It is the last week of August, which means approximately half of New York is in Europe, the other half is pretending to work from somewhere that is not New York, and everyone has decided that nothing really needs to happen until after Labor Day.

Except Q4.

Q4 is already happening.

Every year, sometime around the first week of September, the emails start coming in.

“We’re looking for a PR agency for Q4.”

“We have a big launch in October.”

“We want to do something around holiday.”

“We have budget we need to spend before the end of the year.”

All great. Except if you are starting your agency search in September for something you want to happen in October, you are not planning for Q4. You are already behind.

PR has a lead-time problem that I don’t think enough people outside PR understand.

You don’t hire an agency on Monday and end up in The New York Times on Friday.

Before anyone pitches anything, we need to understand the company. The product. The founders. What you’ve already said. What you haven’t said. What your competitors are saying. What journalists are writing about. What they’re tired of writing about. What is actually interesting about you. And, sometimes more importantly, what isn’t.

Then we have to figure out the story, and that takes time, AND that’s before we’ve sent a single email to a journalist.

PR Isn’t Advertising

I think part of the disconnect comes from the way companies buy other kinds of marketing. You can turn on paid media, you can buy an ad. You can hire creators, approve content, and establish a posting schedule.

But we all know PR doesn’t really work that way because you are asking another person, be it a journalist, editor, producer, newsletter writer, or podcast host, to decide that your story is worth their time and their audience at a time when you’re competing with hundreds of other people asking the same thing. And remember, you don’t control their editorial calendar, you don’t control when they respond, and you definitely don’t control whether something happening inside your company is interesting enough for them to cover.

All of this ladders up to one thing: the earlier your PR team is in the room, the more we can actually do.

We can tell you the launch date is terrible.

We can tell you which of your competitors are announcing essentially the same thing that week.

We can tell you the thing you think is the story isn’t the story. We hate doing this one, but it’s in YOUR best interest that we be honest and manage your expectations.

We can tell you the founder should start talking about something now so that six weeks from now, when the company has news, people already understand why they should care what she has to say.

This is the part of PR that gets missed when PR is treated as the last box on a checklist instead of being part of the process from the beginning. You see, PR is in its golden era (if you’ve been reading for a while, you’re probably sick of me saying it) because ads are too expensive, a hamster wheel you can never get off, and influencers aren’t moving the needle the way they used to. But you know what is? Owning your narrative and controlling how you show up in the world, because that’s what the LLMs are crawling for, that’s your AEO, GEO and SEO, and that’s all coming from your PR team. If someone asks ChatGPT for the best product in your category, what has been written about you matters, and increasingly that’s a PR problem too.

Product ready. Campaign ready. Website ready. Okay, call PR.

By then, some of the most interesting decisions have already been made without us.

Q4 Is Particularly Unforgiving

September always feels like the beginning of something because everyone comes back, kids go back to school, calendars fill up, and budgets suddenly become real again. There is this collective feeling that we have four whole months left in the year.

But we don’t. From a communications standpoint, Q4 is incredibly compressed. September disappears almost immediately, then October is launches, conferences, events, and everyone trying to get attention at exactly the same time. And if you’re a consumer brand, holiday is even less forgiving because by the time you’re thinking about gift guides in October, many of the ones you actually wanted to be in have already been planned, assigned, or closed.

Then comes the election/news cycle, depending on the year, followed by Thanksgiving, holiday coverage, end-of-year lists, predictions, gift guides, vacations, and suddenly someone is emailing you on December 12 asking if we can get something placed before Christmas.

And look, we’ve all done it; we’ve all said maybe and made it happen, but I would rather have started in August.

So What Should You Actually Be Doing Right Now?

If you know you have something important happening this fall, now is the time to start thinking about and moving on PR. Not necessarily launching a giant campaign because, hey, we are rounding out eclipse season, but now’s the time to really start thinking it through.

What are you announcing?

Why does anyone care?

What is happening in the world around your announcement?

Who needs to know about you before you announce it?

What conversations do you want to be part of this fall?

And the most important question: is the agency or person handling your PR already helping you answer those questions?

If you’re hiring someone new, this is the time to have those conversations too, because the best agency relationship isn’t the one where you hand someone a finished plan and ask them to get coverage for it. It’s the one where you bring them in early enough for them to help improve the plan.

August Isn’t Dead

I’ve spent my entire career hearing that nothing happens in August, and yes, people go away, editors go away, clients go away; heck, even I go away (more on that later), but business doesn’t actually stop. August is when I start thinking about what I want the rest of the year to look like and build my checklist:

Who do I want to work with?

What do our clients need?

What isn’t working?

What opportunities are we missing?

What do we need to start now if we want it to matter in October?

There is something useful about doing this while everything is just a little quieter.

Because on September 8, everyone’s inbox is going to explode at exactly the same time.

And if that’s when you start thinking about Q4, you’re not early; you’re competing with everyone else who waited until September.

The Fine Print

If you have something you want people talking about in Q4, start now. Bring PR in before everything is decided, give us time to tell you when the story isn’t the story, and please don’t call us on December 12 asking if we can get it placed before Christmas. Maybe we can, but we would have rather started in August.

P.S. If this is the year you’re actually starting that Q4 conversation, I’d rather have it today than on September 8.

Ahhh, and speaking of vacation, next week I’ll be writing to you from mine with some tips, tricks, and slightly unhinged systems I use to make traveling easier. More on that from Portugal.

But before I leave New York, there are a few things worth leaving the house for...

5 Things I’d Leave the House for: US Open Edition

1. Thompson Central Park lobby pop-up from buzzworthy tennis apparel brand Court Club (Aug 26–Sept 1).

2. I’d also grab an Opening Serve cocktail at Parker's or the limited edition Coffee Brownie Shake with a Baileys add-on at the Burger Joint, both also at Thompson Central Park through Sept. 13th.

3. The main draw for the tournament starts Sunday, August 30th, but until then, head to Queens for the open practice sessions & exhibition games at Arthur Ashe, Louis Armstrong, and Grandstand courts throughout the week.

4. New U.S. Open sponsor Electrolit is hosting a “Battle of the Sabys” at Fini Pizza in Brooklyn Heights with brand ambassador ARYNA SABALENKA. Fans will be invited to “channel their inner Aryna through serve, style and sound challenges, with three winners earning the chance to meet Aryna herself and receive a custom trophy presented by the tennis star.” If you miss the main event, try “Saby’s Slice,” available at all N.Y. Fini locations between Aug 28-30.

5. On August 28th, The Seaport Racquet Club at the Racquet Clubhouse Pier 17 is hosting a conversation between Racquet Magazine founder CAITLIN THOMPSON and The Athletic’s MATTHEW FUTTERMAN on his new book, “The Cruelest Game: Chasing Greatness in Professional Tennis.” The event begins at 5:30 pm ET.

   ---

That’s it from me, as always, thank you for being here, for reading, and for sending me words of encouragement. And don’t forget to tap the lil heart so I can make more internet friends.
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Though I am a firm believer that summer doesn’t end until September 21st, the vibes are slowly exiting the building.

This past summer in New York was magical. Everyone said it: NY IS BACK BABY. Between the Knicks’ run for the championship, followed closely by the World Cup, then America 250, and back to the World Cup, the energy everywhere was palpable. People in the streets drinking, hanging, socializing like it was 2016 or 2018 or even 2019, a time before our worlds got smaller. The weather was typical New York: perfect, then unbearably hot, then downpours and thunderstorms, then back to perfect.

As we head into the last three weekends of the unofficial official end of summer, I usually take these last two quiet-ish weeks to let my team work on a more lax schedule. More remote time, get your work done, get those last beach days in, and really recharge before we head into the craziest time of year.

Ever since I started working for myself, I’ve taken this time to get my life sorted out, because frankly it can get chaotic when you’re always working, traveling, meeting, projecting. Here’s a simple list of a few things I’ll be doing. Let’s call it my August Audit: a chance to see where I am, what’s working, what’s not, and where I need to be before everything speeds up again.

1. The Last Round of Yes

Take all those last-minute, more fun meetings and drinks. Make the reservation at the place you’ve been dying to try, eat outside as much as you can before the weather gets colder. The rush comes in right after Labor Day, and after that you can’t schedule anything until January.

Last week I finally got to see my friend Michaella, whom I’ve been trying to see all summer. We saw each other briefly at a PRNet event she hosted a few weeks earlier, and we finally got our lunch on the books. Spending a beautiful afternoon with a smart and inspiring friend was a perfect way to break up my day, and running into friends of mine along the way led to new connections for everyone. Unexpected moments like these, when the pressure is low and the vibes are high, lead to so much goodness. I’m glad we finally got it in before we’re both too busy again.

2. Does Everything Still Work

Audit your website, your marketing materials, everything client-facing. Make sure it’s actually working.

I’ll use myself as an example: last October we launched our new and improved website, except the person we hired to build it wiped all of our SEO, GEO, AEO, and web authority. Everything I had built over the last 11 years was gone, wiped away as if we’d just started yesterday.

This is why it’s so important to stay on top of this stuff and not assume things are working just ‘cause they’re supposed to.

The uncomfortable part is that this isn’t just an audit of systems. It’s an audit of people, too. If there’s a client that doesn’t feel like a fit anymore, it’s probably time to make moves to separate from them. Sometimes employees have run their course, and their goals no longer match the direction of your company. Your accountant, advisors, vendors, whoever you work with or use: are they still doing what you need them to do? Now is the time to be held accountable and hold them accountable.

On a practical level, your website, your SEO, your GEO, all of it needs to actually work for your pipeline. If things are quiet, maybe now is the time to run some tests or hire someone to do it if you don’t know how. Even though I like to lock in my pipeline in August, the number of folks looking for you in September and October can grow exponentially. Make sure everything is working so they can find you and you are ready for them when they get there.

3. Everything In Buckets

I usually give the last week or 10 days before Labor Day as remote time for my team. While I’m home or away getting my life together before the unofficial start of fall, my team can do the same.

But in order to be able to do that, we spend the first half of August lining up our ducks for the rest of the year and into Q1. If we can plan out as many of the big things as possible now, the smaller things can slot in. It gives us more flexibility on the things we want to do, and an easier way to get to no on the things that don’t necessarily make sense.

When I met up with my client Judith yesterday (hi Judith), we were able to toast that our roadmap through the fiscal year was built and in motion, the budgets were in a good place, and we can add or remove as we see fit without it derailing everything. The planning is done. Now the fun part of executing comes.

The way this applies to my personal life: I can tell you by August 25th what my plans look like through January. This includes everyone’s birthdays and celebrations, any travel both personal and professional, and adventures and special moments too, because having stuff to look forward to on those longer winter days is so important.

A doctor said to Robert (my partner) and me after his accident that “novelty is one of the most important parts of life,” and it’s stuck with me ever since.

The more I plan, the more room I have to be spontaneous.

This is also when I plan out all of my medical appointments and beauty appointments for the year. I can tell you when I’m getting my hair colored or cut for the next six months, same for nails and other things. It might seem like a lot, but not having to think about it in the moment really helps me move more freely through the days.

And I put a few rest days in. We don’t realize how fast the fall goes, and then suddenly we’re toasting to the new year.

4. The Hard One

Don’t leave money on the table.

This is the hard one. Audit your books, see where you landed for the first three quarters, and whether you’re on track to land where you expected for Q4. Sometimes seeing how you’ve spent or what you made is a painful truth, we’ve all been there. It can be disappointing, but it can also be exciting. Those unexpected end-of-year contracts can be exactly what pushes you over your goal, and over the year before.

This is also where the August Audit gets personal.

I check in on the goals I set in January, not just the business ones, the personal ones too. Have I kept up with them? What fell by the wayside?

This year I decided to keep my phone out of my room at night, and I’ve been doing that about 95% of the time. The other 5% is usually when I’m traveling or forgetful. I wanted to reach 20 books and I’m 14 in, so I have plenty of time to get the last six in, maybe an extra one or two.

I’ve been practicing my Dua Lipa (my nickname for Duolingo) for 15 minutes a night. I’m 300 days into my streak, my French has definitely improved and I’m proud of that.

My five-minute journal kind of fell off a bit because of travel, but I’ve been traveling with smaller notebooks and journals and writing in those wherever I am on the road. I also just picked up a creativity journal for the days I want to do something besides just words.

Moving my body is always a goal, and I’ve been doing a lot more of it, which I’m also proud of. I’ve been walking at least 10k steps a day, going to pilates and physical therapy a few days a week. I feel good, I feel strong, and I want to keep going.

Some goals I nailed, some I modified, some fell off a bit. That’s life. I still have four months to work with.

5. Get Your Shit Together

Savor the last few moments of calm and get your shit together.

Whether that’s cleaning out your inbox, cleaning up your client files and databases, removing old media alerts, cleaning out your closet and getting rid of the junk that was supposed to be donated and hasn’t made it out yet, or unsubscribing from the Substacks and newsletters you don’t read (except mine).

Clean it out now, while you have some time to commit to it, because you know you won’t get it done once things get busy.

Come September, the clutter starts to build, and if you don’t take care of it now, you won’t when things get busy.

The Fine Print

The last weeks of summer aren’t a time to get all sad panda about summer ending. They’re a chance to look around while things are still quiet enough to actually see what’s working, what’s not, what you want more of, and what you’re absolutely not taking with you into fall. Clean it up. Make the plans. Book the haircut. Chase the money. See your friends. Then go enjoy the last few weekends of summer. September will be here soon enough.

And now for a few things on my fall shopping list that make my life easier and I HIGHLY recommend

1. A ludicrously capacious bag because between a laptop, gym clothes, and other stuff, I’m on board with this trend regardless of what anyone says ;) (this one is also cute)

2. With predictions of a super wet and rainy fall in the northeast, at least I can look stylish AND let everyone see my outfit with this guy in my hand

3. Get ready to get sick of seeing me wear this go-with-everything accessory, which literally elevates everything and makes my outfits more intentional

4. Fall travel means packing for everything and usually in a carry-on; these cubes save the day

5. For shorter trips to FedEx or the grocery store, this is the MVP. *Mom Hack: I also use this as Sidney’s weekend bag since he can roll it himself

6. Healthy body (here and here), healthy hair (here and here), healthy me

That’s it from me, as always.

Thank you for being here, for reading, and for sending me words of encouragement. And don’t forget to tap the lil heart so I can make more internet friends.
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I was going to publish this piece over this past weekend, and frankly abandoned it because I’ve been going back and forth reading all the commentary, from Dana Thomas, to Amy Odell, to think pieces everywhere. This John Galliano show at the Met has brought up a lot of questions and a lot of feelings.

This one is genuinely hard, and I see both sides of it. I’m a Jewish woman who’s been handed some version of an antisemitism sandwich every day since 2020, yes, long before October 7th, and I also grew up in New York City, a place where I never really encountered it firsthand until I went to college in Ohio, because Jewish people have been part of the fabric of this city since its birth.

Then there’s my own history with Galliano specifically, which felt like something out of a dream except it came with its own confusing baggage, because it started right after he got out of rehab in 2012, following his antisemitic tirade in 2011. I was actually in touch with him until just a few years ago.

I met him through friends, and meeting him, for a fashion fangirl, was surreal. I think I also cried when the news broke of his tirade in that Paris restaurant, it was confusing and sad and I was hurt, it was personal, this person I loved and admired spewing such hateful rhetoric. This was also before the days of social media and parasocial relationships the way they are now, so we didn’t get that same exposure to people the way we do now.

We talk a lot about separating the art from the artist. I don’t think anyone’s actually defined what that means in practice.

Indeed, despite his creative genius, it wasn’t always assured that Galliano would get the Costume Institute treatment. In 2011, he was arrested and subsequently fired from his creative director role at Christian Dior for making antisemitic remarks at a Paris bar. Cast into creative exile, he spent time in rehabilitation, subsequently reemerging at Maison Margiela, where he rebuilt his reputation, collection by collection.

So instead of something new, here’s where I actually land today: nowhere firm. Below is the piece I’d already written for this past weekend, along with some of the best writing on this from other people, Dana Thomas, Faran Krentcil, and Amy Odell, plus my own original piece on Galliano from April. Read them, see if you can figure out where to land, and tell me. I’d genuinely like to know.

The Met’s Costume Institute announced that John Galliano is the subject of next year’s blockbuster exhibition and gala, “John Galliano: Horizons.” It’s only the third time the Costume Institute has built a solo show around a living designer. The Met’s own release says the exhibition “will address the derogatory conduct that fundamentally altered his career and public reception,” and will consider “how artistic achievement should be understood alongside ethical accountability.”

The ugly part is built into the wall text too.

The irony is that the Met’s release promises “sketches, toiles, research books, and archival materials,” and most of it won’t be able to cover his first decade, because it was all liquidated when his early backers pulled out, first in 1986 and again in 1991. It’s safe to say a lot of what we’ll actually see will be from his years at Givenchy and then Dior, the era that made him an international phenomenon and earned him the nickname l’enfant terrible, bad boy, in French.

I wrote about Galliano back in April, when Zara announced he’d be re-authoring pieces from its archive. The question I was circling then was simple: if someone steps out of the spotlight, takes accountability, actually does the work and the recovery, and comes back with a real understanding of what they did, where does that leave them? I’ve had my own front-row seat to that question. I met Galliano when he got out of rehab after the “incident”.

But I think what I’m realizing now is that there are actually two questions.

Can someone change, take accountability and deserve forgiveness?

And if the answer is yes, does that mean they also deserve to have everything they lost restored?

Because Galliano’s return wasn’t one big comeback. It happened slowly.

Margiela quietly named him creative director back in 2014, its own kind of rehabilitation, tucked under someone else’s name instead of his own. Then a documentary in 2023. Kim Kardashian wore one of his Margiela masterpieces to the Met Gala in 2024, a corseted silver-brocade look, and the world got to fall back in love with the work before it ever had to reckon with the man who made it. A Zara deal last spring. Now a Met show, this time under his own name. Each one moved the needle a little further before the next one asked for more.

This was always the plan: bring fashion’s favorite bad boy back, and make the world remember how talented and good he always was, even if he was also very, very bad.

Fashion insiders called this years ago, Anna Wintour’s rehab campaign for Galliano. Dana Thomas wrote about it in 2023, after the Telluride premiere of the Galliano documentary, calling it the opening move in a campaign built to end in exactly this, a Met retrospective and gala. She flagged it again last spring when Zara announced the archive collaboration. The takes have piled up fast since then, more of them than I expected for what’s still just a museum press release

And yet here in NYC, the NYPD data has Jewish New Yorkers targeted in a majority of the city’s confirmed hate crimes so far this year, more than every other targeted group combined, despite being roughly a tenth of the population. Against that backdrop, I keep asking myself what it means that fashion’s biggest institutions can spend years building someone back up from exactly this kind of hate, and that it worked and will now be celebrated.

And then there is my own experience with him, separate from anything the Met or Dana Thomas or Anna Wintour can offer. When I met him, the tone shifted at one point, just slightly. He got serious and said something along the lines of:

“I want to thank you for the kindness and hospitality you’re showing us. It’s not lost on me that you are Jewish, and I know I said horrible things. It was a very dark time in my life, and it’s not who I am.”

I believed him in that moment. I still do. I still don’t know if believing him is the same thing as deciding he deserves this. Or maybe the bigger question for me is, does this need to happen now?

And I think that’s where I’ve been getting stuck. I can believe that someone can say something horrific, confront what they’ve done, get sober, learn and change. I can believe in forgiveness.

But forgiveness, going back to work, and being given one of the biggest institutional celebrations your industry can give you aren’t necessarily the same thing.

Anna Wintour, who chairs the Met Gala and has enormous say over what the Costume Institute puts on, has been one of Galliano’s most powerful and consistent supporters. This road back didn’t happen in a vacuum. The fashion industry has repeatedly chosen to give him another stage, another collaboration, another opportunity to remind people why they fell in love with his work in the first place.

Now the Met has given him the biggest one.

And maybe that’s the question I can’t answer. If someone has done the work, taken accountability and genuinely changed, what are we supposed to give them back? Their career? Their reputation? Our forgiveness? All of it?

I don’t know.

If you want the full story, the piece is here: “This Is My John Galliano Story”

The Fine Print

I still don’t know if he should have gotten this, right now. I’ve had years with this story, and the question isn’t any closer to a clean answer for me now than it was in April. The industry’s heavy hitters clearly decided. I haven’t, and I don’t know that I ever will.

That’s it from me, as always, thank you for being here, for reading, and for sending me words of encouragement. And don’t forget to tap the lil heart so I can make more internet friends.

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Here’s my problem with it: PR is relationships and storytelling, a business built entirely on the idea that a real person with a real track record is vouching for something to another real person. A robot doing that job defeats the entire point. I use AI in my own work, for editing, to …

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I see you signing up in real time, and I’m not going to pretend that doesn’t make my whole week when I see those notifications. If you’re wondering what you walked into, it’s a PR founder telling you what actually happens behind the pitch, the client dinner, and the panel, instead of the version that makes it into a case study deck.

Which brings me to today’s post.

A few weeks ago I sat down with Chris Danton and Kirsten Ludwig from In Good Co for their Good Thinking podcast. I’ve known Chris and Kirsten for about 5 years and have always admired their work. I always joke I am an unashamed superfan of their newsletter by the same name. We had so much fun recording this, and the episode just went up; it’s called “The Pie Is Infinite. Act Like It,”.

GOOD THINKING

The pie is infinite. Act like it.

Hi all…

Listen now

a month ago · 6 likes · 1 comment · Chris Danton

If you only have twenty minutes this week, I’d rather you spend them there listening than here reading because it’s that good, BUT since you’re already here, here’s what I’d pull out of it if I were you.

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Covid changed the way this industry does business. Restaurants closed, people stopped going out, and when things reopened, we didn’t go back to the way we used to meet. Being human and meeting in real life is the core of this business, and that’s the part we lost.

This morning I was supposed to meet my dear friend Gabriela, who I’ve known in this industry for well over ten years, for breakfast at Odeon. We got there and realized Odeon doesn’t open for breakfast anymore. Just brunch, st…

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Everyone started saying “a 360 strategy,” and a lot of them didn’t truly know what it meant, so it eventually diluted the really holistic brand and communications work people were doing.

PR is also changing dramatically, even in just the last eight months, magazines shuttering, editorial staffs cut down to skeleton crews. It feels like the whole industry is contracting. In an industry feeling the pains of so much change, our work is now more important than ever for a brand. We’re just no longer looking at the whole picture. It’s not 360. It’s 4D: storytelling, credibility, the real world, and the blocking and tackling that keep them honest. Each moves on its …

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Cartier is one of the most recognizable luxury brands in the world. That’s why losing one of its most iconic pieces immediately felt catastrophic. A piece of the brand’s own mythology was now somewhere lost in the south of France.

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Who’s Actually the Protagonist Now

Lions Creators moved to a bigger beachfront space this year, and creators were everywhere: every event, every panel. But a lot of them paid their own way to be there because brands weren’t footing the bill; they were out there hoping to land a deal, not because one already existed. The creators actually speaking on panels tended to be the ones with bigger agents behind them, people who’d had real jobs before becoming creators, and even Cannes itself got in on it: a thousand-dollar creator pass that basically let you buy your way into being in front of the right people for the week.

Five hundred creators showed up …

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When I was in Cannes last week, half in a client meeting, half scrolling LinkedIn, pulling up my own clients’ Prime Day press numbers on the other tab, I knew it before a single research firm put a number on it. Prime Day is in its flop era. Shoppers are exhausted. Nobody’s excited about the next gadget. And every year it’s the same handful of brands running the same discount on the same day, which means we’ve spent years training people to just wait, because why would anyone pay full price when the brand restocks them twice a year on a schedule everyone already has memorized.

My clients’ numbers were fine, good even, just nowhere close to what we saw for Prime Day last summer. And the reason has nothing to do with the brands or the deals. There were fewer Prime Day stories to land in, period, because Prime Day now sits wedged between Memorial Day sales and July 4th sales on a calendar that never stops discounting. When the sale no longer feels like its own event, the coverage doesn’t …

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I created a role called Director of Vibe in 2010. Brands have been copying it ever since. You’d think someone with that title would have been at Cannes years ago, but the festival always felt like it was speaking a different language, inside baseball for the advertising world, awards for campaigns I didn’t work on, conversations that lived one step removed from where I actually work. I watched it every June and never quite found the door.

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Which is what made thirty years of losing so hard to explain.

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For the last 20 or so years, search has been a question followed by an answer, and that answer consisted of a list of websites and links. But after 20 years of a great thing, Google has decided to flip that model on its head entirely. When the news broke about what Google I/O actually means for everyone working in brand, digital, affiliate, SEO, publishing, brand marketing, and e-comm people were rightly nervous with a lot of “What does this mean for me?”

Google is transforming into an AI-driven answer engine, which means it now summarizes, recommends, and synthesizes directly in search results. For media and brands, this means fewer website clicks, less traffic, lower affiliate revenue, and a fundamentally different model for how people discover brands online.

If you missed the announcement, go back and read it; it sets up everything I’m about to say.

And because of these changes, one channel just became sign…

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I’ve been to a lot of industry events, and I have to say, this one is different. The women who show up aren’t there to collect business cards and post a photo of all the transactional networking. They’re operators, executives, and founders, and they actually came to connect. You feel the difference immediately.

This was my first year, and I was there in two capacities: attending as an industry person, and the IFP team was on the floor running a fit activation for our client, Wacoal, across three days. It was an interesting po…

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Last week I was in Florida for the Women in Retail conference with our Wacoal clients, and it was one of those events that remind you why you do what you do. Great people, real conversations, and I walked away with pages of notes and a few things I’m still thinking about.

It was also a bit of a heavy week personally, which I shared in my Note today. Life was life-ing. I’m OK, and I’m back, and I’m excited about what’s coming.

First up this week: my leadership takeaways from Women in Retail. I think some of what I heard will land for you, too.

See you Thursday.

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For the first time in a while, instead of everyone saying “media is dead,” there’s more coverage, more channels, more noise, and at the same time, more opportunity than most brands know what to do with.

The mistake is thinking all coverage is equal.

Anyone can get a hit, but the kind of coverage that actually moves a business, that shifts perception, that opens doors you couldn’t get into before, that’s a different thing entirely, and it’s where PR gets undervalued.

At IFP, we call ourselves rainmakers. IFP stands for il fait pluie, French for “it is raining,” and that’s the point, we make it rain, but not in the way people have come to use that phrase.

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