Millennial Entrepreneurs Taking PR To The Next Level
Whether it was being on Forbes 30 Under 30, helping Tumblr send bloggers to Fashion Week, or wearing prom dresses for 30 days straight. Small Girls PR is the real deal. The founders are here to share some PR tips to get you to the next level.
What is Glappitnova?
Glappitnova is an publication and festival uniting amazing people from different industries for 8 days in Chicago, and more.
What is Small Girls PR?
Small Girls PR is an agency specializing in media relations both online and off, for tech, fashion, and lifestyle brands. Rather than traditional modes of PR, they conduct outreach to digitally focused outlets and sites, blogger collaborations, brand partnerships, creative campaigns, and social media strategy.
“We didn’t know what would happen in three months, but we didn’t worry about it and felt that we had nothing to lose.”
We started out planning events and social media/blogger partnerships with fashion brands and tech startups. We’ve thrown parties for Google at SXSW, and assisted with Tumblr’s first foray into sending bloggers to fashion week. One of our first clients, Spot Dessert Bar, was featured in the Wall Street Journal for increasing their sales 20% through our work with social media. Our first big stunt was with prom dress retailer Tiza.com, where we wore a prom dress every day for 30 days and liveblogged the experience.
Without doing traditional media outreach sites like Glamour, and Elle Girl, “The Gloss” picked it up. We were hailed Prom Queens of the NY Tech scene by the NY Post as the project culminated with an adult prom from bloggers, friends, and media.
Since then we’ve expanded our services to include traditional media and have become the agency of record for Fortune 500 companies like General Electric and AOL’s Lifestyle Group. We’ve worked with some amazing large scale brands such as Simon and Schuster, Pinkberry, Disney Publishing Group and more recently Ann Taylor, as well as launched the first menswear collection licensed by the US Army. We’ve continued to work in the tech space with apps like Hinge, Cover, and Lulu as well.
Running A Business Has Steady Struggles
Running a business has its struggles but with great rewards. Whether it might be working as business partners, being in a committed relationship, learning how to manage and maintain the business as it grows, or dealing with 7-10 clients at a time has its obstacles.
Here Are Some Great Tips For Millennial Entrepreneurs in PR
- Network, network, network! Meet everyone everywhere, and be nice to people! You never know if the person you meet will be detrimental or helpful to your journey.
- Relationships are key. Going off of our first tip, it’s not enough to meet people. You have to establish real relationships and maintain them.
- Don’t be afraid of failure. Take risks and explore opportunities.
- Be genuine to yourself and to your brand. Practice what you preach in terms of how you handle and promote your own company, and how you handle and promote your clients or projects. Filter your passions and the skills you’ve learned from your personal life into your professional career. You must constantly keep your creative hat on while paying attention to what’s happening within your industry.
- Transparency in this new age of PR is key. No fluff, no keeping clients in the dark. Maintaining a healthy and honest communication with your clients, and translating the message to their audiences is a must. Being open and maintaining friendly relationships with other PR companies makes this business more of a collaborative one than a competitive one. We often work with, refer, and play/party with other startup PR firms and large agencies. It’s better and strengthens the community.
The Story Behind Small Girl PR
Bianca studied Fashion Marketing and worked at Lucky Magazine in advertising and promotions, before a brief stint in music promotions, and then eventually in-house PR at a vintage store in the east village. Mallory’s background included market research for technology companies and large brands like Apple, Nokia, and Nike while she studied at NYU’s Gallatin.
We fell into business together when we realized the potential for this “new PR” in the social and digital world, coupled with the connections we had and the combined skills to help brands grow.
We saw how brands could take advantage of how engaged followers can be to a company on their social networks. We were both early adopters on tumblr and twitter, and just knew how to grow a follower base, connect with an audience, post really fun compelling content, etc.
While Bianca worked PR at a vintage/thrift store in the east village, she grew their tumblr following from 15 followers to 15,000, and invited bloggers to come in and do guest-hosted videos, posts, and shoots. Mallory was one of those people, who was also doing creative things to promote friends’ companies and bands like livestream chats with fans.
Mallory emailed Bianca one night and said, “We’re so dumb, we should start a PR company together.” and that was it!
It was our first go at entrepreneurship, but the attitude we had was an open and willing one. We didn’t know what would happen in three months, but we didn’t worry about it and felt that we had nothing to lose. We were getting client referrals from friends after immediately announcing we were starting a company, and our first client’s check paid for our first month’s rent. We bootstrapped a lot in the beginning (and still do), working 12 hour days and weekends, barely paying ourselves out. We also worked out of a co-working space with about 5 other tech start-ups who became somewhat of a support and information system. We learned from each other and also found ways to help one another. Almost 4 years later we now have our own office and a team of 14 people, but we haven’t forgotten our values and our roots.
