Temilola Agbede Builds Marketing Resilience for Consumer Brands

“I spend my time helping founders and marketing teams build growth strategies that don’t live and die by the Meta algorithm,” Temilola Agbede says. Brands usually call her when the channel that drove their growth stops performing, and no one inside the company owns the plan for what comes next. She built a business in the gap.

Temilola Agbede is the founder of T.Blacksmith Consulting, a fractional marketing leadership and advisory practice for consumer brands. She spent 15+ years as an in-house marketer, moving from Fortune 500 companies like Estée Lauder to high-growth scale-ups including S’well, Love Wellness, and Dropps, managing P&Ls that ran from $10 million to well past $100 million.

A lifetime member of the Entreprenista League and one of its resident marketing experts, she now works as an independent partner to brands navigating growth, transition, or both. “The frameworks I use with $50 million brands are just as valuable for someone 2 years into building their first product.”

Her path from Fortune 500 marketing to an independent practice came down to an observation about how growth teams actually work.

A first business in African fabrics

Temilola always knew she wanted to own a business. The shape took longer to find. In 2019, she started Asa Blends, an online marketplace for African fabrics, and got her first real look at what building from nothing asks of a founder. “That experience gave me a real, hands-on understanding of what it takes to build something from nothing, long before I turned that same instinct toward T.Blacksmith Consulting,” she says.

Why fractional marketing leadership made sense

She actually started T.Blacksmith Consulting in 2022, while she was between full-time roles, and committed to it fully in 2024. What pushed the decision was a pattern she kept seeing at consumer brands under $100 million in revenue: the marketing team a business needs in January is rarely the marketing team it needs in July.

“Their needs shift constantly depending on what stage they’re at, and I saw that a lot of them would benefit more from a fractional marketing leader who can adjust as the business strategy shifts,” she says.

She brings both halves of her career into the room. “That range, big-company discipline and startup speed, is what I bring to the brands I work with now,” she says.

Growth that does not depend on one algorithm

The work itself is diversification. Temilola helps teams spread acquisition across DTC, Amazon, TikTok Shop, and Faire, and she gives retention and brand building the same weight as new customer acquisition. The goal is a system where all 3 compounds.

Her clients are consumer and lifestyle brands doing roughly $1 million to $50 million+ in annual revenue, mostly in beauty, health and wellness, home goods, fashion and lifestyle, and food and beverage. Some are founder-led and scaling fast with no one internally owning marketing strategy. Others are VC- or PE-backed and moving through a leadership transition or a growth inflection point.

“What they tend to have in common is a strong product and brand story that hasn’t fully translated into a marketing system that can scale with them,” she says.

Big wins this year

This past year she achieved major wins. She was selected as a marketing expert columnist for Inc., where she now publishes the strategic frameworks she uses with clients for a much wider audience. She also built the go-to-market strategy for a premium perimenopause and menopause wellness brand that launched this year, and she launched Stop the Leak, a workshop on Maven that walks founders and marketers through using AI to diagnose gaps in their customer journey.

“I built it because so many of the brands I talk to want to use AI strategically,” she says.

The work she is proudest of

Ask what she is proudest of and she points to the pro bono and low-bono mentorship she does with early-stage founders through accelerators. “Watching a founder go from not understanding why their site isn’t converting to having a clear, confident marketing strategy, and knowing I helped get them there without it costing them everything they have, is some of the most meaningful work I do,” she says.

What comes next is more of the same at a bigger scale. She plans to keep moving consumer brands toward real marketing resilience and keep building workshops and courses that hand people the foundational frameworks directly. Mentoring stays on the list every year. “Watching them build something real from nothing is part of why I do this work in the first place,” she says.

Her advice for founders who are curious about the Entreprenista League is short: “If you’re considering joining or just even curious, attend an event to learn more.” She also learned early that the community rewards a plan. “There are so many connections available through Entreprenista that it can be overwhelming at first, but having a plan to connect with the community is a great place to start.”

You can follow Temilola on LinkedIn, read her marketing column at Inc., find T.Blacksmith Consulting here, and browse her workshops and courses, including Stop the Leak, on Maven.

Temilola built T.Blacksmith Consulting alongside a community of women founders doing the same. No one should ever have to build a business alone. Consider this your official invitation to join us.