How an Experiential Marketing Agency, Coffee ’n Clothes, Freed Its Founder from Day-to-Day Execution

key functions supported (sales, operations, recruiting, production & administration)

additional Oceans operators added since

30 to 50

live brand activations managed at any time

Industry

Agency

Company size

Startup

Role

Executive assistants

Published

July 28, 2026

Introduction

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Coffee ’n Clothes (CNC) started in 2014 as an Instagram page blending fashion and coffee, and grew into an end-to-end experiential marketing company producing immersive brand activations for clients like Dolce & Gabbana, Uber Eats, L’Oréal, Mattel, and Nike.

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Recognized by AdWeek, Forbes, Inc., and Business of Fashion, and named to the Inc. 5000 list of America’s fastest-growing companies in 2025, CNC runs a distributed team across the US, Mexico, Canada, the UK, Germany, and France.

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Founder and CEO Ryan Glick partnered with Oceans Talent in 2023 with one goal: spend the least possible time on communication and execution, and the most on sales, vision, and the company’s move from a national to an international footprint. That meant the operational layer of the company had to be owned by someone else, end to end.

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The Challenge: A Founder Running the Machine Alone

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CNC runs a rolling backlog of 30 to 50 named-brand activations in flight at any time, across a fast-growing, distributed team. Three obstacles stood between Ryan and the founder role he actually wanted:

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Execution gravity. The calendar, the inbox, the pipeline, and the budgets all routed through Ryan. A founder running 30 to 50 live activations cannot also run the machine underneath them.
The process lived in one head. For years, CNC’s operations existed in Ryan’s head and a stack of Google Sheets. Nothing was documented, transferable, or delegable.
The trust bar. Handing this off only works if the person can make judgment calls without checking in. Task-level help wouldn’t move the needle; CNC needed embedded ownership.

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Before Oceans, I was the bottleneck. My calendar, my inbox, it all sat with me, and none of it was documented anywhere but my head. Mishaal and Isura didn’t just take tasks off my plate, they helped me build the systems CNC runs on now.

Ryan Glick

Founder & CEO

Integration & Results

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Mishaal, Executive Assistant+ (embedded since August 2023). Mishaal sits inside Ryan’s calendar, inbox, pipeline, HubSpot, Ramp expenses, and Google Workspace admin. He built CNC’s processes from the ground up, deliberately around Google Sheets, the tool Ryan actually uses, then layered AI and automation on top where it held up. His scope, three years in:

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Ryan’s operating layer. Full calendar ownership, weekly Ramp reconciliation, and invoicing, plus leading RFIs involving L’Oréal, Meta, and Unilever as the coordinator across finance, accounts, strategy, resourcing, and production.
The infrastructure underneath. Owns the core inbox and communications infrastructure the wider team runs on, and provided interim tech support until CNC hired a dedicated tech team.

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Isura, Business Operations Specialist (embedded since February 2025). Isura runs the marketing engine behind CNC’s growth:

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The case-study engine. Owned end-to-end: one case study built from every project, a minimum of five per month, structured as Problem / Solution / Impact, and pushed to the client list as they ship.
Social and the founder’s voice. Both CNC channels run on content calendars he maintains, and he has run Ryan’s personal LinkedIn outreach as a standing workstream since April 2026.

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Conclusion

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One operator for almost three years. A second for eighteen months. Between them, Mishaal and Isura hold Ryan’s calendar, pipeline, budgets, marketing, and case-study engine, and CNC has added 3 more Oceans Talent operators since. Ryan got the founder role he was after: out of execution, focused on sales, vision, and the move from national to international.

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Ryan Glick

Founder & CEO

Coffee ’n Clothes