing, the category language was generic, the packaging photographed beautifully but did not read under retail lighting, and the brand did not look like a brand a category buyer could stake a planogram on. The business was a clever DTC story. It was not, yet, a trade story.
We were asked, originally, to "refresh the packaging." We did not quote for that. We came back with a different argument: the packaging was the symptom, not the brief. The brief was a three-practice transformation — brand architecture, retail system, social model — run in that order, on an aggressive timeline.
Stop arguing with Bondi Sands. Start arguing with La Mer.
The single strategic move of the engagement: we argued that Australian Glow was not a mass-market tanning brand doing premium things. It was a premium skincare brand that happened to make tan.
This was not semantic. It shifted which retail shelf we pitched for, which price point we defended, which adjacencies we advertised against, and — critically — which brand language the founder was licensed to use publicly. The category had trained buyers to read self-tan as FMCG. We made the case that Australian Glow belonged in the dermocosmetic adjacency.
We triangulated three positioning hypotheses against trade data, retailer interviews, and a custom conjoint we ran through a panel of 1,200 category shoppers. The "premium skincare" frame scored meaningfully higher on purchase intent at A$58 than the "performance tan" frame did at A$32.
What we redefined- Category — self-tan → glow skincare.
- Price architecture — hero SKU repositioned at A$58 (was A$32).
- Adjacencies — away from sun-care; into serums and moisturisers.
- Claim hierarchy — "streak-free" demoted; "skin barrier-safe" promoted.
An identity built for retail light, not ring light.
The existing identity was built for Instagram. It was pretty under a ring light, sentimental at arm's length, and completely illegible at the four-metre shelf read a Priceline planogram requires.
We rebuilt the wordmark, the hero lockup, and the packaging architecture against one constraint: scan-speed at 4m, in 2700K retail warm-white, on a 120mm-wide bottle. The wordmark was re-drawn in a bespoke serif with heavier stroke contrast and a customised ampersand. We introduced a secondary monogram — 'AG' — built for compact formats (caps, shoulder marks, accessories) so the brand could wear itself in places the wordmark couldn't fit.
Colour moved from a five-colour florals-and-foils palette to a disciplined three-colour system — a warm bone, a deep bronze, and a single lime accent kept as an editorial tool only. A typographic voice — one serif for body, one sans for claims — replaced eight competing script fonts across the previous system.
What we built- Bespoke wordmark — 6 weights, 3 sizes, variable-font.
- 'AG' monogram for caps, foils, and accessory marks.
- Three-colour system; eight retired.
- Type pair: Instrument Serif (body) + Söhne (claims).
- Brand book, 140pp; retail mechanics playbook, 42pp.
A small sample of the shipped system.
Full identity system, retail mechanics playbook, and channel strategy decks available to qualified buyers under NDA.
Fourteen SKUs. Three block-codes. One shelf-block that hunts.
A shelf-block is not decoration. It is commercial property. We designed the 14-SKU packaging system to hold real estate the way a La Roche-Posay or Drunk Elephant block does — by using colour, scale and repetition to make the range unmistakable at walk-by speed.
We built three "block codes" — hydration (warm bone), bronzing (deep bronze), and the hero (a lime accent flash). Within each block, the SKUs inherit a single architecture: wordmark lock, claim panel, ingredient glyph. No illustration, no floral treatment, no foil on the shoulder. The system hunts as a block first and reads as a bottle second.
We then ran the shelf test the right way — photographed under retail-spec 2700K warm-white at 4m, 2m, and 40cm, and ran a 50-respondent shelf-recall study against three competitive sets. The redesigned range out-recalled the previous one by 71% at 4m.
Retail mechanics- 14 SKUs rationalised from 22.
- 3 block codes; 1 shelf-strip system across all retailers.
- ASP moved A$32 → A$58 with no meaningful volume loss.
- Retail listings: 46 → 154 across ANZ alone in 10 months.
We pitched the buyers ourselves. Eleven markets in fourteen months.
Most brand consultancies leave at the airport. We got on the plane. Our retail team took the pitch to buying committees at Priceline, Chemist Warehouse, Ulta, Boots, Sephora, Douglas, and Mecca — in the room, with the founder, with the decks we wrote.
The pitch kit was its own object: a P&L-grade sell-in model, a 24-month planogram proposition, a dedicated shelf-strip spec, a category-growth argument built from retailer-specific data, and a media commitment calendar. Not a brand book with prices on the back.
The important number inside the engagement: the win rate. Of the twelve buyer meetings we took in 2024, ten converted to listings or trials. That is not marketing. That is what happens when the pitch is written by the people who also wrote the brand.
Markets opened- Australia — Priceline, Chemist Warehouse, Mecca.
- UK — Boots, Space NK.
- US — Ulta (pilot 420 doors → 1,100), Bluemercury.
- EU — Douglas (DE/NL), Sephora (FR), Flaconi.
- ANZ + 8 international markets in 14 months.
We halved paid CAC — by finally paying owned and earned properly.
The legacy social model was performance-led and expensive. Meta and TikTok had become the de facto brand — running the tone, the cadence, the claims, the creative. Cutting paid meant building the other two levers until they were load-bearing.
We rebuilt around a three-lever model — Owned (editorial content, CRM, on-site), Earned (creator strategy, PR, community), Paid (disciplined, not dominant). We retired 11 of 14 paid creative templates. We invested in 6 senior creators as paid retainers, not one-off posts. We built a CRM engine that delivered 42% of revenue from owned channels within 11 months.
The attribution model was rewritten. Paid no longer carried the credit for conversions that owned and earned had already warmed. The correction alone reallocated A$1.9M of spend and lifted blended ROAS 33%.
The model, shipped- CRM engine — 42% of revenue from owned.
- Creator bench — 6 retained, not one-offs. EMV 3.1× prior year.
- Paid creative retired: 11 of 14 templates.
- Blended paid CAC — 2024 vs 2023 baseline: −38%.
"The numbers we hit with Jackson's team are the numbers we tried and failed to hit with three holding-company agencies before them."
What actually moved.
Measured Dec 2023 → Feb 2026All figures are verified with Australian Glow's CFO and drawn from management reporting. Retail listings tracked via SKUTrack Q4 2025. CAC and ROAS computed blended across Meta, TikTok, Google, and Pinterest. The engagement continues: Ulta doors scaling in H1 2026; EU expansion Q3.
The people behind the engagement.
Engagement lead
- Jackson Morice Founder & principal
- Saoirse Hale Strategy director
Brand
- Théo Marchetti Creative director, identity
- Ada Chen Design lead, typography
- Lena Osei Copy lead, verbal
Retail
- Ned Halloran Retail & commercial director
- Daniel Reeves Packaging lead
- Zara Obi Channel & buyer strategy
Social
- Zara Obi Social director
- Maeve Lindqvist Creator programme
- Rohan Pillai Measurement & CRM
A transformation of this scale?
If your business is at a comparable inflection point — mass retail on the table, category position unsettled, paid economics strained — write. A call with our founding team inside three working days.