Chris Parlato founded AfterThis in 2025 after 17 years at leading innovation consultancies PA, Essential, MEME, and OMA. With a career spanning Insights, Innovation, and Experience Design roles, he's worked with clients such as Adidas, Lululemon, EA, Samsung, and Philips to discover new growth platforms, design and launch game-changing products and services, and build internal processes to look further, think bigger, and move faster.

AfterThis is a new kind of design research and strategy studio, born at the forefront of an AI-powered shift in how we understand culture, spot opportunity, and bring ideas to life. We go broader, deeper, and more visual in a fraction of the time—using internet-scale data and AI tooling to tap into the cultural zeitgeist, surface patterns, and interrogate whitespace. Then we use generative design tools to rapidly visualize new concepts, ecosystems, and narratives that move teams and stakeholders. With a team of senior operator-designers and agency expats, we’re building what comes after the old model: no more handoffs, no more bloated timelines, no more translation loss. Just small, expert teams working end-to-end—turning signal into strategy, and strategy into futures you can see, share, and believe in.