Brand New: A Collective (BNC) is an award-winning, integrated marketing agency that lives at the intersection of creativity and commerce. Where a lot of brand work stays broad and overarching, BNC goes the other direction, into the subcultures, communities, and consumer segments where culture actually moves: music, entertainment, food and culinary, fashion. The work starts strategic, then runs through creative, talent, and productions, spanning everything from key campaigns to experiential activations.
Co-founders Kellie Pean and Alyssa Convertini-Lindquist launched the agency in early 2018, after spending most of 2017 defining what they wanted it to be. Kellie came up through brand marketing and then media; Alyssa had spent over a decade in media and entertainment. The name was deliberate. "A collective" let them stay nimble and pull in subject-matter experts across creative disciplines, adjusting the lineup to fit each client's world, whether that's spirits or beauty, a campaign or an activation.
Today BNC runs as a team headquartered in Los Angeles with an office in NYC. Small but mighty. The roster has grown considerably since launch, and so has the depth of the work, much of it built on long-standing, repeat client relationships.
For a founder-led agency, the same hands-on approach that built the business created an opportunity to define the next layer of leadership and operating structure.
The pace of client work required team members to ramp quickly, which made clearer onboarding, mentorship, and decision-making frameworks increasingly important. The founders recognized that creating a stronger leadership layer would let the agency scale with greater clarity, consistency, and independence.
There was a second thread. Kellie and Alyssa had each other as sounding boards, but they wanted an outside executive perspective to check their blind spots and help them develop a clearer rubric for success beyond the day-to-day.
The goal was to preserve BNC's high standard of work while empowering the broader team to carry more leadership across accounts and workstreams.
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Kellie had looked for leadership partners before, and the first search disappointed her. Most of what came back was built for large enterprise companies. BNC is a nimble, founder-led agency with the pace and ambition of a growth-stage business, and she wanted someone who understood the velocity of rapid growth, not a rinse-and-repeat program that missed the agency's DNA. So she held out rather than settle.
Then life got busy, and the search quietly fell off the radar. Months later, she realized they still hadn't done any of it, so she started again.
The second pass led them to Unicorn Labs. What struck Kellie was how closely the positioning around small, fast-moving ventures mapped to how an agency thinks and moves. She'd asked her team to distill a long list into a top three, sorted by what they were and weren't looking for. Unicorn Labs made the cut. Once they were actually in it, the founders and the team felt it right away. Kellie's word for it was kismet.
"We talk about Fahd like we're best friends. It's so relevant and restorative and rejuvenating."
For the first engagement, the founders decided to go big. They flew the full team, split between New York and LA, to Palm Springs, and spent two and a half full days in person with Fahd.
The work was tailored long before anyone arrived. The team filled out information in advance, both individually and as co-founders, clarifying what they wanted out of the experience. Kellie and Fahd shaped the days together so they'd feel engaging but flexible, with room to move, connect, and break into individual work.
What stood out was the arc. Kellie described the whole experience as a story, the way Fahd opened it and where he landed two and a half days later, pulling everything back into one cohesive narrative. The days moved between exercises, hands-on teamwork, prompts, and small-group breakouts that shared back to the room.
The in-person format did a lot of the heavy lifting. Computers down, phones away, everyone genuinely dialled in. Kellie was clear that this kind of work doesn't land the same way virtually, where attention tends to scatter.
It was reflective, honest, and more emotionally resonant than a typical offsite, which is why the team connected with the work so deeply. For many of them, it was their first offsite and their first leadership work at that depth.
The clearest shift showed up where it mattered most, in how the founders led.
One exercise became the turning point. Fahd had Kellie and Alyssa map where their time actually went. Kellie's time was concentrated in meetings, email, Slack, client oversight, and final-stage review, leaving limited space for business development, mentorship, and long-term planning. Then he had them map where they wanted it to go. The exercise revealed an opportunity to protect more intentional time for coaching, mentorship, business development, and thought leadership.
"That was so revelatory for both of us, that one exercise."
That single exercise was the unlock. It reframed the founders' role from keeping the team moving to actively leading it. The work helped clarify how to delegate more intentionally, build stronger accountability, and empower the team to take greater ownership across the business.
The coaching ran well past the retreat. What began at the 2023 offsite has continued through 2026, an ongoing relationship spanning several years. That work changed how Kellie thinks as a leader, toward prioritization, building a sound plan, and laddering everything up into it.
It also reached all the way back to the agency's own positioning. Together, they pressure-tested BNC's positioning and sharpened the language to better reflect what has always differentiated the agency: cultural fluency, strategic rigour, and creative work rooted in community. That mattered because positioning touches everything. How they hire and recruit. How they pitch. Their marketing materials and case studies. The revamp became its own project, and it ran for about a year and a half.
For the broader team, the awareness has kept surfacing in individual reviews, and the founders still return to their retreat notes. Heading into media reviews, Kellie planned to revisit those notes and use them as a provocation, asking team members how they'd leaned into that growth over the past two years.
What stuck wasn't one tool. It was a posture. Kellie describes herself now as someone constantly recalling and resetting: where she wants to be, how she wants to respond, taking the time to actually think. Having a consistent voice to pressure-test against has been the real benefit, because it's hard to grow without being challenged and learning from it.
One reframe has stayed with her. Fahd helped reframe the question around leadership clarity: had expectations been clearly defined, communicated, and supported with the right structure? It's a small moment, and it captures the larger shift from frustration to intentional leadership.
The relationship has continued because the founders see the value in it. What's telling is how she frames that value: as belief in people. A reminder that people are capable and can figure it out, and that leadership rallying around someone can be deeply additive.
Without the work, Kellie believes the agency would have remained more reactive, with less protected time for strategic growth, recruiting, and long-term leadership development. Instead, BNC has a founding team that's clearer on its positioning, more protective of its time, and more deliberate about building the structure to grow into.
And would she recommend Unicorn Labs to peers? She didn't hesitate.
"Oh, my gosh, yes. I've already been doing that."
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