There is a peculiar moment in the life of a young consumer brand. The product is real. The packaging is handsome. A few stores have said yes. The founder now wants what founders call “buzz,” a substance imagined to travel from magazine page to shopping cart with no loss of pressure. So the founder hires a publicist. A pitch goes out. Perhaps an article appears. Everyone takes a screenshot. Then the sales graph continues in roughly the same direction.
Jess Windell has spent her career in that gap between the screenshot and the sales graph. Before starting Maven in San Diego in August 2020, she worked on both sides of the conference table - at agencies, and then inside Perfect Snacks, where she led PR and learned what the rest of a consumer business needs from communications. Brand marketers were moving toward launches, retail expansion, digital attribution and revenue. Publicity could remain in its own pleasant province, counting clippings.
Maven PR is her attempt to redraw the border. The boutique firm works with food, beverage, wellness, beauty and lifestyle companies. Its published roster has included Perfect Snacks, LOVE CORN, Koia, Coconut Cult, Mauna Loa, Goodr, Maev and dozens more - the kind of names one encounters while wandering the brightly colored frontier of the modern grocery aisle. Maven says it has represented more than 40 CPG brands.
Three kinds of attention, three different jobs
Maven’s model divides media into three lanes. Earned media supplies the old magic: independent editorial attention, expert commentary, podcasts, awards and recognitions. Commerce media adds affiliate links and shopping coverage, placing the story near a decision to buy. Sponsored media buys distribution through publishers, creators and platform-native partnerships. They are not interchangeable, which is precisely the point.
An editor chooses the story. The brand borrows trust, not space.
A publisher connects discovery to a tracked path toward purchase.
The brand pays for precise reach while keeping the narrative aligned.
The arrangement sounds obvious only after someone says it. A newspaper profile and a creator video may both put a product in front of people, but they create different kinds of evidence. One tells the retailer that the brand matters. Another tells the marketing director that readers clicked. A third guarantees a message reaches a chosen community. Maven’s wager is that a good story can travel through all three systems without becoming three unrelated campaigns.
“PR is separating and elevating yourself from the competition, not going head to head with them.”Jess Windell, speaking on the Chat CPG podcast
That sentence contains Maven’s competitive position too. The firm is not the giant integrated agency with a department for everything. It is not quite an in-house hire. It is also not a lone freelance publicist working from a media list. The pitch is intimacy plus range: a small, selective team acting close enough to the business to spot the story, with specialists across media relations and commerce who can give that story more than one job.
The first thing to fail is usually the premise
Here is where the model gets more interesting. Windell says nine out of ten founders she speaks with are not ready for full-service PR. That is a bracing statistic for a person who sells full-service PR. The early failure is seldom the journalist’s refusal. It happens before the pitch: the positioning is muddy, the business lacks meaningful momentum, or nobody has agreed on what the next six to twelve months are supposed to accomplish.
The founders Maven interviewed for its education product described the bind plainly. PR felt hard to tie to sales. Their brands felt too small. They had a good story but too many nearer expenses. Those objections changed the shape of the company. Instead of pretending every prospect needed a retainer, Maven made a product for the period before one.
A course for the people the agency turns away
Catalyst by Maven is a ten-module program with more than 30 lessons and videos. It covers the media landscape, story development, pitching and affiliate strategy. A “Takeout Toolkit” adds more than ten lists, templates and examples; the coaching version includes weekly group sessions and a Slack community. Course access is advertised as lifetime access.
Those are public prices, not a guess at Maven’s agency fees, which the company does not publish. The distinction matters. Catalyst replaces some outside labor with the founder’s own time. Its ideal customer is an early- to mid-stage US consumer brand, below $5 million in revenue, without an existing PR firm or freelancer. The company vets participants and limits one purchase to one brand.
This makes Catalyst both a product and a filter. The course can create a more capable do-it-yourself publicist. It can also produce a future agency client who understands what counts as news, how long relationships take, and why a glossy mention is not a strategy. Teaching the customer to ask better questions is an unusually patient form of business development.
The copyable part begins before the pitch
A founder does not need Maven’s client roster or media relationships to borrow its most useful habit. Before hiring anyone, write down three answers: What is different about the brand? What must the business accomplish in the next six to twelve months? What is happening across launches, retail, partnerships, hiring and fundraising that publicity could genuinely amplify? “Get us into a magazine” is not an answer. It is a proposed tactic wearing an objective’s coat.
The Maven readiness test, condensed
- A position that a stranger can repeat without the founder in the room
- Real momentum or news, not merely a product that exists
- A business goal with a date and an owner
- Enough budget, inventory and team capacity to exploit attention
- A reason this story matters to an audience right now
Under the opposite conditions, the approach will disappoint. PR cannot rescue unreliable distribution, invent product-market fit or guarantee that editorial coverage converts. Affiliate coverage is weak when margins cannot support commission or shoppers cannot easily buy online. Sponsored media is wasteful when the audience or message is vague. Earned media stalls when there is no timely, defensible story. Attention is an amplifier; it is not a replacement engine.
A firm grows up, then shortens its name
Maven began as Maven Consulting Co., a deliberately ambiguous name for a business that did not want to feel like a conventional agency. Six years later, it has embraced the simpler Maven PR. Creative studio Middleman built the refresh around a connected “M” and the same three-pronged operating model. The new identity is brighter, louder and less coy about the category.
The underlying idea has stayed remarkably steady. Windell launched during the awkward summer of 2020 with a mission to do strong work for brands she believed in, build real relationships with the people behind them and prove that PR could be strategic, creative and personal at once. By 2026, Maven was marking its sixth year and adding PRIMA, an ancestral protein-bar brand, to the roster.
A small agency cannot be the right answer for every brand. Maven has made that limitation part of its architecture. The ready brands can hire the team. The early ones can learn the method. The rest can at least steal the first question: before chasing attention, what exactly do we need that attention to do?