About Craft Grow
Rooted in practicality, understanding your brand's nuance.
Background
Craft Grow is a brand consultancy based in Seattle, Washington, founded and led by Josh Malczyk.
Josh’s day job has been global brand leadership in consumer sports: global brand director and global marketing director roles across K2 Sports’ brands — K2, Völkl, Marker, Dalbello, Line and Full Tilt — through their ownership by Jarden, Newell Brands and Elevate Outdoor Collective. That means brand strategy, endemic media, film and athlete programs, retail, and performance channels, with global scope, real distribution and actual inventory to move.
Outside it: brand architect on the founding team of Season Eqpt, a ski and snowboard brand built not to expire, and co-founder and publisher of Ori, a twice-yearly print magazine about travel told from the source.
What makes the practice unusual is the other half. The person writing the positioning also audits the merchant feed, structures the product data, writes the PDP copy, and instruments the analytics. That combination is rare, and it’s the reason Craft Grow exists — strategy that has to answer to execution tends to be better strategy.
The network
The right specialist for every part of the job.
- 01
Creative direction
Creative directors who carry one idea across a campaign, a launch or a whole brand, and keep every piece pointed the same way.
- 02
Design
Identity, packaging, digital and print designers who turn a position into something you can see and hold.
- 03
Motion and animation
Animators and motion designers for product explainers, brand systems in motion and the short loops social runs on.
- 04
Film, photography and storytelling
Directors, photographers and storytellers who find the real story in a product, a place or a team, and tell it well.
- 05
Copy and editorial
Copywriters and editors for launch lines, product pages, long-form pieces and anything else with a word count.
- 06
Software and data
Developers and engineers for sites, storefronts, integrations and the data plumbing that keeps them honest.
How it works
Bigger than one person, without the agency overhead. Josh leads every project, and the team around it is built for the work in front of it.
We scope the problem first. When part of the job calls for a skill outside the core practice — a launch film, a motion system, a rebuilt storefront, a campaign that needs its own creative director — we bring in the right person from the network for that piece, and only for as long as it needs them.
You keep one point of contact, one plan and one standard throughout. You never pay for a bench that isn’t working on your project.
How we work
Four things we’ll hold you to.
- 01
Strategy that survives a spreadsheet
A position that can't be turned into a product attribute, a page title, and a sales line isn't finished. The test of a strategy is whether people downstream can act on it without asking what it means.
- 02
The boring layer matters most
Feeds, taxonomy, naming conventions, measurement. It's unglamorous and it's usually where the money is — because nobody wants to own it, so nobody does.
- 03
Say the true thing specifically
Vague superlatives are what brands reach for when they don't know what's actually good about the product. The specific truth is almost always more persuasive than the general claim.
- 04
Small scope, real answer
We’d rather solve one thing properly than sell a program. If a project doesn’t need us, we’ll say so — that’s worth more to both of us than a retainer.
Off the clock
Most of the photographs on this site are Josh’s own, taken in the same places the products we work on get used — on snow, in the mountains and along the coast.
Engagements
Most work is project-based with a defined scope and endpoint. Some clients keep a standing day or two a month for the ongoing stuff — feed health, launch reviews, the questions that come up between projects.
Craft Grow is deliberately small at its core. That means direct access to Josh and no account layer, with specialists joining only when the work calls for them. It also means we take on a limited number of projects at a time. If the timing doesn’t work, we’ll tell you early.