  Flavour models typically rely on flavons - scalars that break the family
symmetry by acquiring vacuum expectation values in specific directions. We
develop the idea of effective alignments, i.e.\ cases where the contractions of
multiple flavons give rise to directions that are hard or impossible to obtain
directly by breaking the family symmetry. Focusing on the example where the
symmetry is $S_4$, we list the effective alignments that can be obtained from
flavons vacuum expectation values that arise naturally from $S_4$. Using those
effective alignments as building blocks, it is possible to construct flavour
models, for example by using the effective alignments in constrained sequential
dominance models. We illustrate how to obtain several of the mixing schemes in
the literature, and explicitly construct renormalizable models for three viable
cases, two of which lead to trimaximal mixing scenarios.
