Why Indie PR Is Favouring Collaboration Over Competition

When designer Harleen Kaur hosted her first ever brand dinner in New York earlier this month, she did so with the help of not just one, but two PR firms.

The Indian brand, known for its bridalwear and lehenga sets, first reached out to Lindsey Solomon, founder of agency Lindsey Media, last year for help with its bridal fashion week show. But Solomon, who focuses on emerging designers, was unsure if bridalwear was a fit — so he called his former colleague Sofia Bibliowicz, whose firm SBPR works with multiple bridal clients, and they decided to co-manage Kaur.

The two had a history of tapping each others’ expertise. Solomon, for example, managed VIP and showroom for one of Bibliowicz’s clients, while both teamed up with fellow publicists Sydney on the Scene and A Gold Consulting to co-host and split costs for an LA press day. For the dinner, Solomon was able to reference his fashion rolodex, while Bibliowicz leaned on her art world connections to invite guests who might cover the event with more of a cultural bent, said Solomon.

This collaborative spirit is a distinct shift from the competitive energy or “shark mentality,” as Potion PR founder Juliana Goldman put it, that has long permeated fashion public relations. Smaller firms are increasingly moving away from gatekeeping in favour of sharing contacts, ideas and manpower, realising that they can’t do it all on their own — nor do they need to.

If an agency can’t cater to a specific need, they are more open to connecting brands with a firm that can. Doing so allows smaller agencies to build their strength in one niche, rather than “being a master of none,” said Aurielle Kaminski, founder and chief executive of influencer seeding firm Agency Eight. Plus, when firms “do such different things, it’s not like we’re eating each other’s lunch at all,” said Jack Bridger, founder of creative and brand strategy agency Lemon, which collaborates with Agency Eight.

“The old agency mindset was fake it ‘till you make it, where it was like say yes, get the job, figure out how to do it,” said Alex Ashton, Agency Eight’s co-founder and chief operating officer. “It’s easy to fall into that trap.” He added that from a cost perspective, growing their own team to cater to a brand’s full set of needs is not worth the “operational burden.”

Banding together has also become a survival mechanism for freelancers and small firms as larger players in the space like The Independents continue their acquisition sprees and top firms like Lucien Pagès and AIPR merge. But as small firms deepen their specialisation in a particular arena, even larger agencies are seeing the appeal in hiring them for specific projects: PR Consulting, for example, harnessed NYC-based Savi PR’s expertise in events and VIP as part of Diesel’s rebrand, while PRC handled press and and events involving the brand’s founder, Renzo Rosso.

By building out relationships with other firms and continuing to lean into what they excel at, whether that’s influencer gifting or traditional press coverage, agencies can benefit from their peers’ strengths and create a network of best-in-class offerings. In doing so, they can also avoid feeling threatened by others’ success or overexerting their own resources.

“The spirit of building brands now needs to be more around rising tides lift all boats, rather than ‘this is mine, and this is yours,’” said Georgie FuTong, founder of the New York-based agency FuTong & Friends, which was founded around the concept of creating a network of collaborators with varied skillsets.

Sharing Strengths

Many of the independent agency founders and freelancers who are starting to band together began their careers in “the old world of fashion,” said Savannah Engel, founder of Savi PR.

“We all are very much trained in that work yourself to death mentality, but the way we all communicate and collaborate together is very different.”

Along with a few friends in the industry, Engel created a Whatsapp group called “PR Channel — Hussies Unite” in 2021, which now comprises 85 publicists based in New York and is dedicated to bringing together “like minds in the field of communications.” The group chat is not the only one of its kind; Engel is also part of a London-based group of agency founders, while Solomon and Bibliowicz have a group chat with Sydney on the Scene’s Sydney Schiff and freelance publicist Loren Osborne.

As an independent publicist, “it’s nice to have a sounding board,” said Solomon.

Working more closely with their peers also allows PRs to tap their areas of expertise, whether it’s in a particular skill set, like events, or an industry they might be less familiar or connected with, such as beauty or art.

For example, FuTong & Friends, which focuses on fashion and design clients, subcontracted Olivia Leachman PR, whose area of expertise is beauty and wellness, to help position its clients Alice Mushrooms and nicotine replacement brand Quit With Jones in those spaces, as well as tapping Agency Eight for influencer seeding. For Alice Mushrooms, Leachman used her relationships with beauty-focused Substacks, podcasts and influencers to help the brand foster its own connections in the space, and co-hosted an event at New York’s San Vicente Bungalows alongside FuTong & Friends with a guest list including a mix of their contacts. Leachman also identified writers analogous to beauty that could be a fit, ultimately landing a profile on Quit With Jones in Forbes, written by a reporter who had previously written about the cannabis space. That story ended up driving some of the highest traffic and sales the brand had seen in its first two years.

Publicists can also find ways to connect one client with another: Leachman, for instance, offered Alice Mushrooms products to one of her other clients, a women’s wellness retreat called Beautiful Nomad, to help drive organic user-generated content among wellness creators on a retreat in Oaxaca, Mexico, and deepen the brand’s credibility in the space.

Clear Communications

While there are plenty of benefits to PR collaboration, publicists also need to make sure they’re clear with clients in doing so.

To avoid confusion, firms should let brands know upfront that they are thinking of bringing in another agency for certain aspects of a project, clearly communicate who is handling what and if that will lead to any cost differences.

Potion, for instance, explicitly states that it may work with external vendors directly in its client contracts. They also include a non-circumvent clause in contracts with agency partners so they can’t sidestep Potion to work directly with Potion’s clients. The majority of firms are also careful not to promise that they have access to a network of other agencies, but rather begin with the specific scope a client originally reached out for, and then offer to bring in partners as new needs arise.

To ensure clients are clear on the specific tasks each agency partner will handle, most set up calls to introduce their partner and clearly delineate their relationship and responsibilities. Bibliowicz noted an instance with a former agency partner that did not clearly explain that she had her own firm to the client, and the lack of clarity led to the brand’s primary agency getting fewer press mentions than her.

“It can get a little sticky on who’s the owner, who’s doing the work. That fogginess over the ownership of the client,” she said. In working with Lindsey Media, “the only reason we’ve managed to avoid it is because we’ve been so transparent from the beginning,” she added.

Choosing communications channels that allow everyone to be in the loop also helps avoid misunderstandings. FuTong & Friends adds agency partners to a shared Slack channel with clients so “it feels very much like I’m working in-house with them,” said Leachman. While the FuTong team is tasked with day-to-day client needs, any member of the brand team can reach out to Leachman when needed.

“It’s important for brands to feel that synergy,” she added.

Open communication also breeds inter-agency trust, which is the basis of any partnership — especially as PR firms work to move past the industry’s competitive nature.

“My long-term goal is to have an agency where there are multiple publicists under one roof that specialise in their own thing, and we can collaborate,” said Bibliowicz. “That’s the future of consulting … a collective. It’s better when you have multiple minds working on something.”