The Collective
Pothos is not an agency. It is a practice built around a single operating principle: the right expert, activated at the right moment, directed by a single accountable architect. No generalists. No overhead. No account managers between you and the work.
How the Model WorksWhy It's Built This Way
A traditional agency bills you for a team whether the work needs them or not. Every engagement carries the cost of account managers, coordinators, and generalists whose primary job is to keep the retainer alive.
The Collective model inverts that. The audit tells us exactly what the brand needs. We then activate only the specialists whose expertise is directly relevant — no excess, no bloat, no conflict of interest from departments competing for budget.
Every operator on the bench was selected because they are the best in their domain at the specific problem founder-led brands face when they've outgrown their brand identity. They don't generalize. They don't freelance for anyone. They work within this practice, on this kind of problem, and nothing else.
The Deployment Logic
Step One
The Brand Neglect Audit is the diagnostic layer. The Principal Architect leads this work personally — examining brand positioning, channel health, subscription data, and asset consistency to produce the Leakage Report and Revival Roadmap.
The audit is not a formality. It is the intelligence brief that determines everything that follows.
Step Two
Based on the audit findings, the Principal Architect writes the internal deployment brief — a precise document that maps each identified weakness to the specialist best positioned to address it.
This brief governs the engagement. It defines scope, sequencing, integration points, and the quality bar each specialist is held to.
Step Three
Specialists are embedded into the engagement — working alongside your internal team under the direction of the Principal Architect. The client has one strategic relationship and one point of accountability. The complexity stays inside the practice.
You never manage the bench. We do.
The Bench
Specialists in competitive repositioning, category narrative, and brand architecture for brands that have grown beyond their original story. These are not brand consultants who make decks — they are operators who have repositioned consumer brands in the market and can show the results.
Operators who specialize in diagnosing and reversing subscriber churn at the brand level — not through promotional mechanics, but through identity and experience restoration. Their expertise is the intersection of retention data and brand coherence.
Specialists in protecting brand integrity across mass, specialty, and independent retail. Their focus is ensuring that what a brand promises to a DTC customer is the same story its retail partner tells on the shelf — and that retail scale doesn't come at the cost of brand identity.
Art directors and brand identity operators who govern how the brand looks and moves — across video, photography, and digital touchpoints. They do not create content. They establish and enforce the visual standard that all content must meet.
Specialists in packaging as a brand instrument — not a supply chain output. They bring expertise in shelf differentiation, material quality signaling, and the translation of brand architecture into physical form, from primary packaging to the unboxing experience.
Writers and voice strategists who rebuild the linguistic identity of brands that have gone quiet, diluted, or inconsistent. Their output is not content — it is the tone, vocabulary, and editorial standard that governs every word the brand produces, from product descriptions to investor decks.
The Strategic Anchor
Every Pothos engagement is led by Alex Vazquez — the practice's founder and Principal Architect. He is the single point of strategic accountability: the one who conducts the audit, writes the deployment brief, directs the specialists, and presents the work to your leadership team.
This is not a model where a senior partner sells the engagement and a junior team delivers it. The person you speak with in the first conversation is the person running the work.
Cross-functional brand leadership across retail and DTC at the $5M–$500M scale
Deep experience in subscription health, channel alignment, and brand architecture
Partnerships with founder-led brands across Veterans, Apparel, and CPG sectors
Principal Architect & Founder, Pothos
Domains of practice
"The Principal Architect directs the engagement from audit to delivery. The Collective executes. That separation is intentional — because the person diagnosing the problem should not also be billing hours on the solution."
Not in scope
Media buying
Website development
Social management
In scope
Brand architecture
Retention strategy
Channel alignment
The result
Restored clarity
Compounding LTV
Coherent brand story
The entry point
Every engagement begins with the Brand Neglect Audit. The findings drive the brief. The brief drives the bench. There is no other way in.