Meet the Founders
Different minds. Shared vision.
Plume Collective was built on a simple belief:
The strongest businesses aren't manufactured. They're uncovered, defined, and deliberately built.
We bring two different ways of seeing to that process—strategy and creative expression, structure and design, pattern recognition and execution.
Together, we help founders discover what's already taking shape beneath the noise and build the strategy, brand, and marketing capable of carrying it forward.
Chay Pape
Founder + Business & Brand Strategist
Chay sees patterns.
With a background spanning business strategy, marketing, advertising, field activation, content, and brand development, Chay has spent her career helping organizations understand not only what to build—but why it should exist, who it's for, and how to bring it to market. But Plume grew from something she kept noticing:
Founders rarely suffer from a shortage of advice.
They suffer from too much of it. Someone else's formula. Someone else's content strategy. Someone else's definition of success. Eventually, the founder can become almost impossible to hear underneath all that noise.
Chay's work begins there.
Through the Plume Method and Vision Extraction, she creates the conditions for founders to slow down, examine what keeps returning, uncover the patterns underneath their ideas, and give language and structure to what they're actually trying to build.
Then comes the business. Positioning. Offers. Brand strategy. Messaging. Marketing. Campaigns. Growth. Because vision without execution remains an idea. And execution without vision builds something you may eventually stop recognizing as your own.
Chay's work lives between the two.
Across businesses. Across markets. Across ideas that haven't quite found their language yet.
AREAS OF EXPERTISE
Business Strategy • Vision Extraction • Brand Strategy • Market Positioning • Go-to-Market Strategy • Marketing Strategy • Advertising • Content Strategy • Campaign Development • Founder Development
Nicole Bell
Co-Founder + Creative Director
AREAS OF EXPERTISE
Graphic design • Email design • Web design • UX • Intranets • Marketing materials • Social media • Email marketing campaigns • Website buildouts
She sees the vision. Sometimes it's a fully formed idea. Sometimes it's a Pinterest board, a half-finished thought, a handful of screenshots, and someone saying, “I don't know exactly what I want, but I'll know it when I see it.”
She's spent more than 10 years learning how to see it, too. Across brands. Across websites. Across campaigns, emails, social content, print, UX, intranets, and all the little visual details that make something feel like it belongs together.
Because good design isn't just about making something look good.
It's about understanding what you're trying to say—and finding the visual language to say it.
That's where her work begins.
She listens to the idea underneath the request. She asks the questions. She figures out what isn't quite working. Then she builds.
A brand that feels like you. A website that finally makes sense. An email that people actually want to open. A campaign that feels cohesive from the first impression to the last. A piece of marketing that takes the thing in your head and makes it real.
Over the years, she's learned a little bit of everything because that's what great design often requires.
Graphic design. Email design. Web design. UX. Intranets. Marketing materials. Social media. Email marketing campaigns. Website buildouts.
If it involves pixels, layouts, ideas, or making something make sense visually, chances are she's done it. But the thing she loves most isn't designing. It's the moment someone sees it for the first time and says:“Yes. That's exactly what I was imagining.”
You bring the vision. She'll figure out how to make it exist.
HOW WE WORK TOGETHER
ONE TABLE.
DIFFERENT LENSES.
Chay asks:
Nicole asks:
What are we actually building?
Why does it matter?
Who needs it?
What keeps returning?
How does it move?
What does that feel like?
What should people experience?
How does it become recognizable?
What visual language belongs to it?
Together we ask:
How do we make the internal vision externally coherent?
That's the advantage of the partnership. Not strategy followed by decoration. Strategy and expression informing one another from the beginning.
Strategy shouldn't be developed in one room and handed to creative in another.
At Plume, those conversations happen together.
WHAT YOU'LL FIND AT OUR TABLE
PULL UP A CHAIR
You don't need to arrive with the perfect strategy, polished brand, or fully articulated vision.
That's what the table is for.
Bring the business. Bring the questions. Bring the thing you can't quite explain yet.
We'll start there.
Not ready for consulting? Explore courses, workshops, and founder resources.
A seat for the founder.
Always.
Honest conversation.
Ideas we're willing to challenge—including our own.
Strategy without borrowed formulas.
Creative work with a reason behind it.
Questions before prescriptions.
Curiosity before assumptions.
A plume is evidence.
You may not see the fire yet—but something beneath the surface is already burning. That's how we think about founders and their ideas. Before the polished brand, the campaign, the launch, or the business plan, there is often something harder to articulate:
An idea that keeps returning. A problem you can't stop noticing. A vision you haven't quite found language for.
We follow the smoke. Plume exists to help uncover what's creating it—and build from there.