About
Started in a garage. On purpose.
Glassy is a small web design and SEO studio in Costa Mesa, built by people who'd rather do great work for a short client list than average work for a long one. No account layer, no jargon walls — just the four of us, doing the work ourselves.
The story
Nick's version of events
Nick Halden grew up in Newcastle, on the New South Wales coast, close enough to the water that checking conditions was part of the morning routine before it was ever part of a job. At fourteen he taught himself HTML to build a surf-report fan site for his home break — nothing fancy, just tide charts, swell notes, and a comments section his mates actually used. It was the first time he noticed that building something useful and watching people rely on it felt like a fair trade for the effort.
That instinct carried him into agency work — nearly a decade across Sydney shops, rising to SEO director while he watched retainers grow every quarter and the actual results sit flat, propped up by reports engineered to look busy rather than to be honest. The gap between what clients were billed and what they got kept widening, and nobody at the agency seemed particularly bothered by it. In 2021, a job offer pulled him across the Pacific to a Los Angeles agency — same floor of account managers between the client and the person doing the work, just with worse traffic.
The morning after a perfect January dawn patrol in 2022, he quit. Not dramatically — just a conversation, a two-week notice, and a clear head from the best surf he'd had in months. (It had taken him less than a year to accept that surfing California in January means a wetsuit thickness no Novocastrian should have to think about.) A few weeks later he was running SEO audits and building sites out of a garage in Costa Mesa, with no staff, no retainer minimums, and no interest in recreating the agency he'd just left. Go back to Australia? Newcastle will always be home, but by then Orange County was where his clients, his crew, and his favorite winter swells all lived.
The philosophy that grew out of that garage was never complicated. It fit on a sticky note, and it still does: no churn, no jargon, answer the phone. Clients should be free to leave whenever the work stops earning its keep. Reports should be written for humans, not for board meetings. And the people doing the work should be the people you talk to — which is a low bar, honestly, and one a lot of agencies still manage to miss.
Four years and three more hires later, that sticky note is still more or less the whole business plan. The garage is gone, but the standard it set hasn't moved.
“No churn, no jargon, answer the phone.”
The lineup
Four people. No account layer.
Everyone you see here does the work you're paying for. There's no one between you and them.
Nick Halden
Founder & Strategist
Nick grew up in Newcastle, NSW, and learned HTML at fourteen building a surf-report fan site for his home break. Nearly a decade in Sydney agencies took him to SEO director; a Los Angeles offer pulled him across the Pacific in 2021, where he watched retainers balloon while results flatlined. He quit the morning after a perfect January dawn patrol and started Glassy out of a Costa Mesa garage in 2022 — closer to the water, further from the account layer. His whole philosophy fits on a sticky note: no churn, no jargon, answer the phone.
Yes, the accent is Australian. Still surfs dawn patrol — client calls start at 9:30, and now you know why.
Marina Delgado
Head of SEO
Marina spent six years in-house at an e-commerce brand, where she learned that rankings mean nothing if revenue doesn't move. She runs every audit at Glassy, reads Google patents for fun, and keeps a personal spreadsheet of every SERP feature she has ever seen in the wild.
Longboarder. Claims nose-riding and title-tag writing use the same muscle.
Koa Nakamura
Design Lead
Koa draws everything you see on this site by hand — every wave, every scene, every crooked little sun. Before Glassy he designed for a surf brand you've definitely heard of, and he still shapes boards in his garage on weekends. He believes a website should feel like a place, not a template.
Shapes surfboards on weekends. His foam-dust-to-pixel ratio is a closely guarded secret.
Sam “Squid” Okafor
Lead Developer
Sam writes the code that makes Glassy sites load before you finish blinking. He is genuinely obsessive about Core Web Vitals and claims he can feel layout shift with his eyes closed. Nobody has disproven this.
Bodyboarder. The team has agreed to stop bringing it up. (He rides waves lying down.)
How we work
Month-to-month, always
No 12-month contracts, no cancellation fees, no fine print designed to trap you. If the work is earning its keep, you'll stay because it's working — not because you're stuck.
Four-minute reports
You get a plain-English readout you can actually finish before your coffee goes cold. No 40-tab dashboards, no metrics chosen to make a slow month look busy.
The person who did it answers the email
There's no account manager relaying your questions to someone else's inbox. Ask Marina about the audit, ask Sam about the load time — you'll hear back from the person who actually touched it.
Small on purpose
We turn down work we can't do well, and we've stayed four people longer than most agencies our age stay one size. Growth is fine. Growth that dilutes the work isn't.
Why “Glassy”?
Glassy conditions are what surfers wait for — the wind drops, the water goes flat and clear, and every wave breaks exactly the way it's supposed to. It doesn't happen every day, and you don't rush it to make a schedule. That's the standard we hold the work to: not fast for the sake of fast, just right, and worth the wait. And it means exactly the same thing at Newcastle's Merewether Beach as it does at Blackies — some things translate perfectly.
Come by. Bring your rankings.
A twenty-minute call, a plain-English read on where you stand, and a straight answer about whether we're the right fit.