Joel Kocher, Co-Founder and CEO of Humann, doesn’t mince words about what he needs from a media partner. “I enjoy the debate of strategy, but it’s difficult to debate Eden,” he says. “Every recommendation arrives with dozens of data sets showing they’ve already pressure-tested every possible avenue.”
That level of conviction is how Eden Collective — a strategic media consultancy led by Founder and CEO Alison Monk — went from optimizing one TV channel to running the entire media strategy for a brand that just landed on Bain & Company’s 2026 Insurgent Brands list.
90 days in, the real problem surfaced
Eden Collective was originally hired to sharpen Humann’s linear and connected TV strategy. Standard channel work. But about 90 days in, a routine check-in meeting told a different story.
Humann had assembled a roster of channel-specific specialist agencies — each strong in their lane. The problem was that the lanes weren’t connected. Channel-by-channel budgeting was fragmenting the brand’s impact, and nobody had a unified view of what was working across the full funnel.
“A sales spike is just a heartbeat on a monitor, proving you’re alive,” explains Monk. “It doesn’t tell you how to thrive.”
From patchwork to blueprint
That meeting became the turning point. Eden Collective proposed decoupling media strategy from media execution — not replacing the specialist agencies, but giving them a unified playbook to follow.
Under the new structure, Eden Collective serves as the central hub for Humann’s media operations. The agency owns the architecture — full-funnel planning, budget allocation and channel strategy — while specialist shops handle execution against that blueprint.
It’s a model that challenges the default approach for fast-growing brands. Instead of stacking specialists and hoping the sum adds up, Humann now runs audience-first planning that connects awareness to retail at every stage.
The brand behind the bet
The stakes aren’t small. Humann — the Austin-based company behind SuperBeets, the number one cardiologist-recommended beet brand — has been on a tear. A 10-time Inc. 5000 honoree, the company holds an exclusive license for nitric oxide technologies discovered at the University of Texas Health Science Center.
Its products are now in over 30,000 retail locations, with plans to scale across 180,000+ points of distribution.
Bain & Company’s Insurgent Brands designation — reserved for independent consumer brands outperforming their categories by more than 10x — confirmed what the growth trajectory already suggested. This is a brand entering a new phase.
“Cardiovascular health is bigger than a single organ, and our brand is now bigger than a single product,” says Kocher. “To build a new category around the science of blood flow, we needed more than media buying — we needed a strategic anchor.”
Why this matters for indie agencies
Eden Collective’s path from channel specialist to strategic lead is a case study in how small shops expand their remit through performance, not pitching. Monk — an Inc. 2025 Female Founders 500 honoree who spent 20+ years at Digitas, Grey, Merkle and Conde Nast before founding Eden Collective in 2019 — built the consultancy around a single premise: growth is a discipline, not a lottery.
For Humann, the proof is in the pivot. What started as a line item became the operating system.
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