Alexi Benhamron, president and co-founder of Vysical, is what happens when a direct marketing legend meets a strategy obsessive determined to move fast. The 14-person New York shop—founded two and a half years ago—swings equally at Starbucks, Lexus, Ledger, and scrappy telehealth startups. What they’ve built is something between a strategy firm and a creative execution machine: they call it “velocity to strategy,” the art of merging consulting rigor with the speed and autonomy of an indie shop. It’s not about the prettiest deck. It’s about real outcomes, deep analytics, and the willingness to tell clients no.
The Name Says It All
Vysical is a deliberate mashup—virtual and physical merged. In an industry obsessed with digital, the agency is quietly resurrecting the old-school advertising wisdom that co-founder Howard Draft picked up from decades of direct marketing. The insight is simple but often forgotten: brands need both worlds. You can’t A/B test your way to culture, but you can’t ignore what’s happening on TikTok either. Vysical gives permission to think in both channels at once, then execute with modern tools.
The Wave: Strategy Broken Into Three Moves
At Vysical, strategy isn’t mysterious. Alexi describes it as a wave—base, middle, tip. The foundation is deep analytics and insights, the kind that most agencies skip over. The middle is advertising expertise, the human knowledge of what actually moves people. The tip is the strategic layer: pricing, distribution, tariffs, the levers that change the game.
It’s a simple visual that cuts through consultant-speak. Most shops focus on the middle or tip. Vysical builds from the base up.
Not Handoff Culture—Impact Culture
Outcome obsession is their north star. When Vysical brings a recommendation, they don’t hand over a deck and disappear. They show why it matters—what the numbers say, what the real business result will be. Vanity metrics don’t make the cut.
They’ve built equity plays and performance-based models with clients precisely because they’re confident in the outcomes they’ll deliver. This isn’t arrogance. It’s accountability baked into the business model.
Permission to Experiment (And Fail Loudly)
The indie advantage here is stark. Alexi talks about sending a junior to Dallas to play secret shopper for a WeWork-of-warehousing client. They gave Raza olive oil a social budget to learn community engagement. They’ve built espresso martini prototypes for celebrities. No procurement committees, no stakeholder approvals—just people allowed to think and tinker.
The learning velocity at Vysical compounds because failure is encouraged, not punished.
The Founder-Led Difference
Howard Draft carries the weight of direct marketing royalty—one of the OGs. Alexi spent nearly a decade at Accenture building enterprise instincts. Together, they speak the language of both Fortune 500 and founder-led businesses equally. It’s old-school intuition married to AI as a superpower.
They can walk into a room with a CISO and a startup founder in the same week and feel at home in both. That founder-led edge means the top of the org is accessible, not hidden behind layers of management.
Why Brands Actually Call
The world moves faster than legacy processes can handle. Brands come to Vysical because the agency has a genuine pulse on culture—they’re not just executing yesterday’s playbook. The test-learn-scale approach builds client confidence.
When Starbucks, Lexus or Ledger work with Vysical, they’re not renting an agency. They’re partnering with people who move as fast as the market demands and won’t let them make decisions from a place of fear.
Where Thinkers Become Builders
Talent gravitates here because the work is real and the autonomy is genuine. Juniors sit with executive mentors from day one—not to fetch coffee, but to learn how to pitch, solve and own client relationships. Vysical hires through word-of-mouth in their network, which means the team shares a certain DNA: ambitious, curious, collaborative.
Pairing analytical minds with creative sensibilities under one roof is rare. Most shops don’t trust juniors enough to let them lead. Vysical does.
All Three: Weirdos, Misfits and Underdogs
Alexi doesn’t shy away from it: the team is weirdo, misfit and underdog—all three. They love challenging big consultancies, disrupting the traditional playbook. The roster mixes creative, analytical and cultural misfits in one room.
“I love being underrated. I love being the underdog. That thrill of surprising and proving ourselves is addictive.” That hunger shows. An agency that positions itself against legacy thinking tends to attract people who got bored inside legacy systems.
A Shoutout to Leaders Who Move Fast
Richard Dixon joined Gap from Mattel and Barbie—then brought in Zach Posen as creative director. He’s built a collaborative marketing and culture team that moves at Vysical’s speed. From nostalgia-driven campaigns to real-time cultural responses on social, he’s become a star player in Gap’s comeback story.
The fact that Vysical can attract and partner with talent of that caliber says something about the kind of partner they’ve become.
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Contact: al***@*****al.io
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