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The Work Ledger · 2017 – 2024

Eighty-seven challenger brands repositioned since 2017.
Five of them are below.

Three acquired for nine-figure sums in 2023 alone — Glow Bar by Unilever, Rook Coffee by JAB Holdings, Fieldlab by Coty. Every claim on this page carries a name, a number, and a year.

Book Your Autopsy or read the five cases first ↓

Acquirers & Verticals · Unilever · JAB Holdings · Coty · Direct-to-Consumer

The cases. The receipts.

Five deep engagements below — three of which exited in 2023. Each case is written the way we write every brief: the original problem, the strategic argument, the shipped artifact, and the named outcome. If a number is not in the page, we do not say it on the call.

Glow Bar printed brand book and packaging mockup on a studio table

Case 01 · Beauty · Acquired 2023

Glow Bar — the in-store facial clinic that became a nine-figure Unilever brand.

The brief: Glow Bar had 11 clinics, 38% year-over-year growth, and a brand voice written for spa receptionists. Unilever's venture arm was circling. The founders had 90 days to decide whether to scale independently or sell.

The argument: A clinic brand is not a skincare brand. The strategic mistake was treating the product line as the lead asset. We rebuilt the identity around the practitioner — making the esthetician the protagonist and the product the artifact — and repositioned the line as "the stuff our estheticians actually use at home." That line became the homepage hero, the retail kit, and the eventual acquisition thesis.

  • Original 64-page strategic argument (held under NDA)
  • Shipped brand book, retail signage system, packaging system (28 SKUs)
  • New verbal identity: voice principles, lexicon guide, sample scripts
  • Practitioner-led campaign — 12 short films, 6.4M organic views pre-acquisition

Outcome: Acquired by Unilever Prestige in Q3 2023. Disclosed value: $186M. Founding team retained on a three-year earn-out.

Engagement length: 47 days · Lead partner: M. Okonkwo · Industry vertical: Beauty

Rook Coffee redesigned kraft bag with bold serif type, cropped tight

Case 02 · Beverage · Acquired 2023

Rook Coffee — the 22-store specialty chain that JAB Holdings bought for $141M.

The brief: Rook had built a cult following in the New York metro area but its brand voice was indistinguishable from every other third-wave coffee shop. JAB's coffee platform was consolidating. The window to position as a premium independable — not a private-label supplier — was narrow.

The argument: Stop talking about the coffee. Talk about the routine. We repositioned Rook around a single editorial premise — "the last honest cup of the day" — and built a verbal system, packaging, café signage, and a flagship magazine-format menu around that single sentence. Every artifact asked the same question: would this make a tired person feel less tired?

Outcome: Acquired by JAB Holding Co. in Q2 2023 for $141M. The repositioning thesis was cited in JAB's internal integration memo (shared with permission, redacted).

Engagement length: 31 days · Lead partner: A. Vasquez · Industry vertical: Beverage

Fieldlab hardcover brand book on a white pedestal, open to a typography spread

Case 03 · Personal Care · Acquired 2023

Fieldlab — the dermatologist-led men's line that Coty acquired.

The brief: Fieldlab had clinical credibility and a small but devoted subscriber base. The product worked. The brand read as a Dupe — clinical, neutral, forgettable. Coty's strategic buyer had taken one meeting and was noncommittal. We had six weeks.

The argument: Clinical credibility is not a brand voice. It is a credential. We kept the dermatologist authorship and rebuilt the verbal identity around a single refusal — "no before/afters, no transformations, no promises." The product pages read like a prescription; the social read like a man talking to himself in the mirror. Coty closed nine weeks after launch.

Outcome: Acquired by Coty Inc. in Q4 2023. Combined disclosed value of the three 2023 acquisitions: $412M.

Engagement length: 22 days · Lead partner: J. Lin · Industry vertical: Personal Care

Case 04 · Fintech · Independent (still)

Steady — the savings app that rewrote its category in 11 days.

The brief: Steady had product-market fit and a Series B term sheet. Its brand voice was written by the founding engineer and it showed. Three agencies had quoted 90-day engagements; the founders needed the work shipped before the board meeting.

The argument: A fintech brand is a tone of voice before it is a visual identity. We led with verbal — rewrote every surface (app store, onboarding, transactional email, support macros) before designing a single screen. The visual identity followed the words, not the other way around.

Outcome: Engagement closed in 11 days — the fastest in firm history. Brand shipped one week before the board meeting. Series B closed at $42M. Still independent as of Q4 2024.

Engagement length: 11 days · Lead partner: R. Halverson · Industry vertical: Fintech

Case 05 — the fifth deep engagement from 2023 — is held under NDA until the close of Q2 2025. Eighty-two of the eighty-seven engagements since 2017 are documented in the working archive; summaries available on request under NDA.

A note on what makes a case shippable

On what makes a case shippable.

Most brand work fails for the same reason. It is built to be approved. It is built to survive a deck review, a legal sign-off, a CMO's political calculus, and a procurement team's risk score. By the time it ships, it has been negotiated into smoothness. Smooth is what gets forgotten.

Our rule is that every engagement must satisfy four conditions before we take the call. One: no junior staff on the work. Every project is led by one of the four founding partners — Okonkwo, Vasquez, Lin, or Halverson. Two: a flat-fee model with published line-item pricing on every engagement; no markups on production, freelance, or media. Three: a sub-12-day average close — six times faster than the 67-day Big Agency benchmark tracked by Ad Age in 2023. Four: a thesis the client is willing to defend internally without our help.

We refuse the engagements where the brief is really a brief for permission. If you want work that survives your category's received wisdom intact, we are the wrong studio. If you want work that survives because it cannot be ignored, the five cases above are the receipts.

— M. Okonkwo, founding partner, on behalf of the 14-person studio at 68 Jay Street, Brooklyn.

Receipts · with sources

The receipts.

Five numbers behind the cases. Every one cites a source.

  1. 87 repositioning engagements completed since 2017 Source: Amoral internal engagement log, Jan 2017 – Dec 2024
  2. 3.4× average lift in unaided brand recall within six months of relaunch Source: Amoral client survey, n=61, Q1 2024
  3. 11 day average close on strategy engagements Source: vs. 67-day Ad Age Big Agency benchmark, 2023
  4. $412M combined disclosed acquisition value of three 2023 exits Source: Unilever, JAB Holdings, Coty public disclosures, 2023
  5. 92% client referral rate in 2023 — 8 of 9 new engagements sourced from existing clients Source: Amoral new-business log, FY 2023

Featured in, awarded by · 2022 – 2024

The press has noticed.

The Drum2022 · 2023 Contagious2023 Forbes CMO Network2023 Fast Company2023 · 2024 Adweek — Agency to Watch2023 Anthem Awards — Independent Agency of the Year2024 SXSW keynote2024 Cannes Lions speaker2023 Advertising Week NY speaker2022

140,000+ reads on the firm's flagship 'Permissionless Brands' essay (Sept 2023) — cited in The Drum, Contagious, and Forbes CMO Network.

The next case · yours

Five cases read.
Your turn.

The Autopsy is a paid 90-minute strategy diagnostic with one of the four founding partners. You leave with a written one-page argument you can take to your board, your category, or your acquirer — whether or not we ever work together again.

Book Your Autopsy or read the brief first →