Welcome to the dynamic world of Glorify, as introduced to us through an insightful interview with Omar Farook on
Website Planet.
This revolutionary AI-powered graphic design tool is tailor-made for e-commerce businesses and marketers, offering a seamless way to craft captivating ads, banners, and more. Stemming from Farook’s own journey from a motion design graduate to an entrepreneurial visionary, Glorify represents the culmination of real-world needs meeting innovative solutions.
Born from a necessity in the e-commerce space, Glorify has quickly distinguished itself with unique offerings like AI-powered background removal and an extensive template library, making it an indispensable asset for anyone looking to elevate their online presence with professional-grade designs.
Could you introduce Glorify to our readers?
Glorify is an AI-powered graphic design tool, built for e-commerce businesses and marketers, that helps you create beautiful ads, banners, posts, and more–easily and at scale.
What’s the origin story of your company, including the initial inspiration and its journey up to now?
I graduated in motion design in 2011, at the time I had hardly any understanding of business or entrepreneurship. While working in a few startups, I was introduced to the Amazon FBA business model. For the first time it all clicked, especially since Amazon FBA is a super easy business model to understand. I absorbed all the training available and launched my first product in 2014. Within just 2 weeks I managed to sell out all my units. I believe an unfair advantage I had over other new sellers was that I had a background in graphic design and branding, so I was able to create a compelling brand with a story-driven sequence of product images in my gallery.
With my initial success, I had others from the Amazon FBA community requesting me to help them with their product images and brand strategy to help them stand out. This led to the birth of a design agency that helped Amazon sellers and other e-commerce businesses launch a fresh brand. As demand grew, eventually the agency grew to a point where we had to say no to a lot of businesses since they could not afford our rise in pricing. This is when I had the idea to automate the process through a SaaS design tool.
Glorify was born–we hired a developer (now our CTO) and got to work in 2016. We launched our MVP to the early adopter market in September 2019 and generated close to $300K in our first 3 months.
What made our launch a success was 2 factors:
1. A niche product: There were plenty of design tools, but nothing built specifically for e-commerce with product-focused template collections.
2. AI-powered background removal: AI is popular now, but in 2019 it was still almost unheard of. We partnered with an amazing company called Clipping Magic, which built a state-of-the-art algorithm to automatically remove backgrounds from any photo. Although it is common now, this was a game changer at the time for product images.
Since our launch, we have had a series of ups and downs. Product improvements, failed experiments, good hires, bad hires, you name it. Throughout the following years, we started making connections with VCs and pitching at events. Eventually, in 2021, we secured a deal with Fuel Ventures for a $2m pre-seed round, just before we ran out of money!
People say money solves problems, but it definitely didn’t for us. Design tech is one of the most complex and resource-consuming. We had a huge vision for the future; we wanted to build an infinite canvas that allowed people to effortlessly create content with unlimited possibilities. To achieve this we had to rewrite our entire application on a new tech stack. Due to this, we had to spend 2 years in the alpha/beta stage. It was tough, as we struggled to generate revenue from Glorify as we fell far behind our competitors. This forced us to look at new avenues to generate revenue while our developers continued building.
In Q4 2022, to generate a new stream of revenue, we started Collabify. Design, a UI/UX design service as a subscription. We were able to scale it to $10K MRR within the first 3 months. It kept growing from there, helping manage our burn rate much better.
In Q4 2023, we were finally ready to launch the latest version of Glorify. With a fresh new campaign, we’ve been rebuilding our user base and community, focussing on creating features that automate the design process for scale. We also recently launched a template marketplace where users can list their creations for sale and earn 100% of the revenue + affiliate commissions on top. We’re finally starting to see Glorify grow again; in fact we had our first 20% growth in MRR this month alone. We are excited about the future and determined to continue to work our way toward becoming the only graphics design tool you need for creating all your marketing assets in just a few clicks!
Can you outline the range of services Glorify provides?
Glorify is an AI-powered graphics design tool that has a range of features that help users effortlessly design beautiful content super fast and at scale. Some of our standout features are:
- AI-powered background removal tool
- 11,000+ templates
- Infinite canvas to manage all your designs in one place
- In-built stock libraries of millions of photos, backgrounds, graphics, illustrations, icons, and videos.
- Pro design tools like our pen tool, smart shapes, layers panel, effects, and more
- Simple video editor (beta)
- Hyper-realistic fully customizable 3D mockups
- Batch creation and editing tool: Create multiple consistent designs at once and edit them at scale.
- Other AI tools: Open AI for copywriting, Image generator, product studio background generator
- Project folders, and brand kits for better organization
Tons more in the pipeline.
What drives Glorify; what is your core mission?
Our core mission is to help ambitious people effortlessly design beautiful marketing materials at scale.
How does Glorify stand out from competitors in your field?
What makes Glorify unique is the experience.
We’re like Miro and Canva combined. One place for entrepreneurs and marketers to easily start creating assets for their online business and grow into a team–all whilst having a lot of fun.
What are your predictions for future trends and developments within your industry?
I believe a combination of AI and AR is the future of design. Eventually, humans will be as close as possible to being able to design with just their thoughts.
That’s why we’re really excited to implement Glorify into Apple Vision Pro’s visionOS. We want to be the first of many to come who will innovate and pioneer within this space.
Find out more at: www.glorify.com
