Origin Story
Category: identity Sources: trace-summary-services-icp-competitors-background.md, company-details.md, founder-interview-2026-07-30.md, founder-interview-glen-2026-08-11.md, founder-interview-glen-2026-08-11-part2.md Confidence: high Last Updated: 2026-08-11
Founder Background
Glen Mascall has worked in PPE testing and certification for nearly their whole career. Their verified experience covers:
- Laboratory testing (carrying out the tests)
- Test-team leadership (leading the test team)
- Certification assessor (assessing technical documentation and issuing certificates)
- Senior business development (account management and senior sales)
This background spans the full lifecycle of PPE compliance: from physical testing through documentation, certification and commercial delivery. It is rare to have experience in one part of the chain; Glen has worked across all of them.
Deepest Specialism
Motorcycle protective apparel is Glen's deepest technical specialism. They also work across hand protection, high-visibility clothing, sports protection, hearing protection, eyewear and head protection.
Career Path (First-Hand)
Sourced from the founder interview (2026-08-11). Internal detail: confirm before naming specific past employers in public output, and note the overlap with the notified-body sources that must stay unnamed (see Competitive Landscape). This arc is the substance behind the full-chain claim.
- Testing, starting on motorcycle. Glen began as a lab technician on motorcycle apparel, unusually: most start on glove testing (EN 388, the simplest introduction to test methods). He came in as EN 13595 was being replaced by EN 17092, as the only motorcycle lab technician at the test house, trained by a single technologist. Early on this already meant high-level client meetings, notified-body shared visits, and live client testing.
- PPE technologist. Wrote the lab instructions that direct the test team, represented the business at exhibitions, and rewrote the motorcycle testing and certification seminars from scratch because the existing ones taught almost nothing.
- Test-team leader. Took on commercial responsibility and grew the motorcycle testing area from roughly £90k to £300k a year on service level and testing efficiency, and built a dedicated motorcycle test lab with a team of three.
- Certification assessor (a different company). Saw first-hand how poor submitted documentation is: technical files hacked together with several fonts and sizes, submitted with no regard for whether they were even usable, only for getting the product to market.
- Senior business developer. Ran larger projects and coordinated at a higher level above the test house and notified body, and met the same boundary from the commercial side: any training offered was bare-minimum, taught to one notified body's requirements, never how to build and own a technical file that holds across bodies.
A constant across every role: he legally could not consult or advise. In testing, certification and commercial roles alike, all he could hand a brand was a blank technical file, never sit with them and work it through. He is a lean, process-driven thinker who speeds up anything slower than it should be, which is the operating instinct behind Trace.
Founding Motivation
Throughout their career in testing and certification, Glen was regularly asked by brands for help sorting out documentation, compliance routes and product evidence. They could never assist due to conflict of interest — working on the testing/certification side created an inherent barrier.
What Glen kept seeing from the other side of the table:
- Good brands struggling because they couldn't hire anyone with real PPE experience
- Good people running these businesses, but PPE compliance takes years to learn organically — there's no shortcut
- The compliance manager cycle — companies hire a compliance manager to sort out the product range, the range gets in a deeper mess, the person leaves, and the cycle repeats
- No accessible route for brands to get competent PPE compliance support without committing to a full-time hire
The gap Glen could never fill from inside is exactly the one Trace fills: an independent buffer between the brand, the test house and the certification body, on the brand's side of the table, catching the gaps that no one in an independent test house or notified body is responsible for catching.
Trace exists to break that pattern. Glen's driving goals:
- Get people to market faster — reduce the time and confusion in the compliance route
- Make it less stressful — bring clarity and defined responsibility to a process that overwhelms most first-timers
- Embrace technology and modern ways of working — not stuck in legacy processes and PDF-based workflows
Founder Drivers and Challenges (First-Hand)
From the founder interview (2026-08-11). Candid and partly internal: the brand-essence points are usable, the personal detail should be handled with judgement in public output.
- Real stakes. Glen left a full-time, secure, salaried job to build Trace. He has risked a lot, on a deep belief that he can make a difference to the brands that keep hitting these issues. The challenge is not capability, it is getting often-defensive brands to accept the help.
- The website taught the brand. His perfectionism made the first site hard: he was designing it for himself and his own validation. The correction became the brand's operating idea. The site exists to let clients and prospects understand what Trace does as simply and easily as possible, not to be a beautiful site nobody understands, and not another do-everything consultancy template. Trace takes a mess and streamlines it, knows exactly what it does, and does not need to shout about it. Cut the waffle.
- Getting himself out of the way. LinkedIn has been hard because he was self-conscious. The brave-brand shift is to stop centring himself and his fear of being judged, and remember the content is for clients and prospects, to build trust, not for critics or people who never started their own consultancy.
- Building the system. What he is still learning is building the whole operation: from bits and pieces to a full digital home that automates what it can and produces genuinely good content.
- Pushing past the comfort zone. Once a very quiet person, he took a seminar opportunity, spoke on motorcycle apparel and owned the room because he is the expert. He keeps pushing himself, and wants to move into video and published interviews. The near-term gate is pragmatic: build a core client base and revenue first.
The Company
Trace Technical Compliance Ltd. was incorporated in England & Wales (company no. 17325886). It operates from a virtual registered office at 66 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NA, with primary contact at hello@tracetechnical.co.uk and the domain tracetechnical.co.uk.