The Glow Report is our quarterly institutional publication. Essays, field notes, and research on how consumer brands actually compound — written by our operators for founders, boards, and investors who would rather read a P&L than a pitch.
Why brand is the only marketing asset that accrues value the way a balance sheet does — and why most consumer founders give up on it one year too early. A plainspoken argument, with the numbers attached.
Read the featureWhy brand is the only marketing asset that behaves like equity — and why founders abandon it eighteen months too early.
A pattern we have now watched, verbatim, in 23 founder-led consumer companies. The cliff is not performance. It is patience.
We mapped every trigger, aisle, and decision moment between category entry and conversion — across 112 brands. Here is what only the best ones own.
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.
Small countries force compression. Compression reveals sequencing. Sequencing is the only thing American brands keep getting wrong.
Three pieces of advice we gave for years that turned out, once we watched outcomes, to be confidently wrong. This is the correction.
A defence of the buyer meeting, the short deck, the samples case, and the founders who still get on a plane to be in the room.
Fourteen days, eleven categories, one conclusion — Japanese CPG treats the shelf like stage design. Most of the West still treats it like storage.
A case study, disguised as a conversation, with a founder who stepped back, handed the brand to operators, and then came quietly back in.
Every single-SKU consumer business has to answer it. Most answer it wrong, and then argue about formulation when the issue was architecture.
We catalogued the aesthetic moves of 84 consumer brands launched in the last three years. Here is what is converging, what is tired, and what is underpriced.
Our annual ranking of the hundred consumer brands compounding the fastest — and the ten we are politely done defending.
Every SKU on a shelf is an unsigned agreement with its buyer. The brands that win treat the bottle like the terms sheet, not the marketing.
Door economics for consumer founders — how to read a door, price a door, stack doors, and know which to walk away from.
Launches are a category mechanic, not a brand mechanic. We are quietly moving our clients to seasons — and keeping receipts.
Why taste is the single most underpriced form of advantage left in consumer, and why most investors will not fund it until it is already priced in.
A decision framework for founders staring at a brand that has outgrown itself — and the small number of signals that separate the two responses.
A practical method — ten minutes, a notebook, and one category — for seeing what every buyer already sees and most founders do not.
Not in the narcissistic sense. In the operational sense — the founder is the only renewable source of taste the brand has for its first four years.
We re-ran the Romaniuk work against twelve of our clients. The findings both confirmed and quietly broke the textbook. Here is the annotated result.
Sampling is the most mispriced channel in consumer. It is also the one your growth lead will resist most, because it refuses to be dashboarded.
You do not beat a category leader by being louder. You beat them by being the one brand their customers do not feel the need to defend.
Three days in New York with retailers. The single most useful sentence was whispered by a Target buyer — and it was not about product.
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.
The last mile in consumer is not shipping. It is occupancy — the decision a customer makes to keep you on a countertop.
A taxonomy of the twelve recurring syntactic moves we see in the brands that age well — and the four we see in the ones that do not.
Six days spent in beauty halls, perfumers' cellars, and one extremely well-lit patisserie. The lesson was about restraint.
Why feed-optimised creative erodes the brand that funds it, and why the social lead who saves your business is the one willing to lose the week.
Every consumer deck contains it — the slide with four brand-equity charts that mean nothing. Here is what should replace it, and why boards will not love it at first.
Primary research, 88 categories, 2,400 shoppers. The shelf is more mnemonically dense than any ad unit you will ever buy. Here is the proof.
A short essay about watching a beloved brand get sold, and what it taught us about the gap between brand equity and transaction price.
A field report from the only retailer that has successfully productised founder taste. And why most others merchandise it to death.
And the one she ended up doing eighteen months later, for reasons we could not have identified at the time. A short case in restraint.
Most consumer categories are being killed not by competition, but by boredom. Premium, at its best, is a refusal to be boring.
Why we started a publication, what we will and will not write, and the ten consumer brands we believe will still matter in a decade.
Our in-house operating rhythm for consumer brands — four quarters, twelve moves, a repeatable pattern that outlasts any single hire.
Why the tool most commonly used to kick off brand work is also the tool most responsible for derivative, interchangeable, unlovable brands.
Volume is the cheapest thing a consumer brand can buy. Restraint is the most expensive — and the only one that keeps appreciating.
A quick method for telling, in the first paragraph, whether a brief is solving a brand problem or paying for someone else's decision.
And the six things it forced us to put in place that we would otherwise have skipped. A short essay, written with hindsight.
We reverse-engineered ten consumer brands that are still being bought by the children of their original buyers. The pattern is uncomfortably small.
Ten slides we prepared for a founder we would not ultimately take on — and the single question that, asked early, would have spared us both.
Why we will never again describe ourselves as a studio, and what we would like the consumer category to call firms like ours instead.
Four series that return every volume. Written by our operators, edited by us, and available whether or not you have ever signed a contract with this firm.
Reported dispatches from cities, stores, and the occasional perfumer's cellar. Hand-edited by Théo Marchetti.
Packaging and retail criticism, written the way a food critic writes — tasting menus, not product reviews. Edited by Ada Chen.
Essays on the commercial side of brand — margins, cadences, allocation, discipline. Jackson Morice, mostly.
Books, films, exhibitions, and buildings we send to clients. Curated by the studio. Updated each volume.
A short, annotated reading list for consumer founders. None of these are marketing books. They are not supposed to be. They are supposed to make the marketing decisions easier.
Chapter three pays for the book alone. Buy physical.
Read with Romaniuk's follow-up. Skip the TikToks.
The reference we hand every new associate in week one.
Read for the rhythm of decisions under scarcity.
A corrective for anyone being seduced by their own deck.
The chapter on affordances is the whole of consumer design, compressed.
The Glow Report exists because consumer branding, as a discipline, has almost no serious writing attached to it. There are agency blogs. There are performance marketing newsletters. There are the Ogilvy quotes circulating like folklore. There is almost nothing a founder can read, on a Sunday, that would materially improve a Monday-morning decision about their brand.
We started this publication so that would stop being true. Every piece we publish answers one question: would an operator be measurably better off for having read this? If the answer is no, we do not run it — even if it is well-written, and even if it is ours.
Everything we publish is free, and will stay that way. Our clients fund it. Our writers are our operators. And once a year, at the end of every fourth volume, we publish a frank assessment of what we got wrong in the previous year's pieces. Volume I is due for that treatment this quarter.
Editor-in-Chief — Saoirse Hale
We do not send a weekly digest. We do not resend old pieces. We do not have a drip sequence. Every three months we post a printed copy of the volume to your address, and email a PDF the same day. That is the whole programme.