Two companies. One Gemini. No apology.
A note on identity, focus, and the operator-founder bet I'm placing on both sides of the consumer brand table.
In January 2024, I left the corporate ladder for the last time.
I’d just spent two years as SVP at Society6, building the brand strategy and consumer model behind 40 billion PR impressions and the company’s first nationally-recognized campaign. Before that, two years scaling Tasc Performance from $2M to $5.1M in ten months — through a pandemic — and opening a second flagship in Houston that grew 13% YoY while everyone else’s retail was closing. Before that, a year at Barry’s — the world’s largest boutique fitness brand — leading expansion across 16 countries and 52 studios, restructuring MENA growth into a +70% year-over-year machine in four months.
Fourteen years. Roughly fifty brands. C-suite roles, fractional engagements, Fortune 500 advisory, startup pivots. The career arc looked complete from the outside.
But somewhere in the middle of restructuring MENA at Barry’s — sitting in a meeting with three franchisees in Dubai who had no shared playbook, watching demand outpace what any single market could absorb — I started to see two different problems at the same time.
The first problem was old. Consumer brands worldwide were stalling. The DTC era had crested in 2021. Fortune 500 marketing teams were calcifying around legacy KPIs. Founders were getting funded with no idea how to scale beyond a single market. Private equity was sitting on portfolios of stalled brands. The consultants and agencies who used to fix this had largely stopped operating like operators — they’d become deck factories.
The second problem was newer. I kept meeting people — high-functioning, ambitious people, mostly under 45 — who were quietly falling apart. They had the gym membership, the meditation app, the boutique fitness pass, the supplement stack, the wellness retreat booked for next month. None of it was fitting together. They were spending more on wellness than any generation in history and feeling more fragmented than ever. The infrastructure for living a non-fragmented life — body, mind, spirit, community, geography as one — didn’t exist. Not as a single thing.
The first problem is BrandHaus.
The second problem is THEYRE.
BrandHaus
I founded the original BrandHaus in 2016 with a simple thesis: consumer businesses were getting bigger and more global, but the agencies serving them hadn’t kept up. We grew it to a $2M practice in eighteen months and sold it to Omnicom. The thesis still holds — but the gap between what brands need and what most consultancies deliver has only widened.
So I’m bringing it back. Same name, same logo, sharpened practice.
BrandHaus today is a global brand and growth consultancy serving founders, CEOs, and the venture capital and private equity firms backing them. Five practices: global market expansion (built specifically from scaling brands across MENA, EU, UK, and the Americas), brand strategy and positioning, growth and demand strategy, digital and eCommerce transformation, and fractional CMO / operating partner engagements.
We work with a small number of brands per year. The format ranges from four-week strategy sprints to twelve-month operating-partner relationships. The bar is high in both directions — clients are vetted as carefully as we ask to be.
The pitch isn’t novel. The execution is.
THEYRE
THEYRE is the opposite kind of project. Where BrandHaus is the practice I’ve spent fourteen years building toward, THEYRE is the first thing I’ve ever wholly built from zero.
THEYRE is a members-only social wellness infrastructure for people who refuse to live a fragmented life. Body, mind, and spirit as one daily practice. Not an app. Not a single facility. An infrastructure — across houses, platform, goods, and travel.
The tagline is Live Together, and it’s not aspirational. It’s the operating premise.
I’m raising for THEYRE now. Pre-revenue, seed, and Series A conversations with investors in consumer, lifestyle, real estate, hospitality, and commerce. The thesis: wellness as a category is in its fragmentation era, and someone needs to put it back together. THEYRE is my bet on what comes next, and on the architecture that lets it happen.
More on that in future essays.
On doing two things
If you’ve been around consumer brands long enough, you’ve heard the warning: don’t do two things at once. Founders who are also consultants are perceived as part-time founders. Consultants who are also founders are perceived as distracted consultants. The market punishes split attention.
I’ve thought about that warning every day for the last six months.
Here’s why I’m doing it anyway:
The traditional advice assumes the two roles compete for cognitive load. They don’t. They feed each other.
Every time I sit across from a founder advising them on positioning, I learn something I bring back to THEYRE. Every time I make a hard call on what THEYRE is and isn’t, I sharpen the lens I bring to BrandHaus clients. The pattern recognition flows both ways. Most operators only ever see consumer brands from one side of the table. I’m sitting on both.
The traditional advice also assumes founders and consultants are different species. They’re not — or at least they shouldn’t be.
The best operators I’ve ever worked with were people who had built something themselves at some point. They knew the cost of every decision they were asking other teams to make. They had P&L scar tissue. They had skin in the game, not just opinions on the game.
I want BrandHaus clients to have someone in the room who is actively, currently making the same calls they are — at THEYRE, with my own capital, against the same kinds of bets they’re making.
And I want THEYRE investors to know that the founder they’re backing is the same person fifty other consumer brands have trusted to scale their business. Not a first-time operator betting it all on theory.
The two things aren’t a conflict. They’re a proof.
About Compound
This newsletter is where I’m going to think out loud about all of it.
The name comes from the operating belief that has guided my last fourteen years: the businesses that win are the ones where brand and performance compound on each other. Where growth builds growth. Where every dollar of investment makes the next dollar cheaper.
Most businesses don’t compound. They burn.
The work, always, is engineering the difference.
Compound will publish every other week. Roughly:
Operator’s notes on consumer brand building. What’s actually working. What’s actually broken. Pattern recognition from 50+ brands, served direct from inside the practice. The kind of thing I’d send to a CEO friend over WhatsApp.
Build-in-public updates from THEYRE. Decisions I’m making and why. Customer conversations I’m having. Things I get wrong. (There will be many.)
Long-form industry essays. Quarterly-ish. The bigger arguments about where consumer brands, wellness, global expansion, and operating talent are heading next.
Case studies. Anonymized when needed, named when possible. How specific problems got solved, end to end.
What I’m not going to write: think pieces I don’t have lived experience to back. Motivational content. Anything that wastes your time.
Who this is for
If you’ve found your way here, you’re probably one of four people.
If you’re a founder or CEO scaling a consumer brand — fashion, fitness, home, wellness, lifestyle, hospitality, anything category-defining — read along. Reach out when you’re stuck. We work with a small number of operators each year through BrandHaus. brandhausmarketing.com.
If you’re an investor in consumer, lifestyle, real estate, hospitality, or commerce — THEYRE is raising now and I’d love to talk. If you’re not investing in those categories but you back founders worth talking to, the door’s open anyway.
If you’re a fellow operator — at a brand, in a portfolio, between roles, advising — the newsletter and the work both exist to make the path easier. I’d love to know what you’re building.
If you’re a headhunter or search partner looking for a CMO, operating partner, or board member for a category-leading consumer brand — I’m selectively open through 2026.
Subscribe so you don’t miss the next one. Forward this to one person who’d find it useful. That’s the whole ask.
Live together.
— Blake J. Lopez Dubai · Los Angeles · New York
About Blake J. Lopez
Blake is a global C-suite marketing executive, founder of THEYRE, and Operating Partner at BrandHaus. 14 years across the consumer landscape. $2B+ in revenue influenced. Currently living in Miami with offices in Los Angeles, New York, and Dubai.
P.S. If you want to track what I’m doing in real time, I’m posting on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/blakejlopez. If you want to talk directly: b.lopez@brandhausmarketing.com.