From Main Street to Sesame Street

Seven years ago, Hagan Walker was on a path for a career as an engineer with Tesla.

Now he can walk from the restored former grocery store in Starkville where he lives to his own business downtown, located in an old theater that hasn’t shown a movie since the 1960s. Instead of helping engineer the latest electric car models, Walker and his team at Glo design and sell children’s toys. Lots of them.

“It’s a different route than I thought I would take,” Walker said. “That’s for sure.”

Glo sprang from a class project at Mississippi State into a drink light company in 2015. Two years later, it expanded by introducing Glo Pals toys that used the same liquid-activated light-up cube technology.

The company now ships its products to 40 countries, boasts a licensing deal with Sesame Street and is finalizing a fundraising round of nearly $1.7 million that sets Glo’s most recent valuation at $17 million.

That success recently earned the company Industry of the Year honors from the Greater Starkville Development Partnership.

At the center of Glo is the one-two punch of Walker, the CEO, and company vice president Anna Barker — both still south of 30 — leading a team of roughly 25 employees on a journey that never seems to take the same route two days in a row.

“I tell people all the time, ‘The day I get bored or keep doing the same thing over and over again is the day I don’t want to do this anymore,’” Walker said. “Every day here is different.”

• • •

Underneath The Rex’s original chandelier and between the exposed antique brick walls is a warehouse with boxes full of Glo Pals and Glo Cubes ready for shipment. Some will go to places like Macy’s, Nordstrom and other retailers, large and small. Others will head to Sesame Place theme parks and Sea World.

“We do all our fulfillment here,” Walker said. “When we moved in, we thought, ‘Wow, we’re going to have space forever.’ We’re already basically out of space. We’ve been very fortunate but it’s just been hard to plan because things have grown so quickly.”

COVID-19, and the supply chain issues that came with it, delayed Glo’s move-in date until March 2021, Walker said, forcing the company to operate for about nine months in an old candy store on Lafayette Street.

Now nearly a year into The Rex, the modern glass-walled office space in the middle of the building departs from the otherwise truly “historic” aesthetic. But Walker and Barker specially requested that touch as a tribute to the company’s own history.

“We’re paying homage to the E-Center,” Barker said.

As a student, Walker and his then-business partner Kaylie Mitchell took their fledgling Glo-Cube to MSU’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Outreach, commonly referred to as the E-Center, in the College of Business. There, they found the advice and resources he needed to build a startup with his drink light marketed primarily to bars and restaurants.

Barker, also a student at the time of Glo’s founding, was trying to develop her own startup through the E-Center. Ultimately, she teamed up with Walker after Mitchell’s departure from the company.

“I would say Glo is the hero story of entrepreneurship out of MSU,” said Eric Hill, entrepreneurship director for the E-Center. “Glo permeates every story we tell because it shows what’s possible.”

Both Walker and Barker sit on the E-Center’s advisory board and evaluate pitches from aspiring entrepreneurs. They also host classes and camps for the center.

“They’re as much a part of the E-Center as anyone else,” Hill said.

• • •

Pippa is into science, technology, math and engineering. She loves to read, but she’s a little shy. Lumi is more artistic. She enjoys painting and dancing.

Alex is kind of old-school. He loves handwritten letters.

These three, along with Blair and Sammy, are the original Glo Pals. Each is a different color. All have a hand drawn, abstract look.

“It looks really intentional now, but when we first got started it was just Hagan and I,” Barker said. “We had no designers. … We drew them.”

The doodled characters, each equipped with Glo’s liquid-activated light, were born from a conversation with a mother of a special needs child who used Glo Cubes in the water to calm her child during bath time.

Today, Walker said, the Glo Pals make up 90 percent of the company’s business.

The Glo Pals, and the story of why they were made, got Sesame Street’s attention. By 2020, Glo inked a licensing deal with Sesame Street to add Julia — a character with autism — and Elmo to the Glo Pals lineup. This spring, Glo will release three more Sesame Street-themed pals — Big Bird, Cookie Monster and Abby Cadabby.

Glo’s relationship with Sesame Street has been “wonderful.”

“It’s pretty awesome,” Walker said. “Even though they are much bigger than we are, they act like a very small company.”

“They loved that we were smaller,” Barker added. “They loved that every time they called us, they were talking to Hagan and me. After our first conversation, I rented the books and watched the shows. Then I sent them to Hagan and made him read the books and watch the shows.”

The Sesame Street characters have been a hit with customers so far, but Walker said they haven’t tempered sales for the original Glo Pals.

That gave the duo another idea.

“We’re moving more toward creating more products that create experiences, so the community we have can be actively involved in the Glo Pals World,” Barker said.

Part of that “world” includes developing characters’ personalities, likes and dislikes, even mannerisms and how the characters interact with one another. Another key element is free online resources on Glo’s website — from learning colors in French to letter-writing kits and other downloadable activities — focused on early childhood development during playtime.

“That’s how they work in a way that’s more than just a product,” Barker said.

Walker said his team also is developing accessories that will interact with each Glo Pal differently. He even hinted at there one day being a “Glo Pals show.”

“We’re trying to bring Glo Pals to life,” Walker said. “It’s kind of a cyclical process. We can do media stuff that’s free content, but it drives the brand value for Glo Pals where you want to go out and buy something. The other side of that is you can go out and buy a physical product and we can promote free educational resources from that.”

The true lesson for Glo Pals is diversifying and adapting, Walker said. While Glo Cubes still sell, orders dried up when government mandates forced restaurants closed during the pandemic. By then, in no small part because of a desperate mom’s bathtime trick for her child, the drink lights had already become a minor contributor to Glo’s top line.

“We made it this far because we listened to our customers,” Walker said.

• • •

Consequences of the pandemic still trickle through, few more jarring than the bill to ship their products from China over Christmas. In 2020, it cost $5,000. A year later: $32,000.

New York Times global economic correspondent Peter S. Goodman, covering worldwide supply chain issues, connected with Walker and learned of Glo’s issue. This summer Goodman may travel with Walker and Barker through other areas of Southeast Asia as they search for a site for a second factory.

Glo manufacturers its products at a factory in China. Adding another factory elsewhere should help diversify the company’s manufacturing and shipping options and hopefully keep costs down.

Walker said he looked for domestic options and was even willing to pay more to make Glo products in the U.S. It didn’t pan out.

“People ask us pretty consistently why we don’t make more here,” Walker said. “Our response is we do everything we can possibly do here. It would be way easier for us to get rid of half our team and have everything produced and packaged in China. … I don’t know if people realize how much of our production ability we have shipped overseas. It’s kind of a scary thought.”

Though the products are manufactured in China, packaging and graphic design is done in Starkville.

• • •

If you walk into Glo’s downtown building, you’ll likely see dogs, the friendly greeters and morale agents of the office so ingrained in the company’s culture that two of their names and photos — Reese, “director for hooman resources” and Canelo, in charge of “paw-blic relations” — are listed as staff on its website.

Employees’ pets or children frequent Glo’s office, Barker said, and the company allows flexible schedules to help promote a healthy work-life balance and provide a welcoming environment.

Even The Rex’s downtown location plays into Glo’s strategy of worker recruitment and retention, especially now that the company is adding new talent across its departments.

“Starkville is really ahead of the rest of the state on creating long-term solutions to combat (the export of talent from Mississippi),” Barker said. “There are certain things that are out of our control. We can’t, for example, turn Starkville into Nashville or Birmingham or New Orleans or Atlanta. But there are certain things that are within our control that young people, or people who might be looking at those bigger towns, are going to want.

“That’s having an office space downtown that feels modern and interesting, where they can bring their kids or pets,” she added. “Something dynamic and cool and where people wanted to go to work every day. We would have saved a ton of money just going and getting a metal building on Airport Road. There’s no way to compete with bigger cities once you do that.”

Most of Glo’s human staff are recent college graduates. An outlier to the pattern is Bernice Lile, 72, one of three full-time members of the fulfillment team. She’s also one of the longest-tenured employees, joining Glo as a part-timer in 2015.

“I lived behind Hagan’s mom in Columbus,” Lile said. “I was out of a job at the time, and she told Hagan about me. I’m grateful he gave me a chance.”

Processing 150 to 200 orders a day on average keeps her team busy. Sometimes it requires late nights.

“We do whatever we have to do to get it done,” Lile said. “Over time, the products have gotten a little different, the orders have gotten a little bigger and the demand is more. When we have to work nights, Hagan and Anna are right here working with us.”

• • •

Outside Glo’s office, on the Washington Street side, sits a 1928 phone booth with a rotary phone inside. Despite its appearance, it’s a fairly new addition to the streetside.

Walker found it in some tiny community between Starkville and his native Hattiesburg — he can’t exactly remember where. He restored it to pristine condition and programmed the phone to where each number dialed will give the listener a different tidbit of Starkville history.

The booth fits well with the juxtaposition of Glo’s historic aesthetic and the young, vibrant, innovative business buzzing inside. Walker thinks both ends of that juxtaposition are equally valuable.

“It’s acknowledging the past while shining light on the future,” he said.

STORY BY ZACK PLAIR

PHOTOS BY RORY DOYLE

Conflict disclosure: Individuals involved in the publication of this magazine are investors in Glo’s parent company.