Here's how to think about supporting local. Getty images

Businesses everywhere are struggling to survive during these strange times. From the largest global companies to the local mom and pops, these organizations are on the brink of losing the good fight.

Brands we all rely on — including J Crew, JC Penney, Neiman Marcus, Modell's Sporting Goods, and Gold's Gym — have filed or are expected to file for bankruptcy protection in the coming days.

Those are some of the national brands. Local brands come and go with such frequency that many times only the most loyal of consumers are the only ones that realize their demise outside of the owners and employees.

What is a local brand?

Echoing throughout our everyday quarantined lives is the mantra to support your local community businesses. What exactly does that mean? A neighbor of mine is the general manager of a large national retail store in our community. It is not a local business…or is it? I certainly do not want him to fail and lose his job due to a corporate decision to shut down locations. That would affect hundreds of folks in our area that work there.

Then there is the local flower shop that is a one-location mom and pop that a family has poured everything it has into building their retail dream. Now, they face a nightmare of losing it all if things do not turn around soon enough.

What does this all have to do with brand equity?

The equity in your brand is that perceived value customers place in your services or products that makes your brand stand out. It includes brand loyalty, perceived quality and your overall brand awareness. It is why a customer choose one brand over another as price is removed from the equation.

As consumers venture out from the COVID-19 isolation more and more each day, they have decisions to make. Decisions like "Where am I going to spend my money?" This gets even more compounded by the shocking number of furloughed and unemployed people that only weeks ago were humming along fine. Discretionary income is almost becoming a thing of the recent past, meaning every dollar spent beyond rent and food is under extreme scrutiny.

It is at this very point that brand equity can make or break a local business. We all know that the coming months will be trying, and brands are simply trying to hang on to make it through the unprecedented downturn. But guess which brands will come out of this with a chance to realize even more greatness down the road? Those companies that realized from day one the importance of their brand. How people perceive it. How to build value beyond the physical goods or services. The culture of their brand and whether it permeates the organization and every brand touchpoint with consumers.

Think of building brand equity like you would when shopping for home insurance. You do not go get insurance on your home after the fire destroys it. You plan ahead and build home equity by mitigating risk. The same holds for brand equity. You plan ahead and place the importance of an effective brand strategy at the very top of your business priorities.

I have worked on brand strategy from global brands to local and regional brands and you would be surprised to see how brand strategy is undervalued regardless of company size. Too many times (actually, almost always) I see companies large and small treat the brand and marketing strategy as an afterthought, once accounting, purchasing, HR, manufacturing, sales and more are given their proper due.

Brands face pressures daily from all sides including competition, government regulations, changing consumer preferences, technology, advertising expense and more. So those brands that have the focused leadership to build a strong brand platform, as a priority from day one, will win in the long term.

The higher the level of your brand equity in your marketplace, the more likely a consumer will migrate toward your business as they begin thawing their wallets from the pandemic freeze of uncertainty. Spending is under more scrutiny than most of us have ever seen, and brand stewards that have built a strong platform of awareness, value, service, quality and overall experience stand the best chance to earn that sale from loyal customers that appreciate brand equity, even though those customers may not understand how to actually define it.

It's not too late.

While you have the time, even though the slow crawl back to some sort of normalcy can seem overwhelming, prioritize your brand strategy. Spend time each day as you would with accounting and sales to consider how to improve the equity, the value, of your brand among your customer base.

Ask yourself how you can differentiate. What are the ways you can value-add to your services that make your product even more memorable with consumers? What about employee training? Consider whether or not your people believe in your business and have the passion to exemplify those brand attributes you clearly demonstrate day in and day out. Are you following up with customers to build loyalty and learn about how to improve?

Look at the competition, regardless of size, and build a list of what makes your brand better. Then continue to find ways to express that. There is still time if you prioritize differently.

There's an old sugar-packet saying I heard early in my career that I still use today, over 40 years later that goes something like this:

"He Who Has a Thing to Sell
And Goes and Whispers in a Well
Is Not as Apt to Make the Dollars
As He Who Climbs a Tree and Hollers"

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Mike Albrecht is currently a partner and director of business development at Houston-based 9thWonder, a large general market advertising and PR agency based in Houston with offices around the globe.

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7 innovative startups that are leading the energy transition in Houston

meet the finalists

Houston has long been touted as the energy capital of the world, and it's now it's also a leading player in the energy transition — home to numerous startups and innovators working toward a cleaner future.

As part of the 2025 Houston Innovation Awards, our Energy Transition Business category honors innovative startups that are providing solution within renewables, climatetech, clean energy, alternative materials, circular economy, and more.

Seven energy transition companies have been named finalists for the 2025 award. They range from a spinoff stimulating subsurface hydrogen from end-of-life oil fields to a company converting prickly pear cactus biogas into energy.

Read more about these climatetech businesses, their founders, and their green initiatives below. Then join us at the Houston Innovation Awards on Nov. 13 at Greentown Labs, when the winner will be unveiled at our live awards ceremony.

Tickets are now on sale for this exclusive event celebrating all things Houston Innovation.

Anning Corporation

Clean energy company Anning Corporation is working to develop geologic hydrogen, a natural carbon-free fuel, using its proprietary stimulation approaches and advanced exploration modeling. The company said that geologic hydrogen has the potential to be the lowest-cost source of reliable baseload electricity in the U.S.

The company was founded by CEO Sophie Broun in 2024 and is a member of Greentown Labs. Last month, it also announced that it was chosen to participate in Breakthrough Energy’s prestigious Fellows Program. Anning raised a pre-seed round this year and is currently raising a $6 million seed round.

Capwell Services

Houston-based methane capture company Capwell Services works to eliminate vented oil and gas emissions economically for operators. According to the company, methane emissions are vented from most oil and gas facilities due to safety protocols, and operators are not able to capture the gas cost-effectively, leading operators to emit more than 14 million metric tons of methane per year in the U.S. and Canada. Founded in 2022, Capwell specializes in low and intermittent flow vents for methane capture.

The company began as a University of Pennsylvania senior design project led by current CEO Andrew Lane. It has since participated in programs with Greentown Labs and Rice Clean Energy Accelerator. The company moved to Houston in 2023 and raised a pre-seed round. It has also received federal funding from the DOE. Capwell is currently piloting its commercial unit with oil and gas operators.

Deep Anchor Solutions

Offshore energy consulting and design company Deep Anchor Solutions aims to help expedite the adoption of floating offshore energy infrastructure with its deeply embedded ring anchor (DERA) technology. According to the company, its patented DERA system can be installed quietly without heavy-lift vessels, reducing anchor-related costs by up to 75 percent and lifecycle CO2 emissions by up to 80 percent.

The company was founded in 2023 by current CEO Junho Lee and CTO Charles Aubeny. Lee earned his Ph.D. in geotechnical engineering from Texas A&M University, where Aubeny is a professor of civil and environmental engineering. The company has participated in numerous accelerators and incubators, including Greentown Labs, MassChallenge, EnergyTech Nexus LiftOff, and others. Lee is an Activate 2025 fellow.

Eclipse Energy

Previously known as Gold H2, Eclipse Energy converts end-of-life oil fields into low-cost, sustainable hydrogen sources. It completed its first field trial this summer, which demonstrated subsurface bio-stimulated hydrogen production. According to the company, its technology could yield up to 250 billion kilograms of low-carbon hydrogen, which is estimated to provide enough clean power to Los Angeles for over 50 years and avoid roughly 1 billion metric tons of CO2 equivalent.

Eclipse is a spinoff of Houston biotech company Cemvita. It was founded in 2022 by Moji Karimi (CEO and chairman of Cemvita), Prabhdeep Sekhon (CEO of Eclipse), Tara Karimi, and Rayyan Islam. The company closed an $8 million series A this year and has plans to raise another round in 2026.

Loop Bioproducts

Agricultural chemical manufacturing company Loop Bioproducts leverages the physiology of prickly pear cactus grown in Texas to produce bioenergy, food, and remediate industrial wastewater streams. The company uses its remote sensing technology, proprietary image-based machine learning model, and R&D innovation to capture raw biogas from the cactuses and is focused on scaling cactuses as an industrial crop on land.

Rhiannon Parker founded Loop Bioproducts in 2023.

Mars Materials

Clean chemical manufacturing business Mars Materials is working to convert captured carbon into resources, such as carbon fiber and wastewater treatment chemicals. The company develops and produces its drop-in chemical products in Houston and uses an in-licensed process for the National Renewable Energy Lab to produce acrylonitrile, which is used to produce plastics, synthetic fibers, and rubbers. The company reports that it plans to open its first commercial plant in the next 18 months.

Founded in 2019 by CEO Aaron Fitzgerald, CTO Kristian Gubsch, and lead engineer Trey Sheridan, the company has raised just under $1 million in capital and is backed by Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy, Shell, Black & Veatch, and other organizations.

Solidec

Chemical manufacturing company Solidec has developed autonomous generators that extract molecules from water and air and converts them into pure chemicals and fuels that are free of carbon emissions onsite, eliminating the need for transport, storage, and permitting. The company was founded around innovations developed by Rice University associate professor Haotian Wang.

The company was selected for the Chevron Technology Ventures’ catalyst program, Greentown Labs, NSF I-Corps and was part of the first cohort of the Activate Houston program. It won first place at the 2024 startup pitch competition at CERAWeek. Solidec was founded in 2023 by Wang, who serves as chief scientist, CEO Ryan DuChanois, and CTO Yang Xia. It closed a $2.5 million seed round earlier this year.

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The Houston Innovation Awards program is sponsored by Houston Community College, Houston Powder Coaters, FLIGHT by Yuengling, and more to be announced soon. For sponsorship opportunities, please contact sales@innovationmap.com.

Rice University team develops eco-friendly method to destroy 'forever chemicals' in water

clean water research

Rice University researchers have teamed up with South Korean scientists to develop the first eco-friendly technology that captures and destroys toxic “forever chemicals,” or PFAS, in water.

PFAS have been linked to immune system disruption, certain cancers, liver damage and reproductive disorders. They can be found in water, soil and air, as well as in products like Teflon pans, waterproof clothing and food packaging. They do not degrade easily and are difficult to remove.

Thus far, PFAS cleanup methods have relied on adsorption, in which molecules cling to materials like activated carbon or ion-exchange resins. But these methods tend to have limited capacity, low efficiency, slow performance and can create additional waste.

The Rice-led study, published in the journal Advanced Materials, centered on a layered double hydroxide (LDH) material made from copper and aluminum that could rapidly capture PFAS and be used to destroy the chemicals.

The study was led by Rice professor Youngkun Chung, a postdoctoral fellow under the mentorship of Michael S. Wong. It was conducted in collaboration with Seoktae Kang, professor at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, and Keon-Ham Kim, professor at Pukyung National University, who first discovered the LDH material.

The team evaluated the LDH material in river water, tap water and wastewater. And, according to Rice, that material’s unique copper-aluminum layers and charge imbalances created an ideal binding environment to capture PFAS molecules.

“To my astonishment, this LDH compound captured PFAS more than 1,000 times better than other materials,” Chung, lead author of the study and now a fellow at Rice’s WaTER (Water Technologies, Entrepreneurship and Research) Institute and Sustainability Institute, said in a news release. “It also worked incredibly fast, removing large amounts of PFAS within minutes, about 100 times faster than commercial carbon filters.”

Next, Chung, along with Rice professors Pedro Alvarez and James Tour, worked to develop an eco-friendly, sustainable method of thermally decomposing the PFAS captured on the LDH material. They heated saturated material with calcium carbonate, which eliminated more than half of the trapped PFAS without releasing toxic by-products.

The team believes the study’s results could potentially have large-scale applications in industrial cleanups and municipal water treatments.

“We are excited by the potential of this one-of-a-kind LDH-based technology to transform how PFAS-contaminated water sources are treated in the near future,” Wong added in the news release. “It’s the result of an extraordinary international collaboration and the creativity of young researchers.”

Axiom Space announces new CEO amid strategic leadership change

new leader

Six months after promoting Tejpaul Bhatia from chief revenue officer to CEO, commercial space infrastructure and human spaceflight services provider Axiom Space has replaced him.

On Oct. 15, Houston-based Axiom announced Jonathan Cirtain has succeeded Bhatia as CEO. Bhatia joined Axiom in 2021. Cirtain remains the company’s president, a role he assumed in June, according to his LinkedIn profile.

In a news release, Axiom said Cirtain’s appointment as CEO is a “strategic leadership change” aimed at advancing the company’s development of space infrastructure.

Axiom hired Cirtain as president in June, according to his LinkedIn profile. The company didn’t publicly announce that move.

Kam Ghaffarian, co-founder and executive chairman of Axiom, said Cirtain’s “proven track record of leadership and commitment to excellence align perfectly with our mission of building era-defining space infrastructure that will drive exploration and fuel the global space economy.”

Aside from praising Cirtain, Ghaffarian expressed his “sincere gratitude” for Bhatia’s work at Axiom, including his leadership as CEO during “a significant transition period.”

Bhatia was promoted to CEO in April after helping Axiom gain more than $1 billion in contracts, Space News reported. He succeeded Ghaffarian as CEO. Axiom didn’t indicate whether Bhatia quit or was terminated.

Cirtain, an astrophysicist, was a senior executive at BWX Technologies, a supplier of nuclear components and fuel, for eight years before joining Axiom. Earlier, Cirtain spent nearly nine years in various roles at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. He previously co-founded a machine learning company specializing in Earth observation.

“Axiom Space is pioneering the commercialization of low-Earth orbit infrastructure while accelerating advancements in human spaceflight technologies,” Cirtain said. “I look forward to continuing our team’s important work of driving innovation to support expanded access to space and off-planet capabilities that will underpin the future of space exploration.”

Among other projects, Axiom is developing the world’s first commercial space station, creating next-generation spacesuits for astronauts and sending astronauts on low-Earth orbit missions.