"You do know what POS means, right?"

Cam asked me this last week, jokingly. We were sitting in my Honda Ridgeline, eating some Taco Bell, staring at the ocean. You know, the perfect setting for life’s most important conversations…aaand I was explaining the whole brand concept for probably the fifteenth time. She wasn't concerned. She was smiling. She gets it.

Yes, I know what it spells. Yes, it's intentional.

I've spent twenty-something years in content creation and marketing. I know how we are told to name things. I've sat through hundred-slide decks about brand architecture. I've been in rooms where grown adults spent three hours debating whether a logo should be 2% more blue. I once watched a company pay $250,000 to change its slogan from something nobody remembered to something else nobody would remember, only to ditch both and revert to its original slogan…which I can’t even remember.

So when I tell you I named my brand Pursuit of Something, knowing full well it abbreviates to POS, understand that this isn't amateur hour. This is a choice.

In my former corporate life, this would have gone through rounds of focus groups. Some consulting firm would have charged six figures to tell us that POS has "negative brand associations." There would have been a PowerPoint about "consumer sentiment analysis." Someone would have suggested Pursuit of Excellence. Or Innovation. Or Tomorrow.

But I'm not in those meetings anymore. I'm in my garage at 11 PM, looking at the pile of parts I need to install on my Honda Element with 233,892 miles on it, and thinking about honesty.

The Element runs. It shouldn't, but it does. The driver's seat is smashed, and the plastic is cracked to the point of no return. The brakes have recently gone from squealing to something a little more violent that, honestly, just shouldn’t be a sound that comes from braking. There's a sound coming from somewhere that I've decided is "character." This car is, by every technical definition, a piece of shit.

It's also taken me on every adventure worth remembering. It's moved me up and down California a couple of times now. I’ve spent many nights in it. I’ve recorded podcast episodes in it. It's more reliable than most people I know.

Most importantly, it’s mine and I love it.

Life has been taking a toll on me for the last couple of years. It’s more than I care to get into today, but in short, I’ve been obsessed with this fantasy of a new car culture-focused brand for quite a while. I just hadn’t come up with the “that’s it” idea. Yet, every time I’m on the road, I’m thinking about it.

I was listening to a podcast about "achieving excellence" recently. At the same time, the car in front of me had one of those "My child is an honor student" stickers. And I just had to laugh to myself.

Because what are we all actually pursuing? Excellence? Please. The world is a mess. I'm pursuing making it to Friday. I'm pursuing figuring out what that noise is. I'm pursuing something, anything, that feels real in a world that seems to be 50% manufactured chaos and 50% phony “authenticity.”

I came home from a recent trip with some newfound clarity. It started with me being frustrated with myself, and the piles of procrastination spread around the house. I looked at my garage full of broken dreams and half-finished projects and told Cam, "I’m done living like this. I need to actually make progress on things and quit putting them off for the sake of perfection. It’s driving me crazy.”

For years, I wrote about perfect things. Deadstock sneakers in climate-controlled storage. Grails behind glass cases. Collections worth more than houses. I documented obsession with perfection, collaboration after collaboration, designed to make people feel like they were missing something.

I have always worn a huge majority of my shoes, but not all of them. A very few were saved for special occasions. Some were just lost to the depths of my storage unit, replaced with something newer and more easily accessible. The problem with collecting so much is that you just never really get to appreciate all of them equally.

The performance of perfection is exhausting. The admission of imperfection is freedom.

And the truth is, I wear a beater pair of sneakers that sit by the front door nearly every day.

I made lists of other names. But I kept coming back to Pursuit…it’s the chase, the creating, the progress, and sometimes, the perfection even. It’s all of those things.

But at the same time, it’s just the pursuit of something. Something is honest. Something is achievable. Something is what we're all actually doing.

The acronym is a gift. It's a litmus test. The people who get it immediately are my people. The ones who clutch their pearls were never going to understand anyway.

Everything I learned in the corporate world said to start with aspiration. Show people what they could be. Sell them the dream.

But what if the dream is just acceptance? What if the aspiration is just acknowledgment that we're all out here with warning lights on, both literal and metaphorical, and that's okay?

Brands are typically aspirational, and sometimes we all need that. My favorite brands have always been the ones supporting my favorite people. They're the ones driven by genuinely good people who meet you where you are. And where most of us are is in a parking lot for a local meetup, googling car symptoms, helping each other make small steps of progress, and hoping it's not expensive.

Sure, it stands for Piece of Shit. But that’s also a term of endearment. It could also stand for:

Or it just stands for Pursuit of Something, and that something changes every day. Today, it might be pursuing a check engine light solution. Tomorrow, it might be pursuing your most intimidating DIY modification to date. Next week, it might be pursuing the acceptance that some noises are just part of the experience.

This is for the mechanic/installer who builds incredible machines, but their own car is a constant work in progress. This is for the woman whose Civic has seen multiple semesters of door dings in the college parking garage. This is for the guy at Cars and Coffee with more zip ties than original parts. This is for the student who just picked up their first car and they’re experiencing that heat on full blast, windows down, music blasting late-night sense of freedom for the first time. This is for everyone who's ever been personally victimized by a machine they love.

If you're reading this thinking, "he really named his brand after a piece of shit," you're right. If you're reading this thinking, "finally, someone gets it," you're also right. Most importantly, I hope you’re like me and thinking, “I LOVE MY POS.”

That's the beauty of pursuing something. The something can be anything. It can be nothing. It can be everything. It just has to be honest.

My Integra is still in Colorado, sadly, becoming more of a POS every day. My brother's CRX is still not running, achieving new levels of POS weekly. My Element continues to develop new features (problems) that add to its POS personality.

And I'm building a brand that says: Your POS is valid. Your pursuit of something is enough. Your check engine light is not a failure. It's a membership card.

Welcome to the club. We meet in AutoZone parking lots and communicate through hazard lights.

Keep pursuing whatever it is for you because PROGRESS IS PERFECTION,

Nick,
Founder, PURSUIT OF SOMETHING
POS Enthusiast

P.S. - If you have any ideas for an acronym for POS, hit reply and let’s hear them.