Curious Futures Co.

Curious Futures is a boutique advisory and fractional operator firm founded by Merril Gilbert, targeting growth-stage consumer packaged goods founders who are already generating real revenue and facing high-stakes business decisions. The firm is not a traditional consultancy; it positions itself as an embedded strategic partner that works across the full operational landscape of a CPG business simultaneously, rather than focusing on a single functional slice such as finance, operations, or marketing. Gilbert brings direct CPG operating experience spanning production, co-packing, margins, market positioning, team building, and capital strategy, and also serves as a co-founder of Lumina Investment Group, giving the practice a dual perspective from both the operator and investor sides of the table. This investor-side access is presented as a core differentiator: clients benefit from understanding exactly what capital providers look for before entering fundraising conversations, reducing costly iterations and misaligned pitches. The firm's service model is structured in three sequential phases. The first is a fixed-fee business assessment priced at $950, which delivers a structured, comprehensive review of a founder's operations, margins, market position, team composition, and financial picture over a three-to-six-week engagement. The output is a prioritized action plan that distinguishes between what requires immediate attention and what can be deferred, with the explicit goal of preventing common and expensive mistakes such as premature hiring or mismatched co-packing relationships. The second phase focuses on capital strategy, helping founders determine whether outside funding is appropriate and, if so, which capital structure best fits their business, whether that is debt, revenue-based financing, grants, community capital, strategic partnerships, or equity. This phase is scoped individually and is explicitly not legal or financial paperwork preparation; rather, it is strategic alignment work performed before engaging attorneys and CFOs, with the intent of reducing the number of expensive professional engagements required. The third phase is an embedded operator retainer in which Gilbert stays actively involved in executing the plan, participating in key vendor negotiations, hiring decisions, and launch execution rather than handing off deliverables to another team. The firm references Pastry Smart as a case study of this embedded approach in practice. Curious Futures is designed for founders who have moved past ideation and are managing real operational complexity, capital decisions, and growth inflection points with limited margin for error.