Amy reporting here today from sunny London where it is a delightful 66F/19C heating up to a glorious 77F/25C - which is somewhere right around my favourite temperature. Rest assured, England will deliver what it usually does on a bank holiday weekend - good ole rain (or so they are predicting at the moment). I’ve just returned from my Stateside Summer and am holding on tightly to the last vestiges of these languid days. It helps that Alpha Kilo is also on its Summer Slowdown, coupled with Work Away - two concepts that we’ve honed over the years that allow the team some time to recharge without taking our eye off the ball. Yes, you can savour summer without missing a trick for your clients.

Downshifting isn’t stalling out.

Let’s face it, anyone who works with European clients knows that they have been winning at summer holiday for decades now. Come August, between manufactures resting and school breaks, half of Europe is on a lounger, bless them, with those of us in the UK/States looking on with mind-boggling wonder at how they manage to stay in business. But they do, don’t they?

As you know, dear Relatives, when Lauren and I started Alpha Kilo we put a lot of time and energy into building a foundation that supported a balanced, happy life for ourselves and the team. Even in those days where founders bragged about always on, minimal sleep and food intake, we were like NO FCKING WAY. We knew Alpha Kilo could be top-tier, deliver at the highest level, AND be only one part of a full life. So we took a page out of our European friend’s book, and set about figuring out how we down-shift in August to recharge, without letting the quality of work slide. No easy feat when more than half of our clients are American (and bless my tribe, we still struggle with the idea of a two-week vacation, fully unplugged).

First came Work Away. A simple concept born before the pandemic and proven by it. It’s work with a little more freedom around where that work happens. For the month of August, the agreement with the team is simple:

1. Be at your scheduled meetings. If you decide to work from Bora Bora, fine, but know you’ll be on client calls at some odd hours of the night.

2. Be reachable during work hours. The work hours of your local office stay the same, so keep Slack fired up and your mobile on.

3. Get your work done to the usual standard (which at Alpha Kilo is pinnacle or bust). Work Away is not annual leave in disguise and if you can’t execute as per usual, then just take the days off.

We learned over the years that certain team members truly do perform better at their desk, so we push those who can’t keep their head in the game to take the holiday - don’t be looking longingly out the window as your family plays in the sand. There’s no shame in taking holiday, babes.

Also key here is flexibility only works when the expectations around it are clear. Freedom without accountability creates chaos, while accountability without freedom creates resentment. The beauty is in the balance.

Then came Summer Slowdown. For the week leading into the August bank holiday in the UK and the week leading into Labor Day in the US, we clear the team’s calendar of all meetings. Client responsibilities don’t disappear and we’re still on the clock, but both internal and external meetings are cancelled. The idea is to give the team (and ourselves) time to clear inboxes, tidy trackers, build plans, clean up those to-do lists, and be ready to run headlong into Autumn. September has way of kicking the door in at the agency. This year it will be even more exciting, intense, and full on so this next week will be the long exhale before stepping on the field.

There’s also something quietly radical about recognising that organising the work is actually work. We tend to reward the performative work of calls, presentations, and launches, and prep gets sidelined to the edges and in-betweens. But it is in that preparation and organisation, we have the space to build stronger, dream bigger, and ultimately execute better.

Fun fact: as we’re ever- learning and adapting over here, next year Slowdown will shift to the second and third week of August when clients, partners, and media are at their quietest. Giving yourself the permission to learn and adapt policies is one of the greatest gifts of owning your own business.

Thanks so much for reading and wishing you all a wonderful last week of proper summer, dear Relatives! We’ll be back to our regular weekly programming next week with the return of our latest finds for our lovely subscribers. On the instagram, we’ll be bringing back the Industry Related Interviews. Cheers to a bumper Autumn ahead! 🥂

With Love from Alpha Kilo ♥️

When we started Industry Related nearly two years ago, we had a section called The Rant. Well dear Relatives, this whole Influencers vs Nantucket that has been circulating the interwebs has revived it. The topic really ruffles my feathers - and as it relates to Alpha Kilo’s expertise in both media and the luxury industry, Lauren allowed me to let loose, so let’s get into it.

Nantucket does not owe you a backdrop, or anything else for that matter.

Given our professional expertise and deep personal and professional connections to the island, it would be almost irresponsible for us NOT to discuss the influencer debate that has erupted on Nantucket and subsequently across national media over the last few weeks. As an agency that finds both the term and the proliferation of self-stylized “influencers” rather vomit-inducing, those who know us probably know where this is headed.

It is revealing that this particular debate has erupted on Nantucket, an island that has, for over a century, embodied quiet luxury, long before marketing discovered the phrase. Operative word being QUIET.

These days, it’s inundated with people claiming insider status, yet covering the same five establishments they probably saw on someone else’s instagram. The lack of even a modicum of research, exploration, or even curiosity would be laughable if it wasn’t so damn annoying. (Par example: What you wouldn’t know from these mind-numbing, same same guides is that Something Natural isn’t the only banger sandwich shop on the island… and those who have been coming to the island for years have OPINIONS on the matter. My favourite at present: relative newcomer, 45 Surfside.) I have yet to see one of these “insider guides” that has addressed what those who genuinely know Nantucket understand… the island has always operated according to a unwritten code of conduct. At the heart of it is the understanding that every human, regardless of background, should be able to experience the beauty of the island in peace and privacy. The cornerstone of this code is recognising that access to a place does not confer ownership over it, and not every experience needs to be documented, broadcast, or turned into content.

Let’s get into the sign that started it all. First things first, dear self-proclaimed person of influence, the “No Influencers” sign under attack here is a QUARTERBOARD. You’re an insider, no? Surely you would recognize one of the most enduring emblems of the island, one that traces back to the early 19th century maritime laws that required ships to have their names carved on boards attached to the stern or aft quarter. As whaling declined, salvaged quarterboards started appearing on island homes - one of the earliest being Shanunga, which wrecked off of Nantucket in 1852. Sometime around the 1970s, commissioning a quarterboard bearing a witty name for one’s island home became a thing and the tradition continues to this day (Baby Got ACK being a particular favorite).

The store in question sells handmade quarterboards on behalf of a local artisan, so I imagine said quarterboard was created as a cheeky sample. So understood in its proper context, the suggestion to name one’s home No Influencers is rather hilarious. It works in two directions, being both self-depreciating and throwing quiet shade to those crossing the threshold. (Might I also suggest NOT INFLUENCED) Here’s a genuine insider tip for ya… maritime superstition has long warned against renaming a vessel, so if your house comes with a quarterboard, best not to rename it, as it is said to be bad luck.

Now that we’ve got that clear, onto the larger issue at hand. I’m throwing the BULLSH*T flag on the premise that influencers are actually benefiting Nantucket on the whole. The island is hardly suffering from a lack of recognition. Its beauty, history and cultural cachet existed long before the creator economy, and, at present, the island is doing FAR more for the influencer than the influencer is doing for the island.

There seems to be this asinine assumption from the permanently online that all promotion is inherently beneficial to businesses, brands, or artisans who come under the lens, or that somehow, showing up with your phone, filtered face and uneducated commentary is actually a favor. The long-standing private residents on this island are the OG influencers though I loathe to place that title on them. Only someone who truly has no understanding of private wealth would so adamantly believe that all proprietors would be keen for exposure to your random audience of aspirants, bots, and 16YOs who couldn’t afford a spoon in the shop, much less a lightship basket. When people make a significant purchase, they probably don’t want to be caught on camera doing so. We’re not talking about some fast-fashion, shit-manufactured $50 sweatshirt that will end up in landfill in within 18 months, but an artisan item or antique with provenance and true value. Beyond privacy, your lens is a security issue.

Furthermore, a privately owned business is perfectly entitled to decide that people filming inside its premises, photographing its merchandise or using the space as a backdrop does not serve the experience of its clientele. It seems to be unfathomable to these superficial twats that these businesses may value atmosphere, discretion, history or the comfort of its existing customers more highly than your paltry reach. This is called DISCERNMENT. Look 👏🏻 it 👏🏻 up 👏🏻.

There is an entire culture of content creators that essentially use Nantucket for the scenery, the mythology, and the borrowed credibility the island provides. Its cobblestones, weathered shingles, hydrangeas, lightship baskets, beaches and that particular strain of UNDERSTATED New England chic become manufactured content, engagement and, ultimately, revenue for someone who does not reinvest back into the economy and culture of the island itself.

Next time you see one of these brands or creators who feel so aggressed by the accusation, ask the following:

• Are they employing or promoting island residents throughout the year? Supporting local craftspeople or photographers? Contributing to conservation, cultural institutions and community organizations? Are they encouraging their audiences to understand the island beyond its most photogenic surfaces?

• Are they helping to sustain Nantucket…or merely consuming its identity?

Perhaps the most illuminating follow-up to this entire debate would be a very simple one: when will the businesses shouting most loudly about what they bring to Nantucket close their doors for the season?

That date will tell us rather more than a follower count, and I think we all know the answer. My money is on the day after Labor Day (at best mid-October) they’ll empty inventory and tape a sign to the door that says “Thanks for a great season, Nantucket!” This is not to say that every island business must remain open through February to be deemed worthwhile. Nantucket has always had a seasonal economy, and many deeply committed businesses operate accordingly. The true measure is not simply whether a store closes, but what remains after it does. Has it created meaningful employment, supported the year-round community or invested a fair share of the value it extracted from the island back into it?

If a brand arrives for the most commercially lucrative months, trades on Nantucket’s name and aesthetic, generates an enormous amount of content and disappears as soon as the ferries become quieter, that is not community-building. It is seasonal extraction.

Were these same creators and businesses using their platforms during the winter months, when island businesses genuinely need customers, local organizations need support, and the realities of sustaining a year-round community are considerably less picturesque, the conversation would be very different.

Influence can be valuable when deployed thoughtfully. It can introduce audiences to remarkable makers, shed light on overlooked stories, and direct meaningful spending towards independent businesses. But I would wager a woman who thinks its entertaining to put her nether regions on the face of public statue of Mr. Rogers on island knows nothing about thoughtfulness, community, or grace for that matter. Clearly.

Thanks so much for reading, dear Relatives! As we roll into peak summer, who knows what next week will bring, but we’re so grateful you’re here. Comments are OPEN if you have anything to add to the above or any questions for us. We’re here for you!

With love from Alpha Kilo ❤️

Casey reporting here from New York where it’s a rather sticky 88F/31C and my vocabulary has taken an unexpected turn over the past fortnight. Apparently I’m supposed to be calling football “soccer” now, although after 33 years that ship has definitely sailed.

For most of the year I’ve simply been “the Brit in the office” since relocating to New York City last autumn from my native London. For the past three weeks, however, I’ve become England’s appointed spokesperson, expected to explain our tactics, justify our optimism, and reassure everyone that yes, penalties are still a slightly traumatic subject. Before we go any further, I’d also like to acknowledge Jude Bellingham. Unrelated to the rest of this piece, but it felt wrong not to as he’s so pretty. And, I guess, also kind of good at “soccer”.

Watching this World Cup from New York has reminded me how terrible we all are at predicting what will actually become the story. Before the tournament started, the conversation was exactly what you’d expect. Can England finally do it? Will Argentina go back-to-back? Was this France’s to lose? All perfectly sensible questions, and as it turns out, pretty accurate ones. But they weren’t the stories everyone ended up talking about.

Last weekend I was watching the England v Norway match at an Irish bar in Brooklyn and realised all of the Americans in the room had somehow become Norwegian. Every time Erling Haaland got on the ball, people were enthusiastically doing the Viking rowing celebration, despite the fact I suspect very few of them had watched Norway play before June. Somewhere along the way, everyone had decided they wanted Norway to do well.

Then there was Cape Verde, a country smaller than the state of Delaware. They didn’t win the tournament, but that was beside the point. Their goalkeeper became one of the breakout personalities of the competition and suddenly, millions of people who definitely couldn’t have found Cape Verde on a map a month earlier were cheering every save.

And then, of course, there was the USA red card. Within 24 hours, we’d gone from talking about one play - a messy tackle - to debating referees, VAR, FIFA, politics and presidential phone calls. Football itself had almost become secondary to the stories swirling around it.

It struck me that this is exactly what happens in the PR world. We spend weeks trying to predict which announcement will land, which launch will dominate the conversation, which product will become the story. We naturally gravitate towards the biggest budgets, the biggest brands and the biggest names because they seem like the safest bet. Except they often aren’t.

Some of the best coverage we’ve secured over the years has come from the thing nobody expected to take off. A throwaway quote in an interview that becomes the headline. A small design detail that suddenly captures everyone’s imagination. A founder’s perspective that resonates far beyond the original pitch. An unexpected collaboration that people start sharing because it feels fresh, not because it had the largest media budget behind it.

That’s the frustrating, and frankly brilliant, thing about PR. You can shape a story, you can position it, you can give it every opportunity to succeed. But the moment it leaves your inbox, people decide for themselves what they care about. Sometimes they’ll latch onto the thing you spent weeks crafting, and sometimes, they’ll all decide to support Norway.

Personally, I’ll take that unpredictability every time. It’s what keeps football interesting, and it’s what keeps this industry interesting too. If we could predict exactly what people were going to care about every single time, our jobs would be considerably easier. They’d also be considerably less fun.

Also, It’s Coming Home. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

Thanks so much for reading, dear Relatives! Isn’t our Casey an INCREDIBLE writer? As it’s summer, who knows what next week will bring, but we’ll keep dropping the Industry Related on the regular.

With love from Alpha Kilo ❤️

Amy reporting here today from London where it is currently 61F/16C on its way up to a glorious 78F/26C and sunny. We’ve been given a momentary reprieve from the insane heat, which is a good thing all around, but especially as England plays again this evening in the World Cup - an occurrence that already is prone to drive the locals a little crazy. We certainly don’t need the heat exasperating the legions of fans spilling out of pubs across the country, still holding on to the belief that their team will one day “bring it home”. I do love seeing the wild hope and displays of emotion the game brings out in a country that prides itself on a stiff upper lip and routinely says ‘excuse me’ to the person who has clearly been the perpetrator of the offense. Combine football, extreme heat, and an amount of booze that surely is keeping the global alcohol industry afloat at present, and all those years of pent up emotions burst through the surface in a way that would give Mt. Vesuvius pause. It’ll be babies or brawls over here.

In honour of the other side of the pond from whence I write, my mother country, which this weekend will be celebrating 250 years (one could say, a mere teenager as countries go), today I bring you a missive that was born last summer whilst participating in the Aspen Institute’s Executive Seminar. As part of our text-based explorations, we read the Declaration of Independence in its entirety and in that exercise, a thought occurred to me…. essentially, this is one BANGER of a press release. Beyond being beautifully written, it holds up as exemplar of how we as professionals should present our client announcements - not to mention includes one of my favourite low-key burns in the line “we hold these truths to be self-evident”. Think about it…

I do declare!

I don’t think many of us in the industry have ever written a press release with the thought that the document itself would stand the test of time. They’re almost written with a read and burn mentality, and for some journalists, perhaps just simply burn immediately. Perhaps if we approached our written outputs with the same rigour of a small wannabe nation tiptoeing the line of I love you, but let me go (and don’t hang me 🤗), we would have more pervasively successful press coverage - and one might argue, inherently more interesting content.

For those of you who have never read the Declaration of Independence in its entirety, I invite you to do a quick dive - it’s shorter than you might have imagined, for starts. You’ll then also be gifted with a bubbling of the smug satisfaction of being something of an academician, because, history. For those you who can’t be arsed, here’s a play-by-play on how to improve the work horse of public relations in a few easy steps ripped from a 250 year old document.

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Amy reporting here today from London where to say it is hotter than Hades is an understatement. 94F/34C hits different in a country without pervasive air-conditioning. Luckily the Carolinian in me is equipped with an internal biorhythm that can easily slide into heat-induced stillness while regulating the ole body temperature with water and some MacGvyer-style skills at creating a cross-breeze with tactical fan placement. The heat is making me miss home so I think I’ll brew up some sun tea punch. For those who don’t know, it’s a delightfully refreshing mix of iced sun tea (tea slowly brewed in the sun), orange juice and mint - and perfect for a hot day.

Today’s missive is unlocked for all readers - YAY! We’re previewing a new client we’re genuinely, incredibly excited about and want as many of you as possible to discover!

Human Gatherings for The Win

Let me start this post by saying, I love my Instagram scroll and I love my bots. 🤖I’m so here for the productivity, the efficiency, and maybe a little TOO here for the dating advice. My friends and I used to have a term for when a girl wouldn’t stop talking about a guy - we called it FRANKing (pronounced Frahnk-ing and I’m afraid it’s too long of a story to tell you why). I’m currently delighting in being able to dump all of this repetitive analysis, the compares, contrasts, same question phrased ever so slightly 200 different ways to see if the response will be any different, onto a bot who is always in my corner and seemingly thinks I’m absolutely brilliant. What’s not to love?

That being said, our pervasive digital culture has brought us to a very strange place. We can discover/learn/buy more than ever and at lightening speed, but we increasingly have no idea what is ACTUALLY real. Think about it… a chair can look extraordinary online and arrive stuffed with what feels like a combination of sawdust and nails. I still marvel at people who buy candles via Instagram without ever having taken in the scent. I imagine their homes smelling like a combination of Axe body spray and the hair of my old Strawberry Shortcake doll - and that’s if they’re lucky. Now add in the fact that we have deep fake and AI being layered over everything, even the visual evidence is becoming slippery.

Which brings us to why we’re here today. In a bit of a full circle moment for me, we’ve just signed New York’s oldest and most established trade fair - NY Now, or for those of us who know from its heyday, the New York International Gift Fair.

What is an agency that specializes in high design and luxury goods doing faffing about with a trade show that (heretofore had been) dying on the vine, you may ask?

Well for starters, it has just been bought by the brilliant, zero BS, boss B known as Dorothy Belshaw. This woman is a legend. I worked with her years ago in my first proper job at George Little Management where she was already rising rapidly through the ranks. I followed her out to LA, where she took the remnants of a once great market and breathed life - and commerce - into it. She doesn’t fck around or do things in halves, and she always plays to win. And those, dear Relatives, are OUR PEOPLE.

Beyond that, you may have picked up that our definition of the word craft extends beyond artisan work to all of those who are operating at the pinnacle of their game. You may also have deduced that we’re here for humans gathering, connecting, and communing. Well, fun fact, before trade shows were driven into the ground by private equity, that’s exactly what they were there for as well. And that’s what the NY Now team is bringing back (the sexy may take a minute, but we’ll get there).

Trade shows do something the digital world cannot. They give you materiality. Weight. Texture. Quality. Scale. The smell of leather. The weave of a textile. The texture of paper. The slightly awkward but important pleasure of looking someone in the eye and asking how their product was made - and when they can actually ship it.

They also give you the person behind the product. The founder. The maker. The sales director who has been carrying the line for twenty years. The guy who can tell you why the hinge matters, why the finish is better, where it’s manufactured, and ultimately, why the product exists at all.

For buyers, editors, designers, retailers, stylists, specifiers, and anyone else whose job depends on taste, judgment, and discernment, all those factor matter deeply. Taste is not built by scrolling. It is built by seeing, touching, comparing, questioning, and occasionally being surprised by something you did not know you were looking for. I give you a perfect example: Squishies. You can scroll through your phone and find hundreds of different types of stress toys for sale, but you know what you won’t be able to measure? The all-important SQUISH. Damn straight, just a bit of squish doesn’t cut it. Too tough, no thank you. The kids aren’t just here for some half-baked copy - they need the full and proper SQUISH. And where would you get your hands on options to squish-test? You guessed it…NY NOW, muthafckers. (I’m told ORB is comparable is quality of squoosh to the OG, NeeDohs, which seems to be sold out ad infinitum)

The old trade show model certainly needs rethink, but the way I see it, the faster we move toward the synthetic, the more important it will be to experience first hand the product and the people. In a world of digital same sameness, physical discovery is becoming invaluable again. Not because it is nostalgic, because it’s vital.

So that is why the return of the glory days of NY Gift Fair feels interesting to us. Not as a throwback, but as a correction. A return to proof and to the real-world intelligence that sits behind the smartest brands, whether they be toys or teapots.

That, AND we love a challenge.

Unapologetic plug here… we’ll be handling all of the PR and programming (talks, masterclasses, demos, workshops, you name it) as well as have devised a brilliant Pavilions scheme for the January market. Get in touch if you want in on the action!

The Curiosity Log: June 25, 2026

📚 What I’m reading
After School by Casey Lewis. A great exploration of all things Gen Z with well-curated intel, interesting interviews and insightful takes. I’ve also just been gifted the perfect paperback beach read, Polo by Jilly Cooper. There’s nothing more quintessentially 80s England I’m told…

🍲 Where I’m eating
Just this evening I’ve been told that Berenjak on Duke Street in London is incredible. As a huge fan of Persian food, I’ll be heading there stat.

🧚🏻‍♀️ What I’m exploring
The recently overhauled Harvey Nichols. Alexander McQueen alumni and current CEO, Julia Goddard, is working some serious magic to bring this icon back from the brink. I discovered some lovely bespoke homewares alongside an incredible selection of surprising brands you won’t see elsewhere. Personally, here for bringing back that 5th floor energy of yore!

Thanks so much for reading, dear Relatives! Next week, I’m thinking it’s time to discuss Pay for Play - what it is, why it exists, and how to support the ecosystem - complete with a publisher interview!

With love from Alpha Kilo ❤️

Amy reporting here from London where it’s 63F/17C, and a bit rainy, but delightfully quiet morning. Luckily I’m not one of those people who actively tracks my sleep, as last night I fell victim to the JOY SCROLL (TM ME) of watching the Tartan Army take over Boston until the early hours of the morning. It’s so damn delightful to see cranky, no BS Bostonians embrace these jolly, kilt-wearing, pipe-blaring Scots with a camaraderie that could bring a tear to your eye (and make you forget the evils of FIFA for a moment). I’m not a huge fan of baseball, but I would have LOVED to have been at the Red Sox game when a stadium of Scots and superfans basically turned it into an epic karoake bar. I should probably not divert you immediately to another substack, but fck it, if you have a moment to read only one - read this brilliant one from The American Pamphleteer on how the World Cup is exactly what America needed right now.

Now back to business.

Wait. Did I just hire myself a boss?

For those of you new to the Alpha Kilo journey as rolled out over issues of Industry Related, in short, when we hit the 10-year mark last October, Lauren and I took a good, long, hard look at what was and, more importantly, what WASN’T working. Fun fact: for ten years, we were basically making it up as we went along 🤗 . And remember, this is pre-AI, dear Relatives, so that’s us basically feeling our way through the dark, looking for love/business advice in all the wrong places. Some things came naturally (clients, ideas, pristine execution) and some things DID NOT (finance, operations, formalized HR). I once spent an entire two-week Christmas holiday writing our Company Handbook from scratch (again, without the help of the bots!!), only for us to basically forget to hand it out to new hires. Truth be told, if there’s a downside to having a wildly creative brain it’s that the business side of things can be downright BORING. Such a slog. By the end of ten years, having grown a successful agency with a banger of a brand reputation, I was OVER IT. I was spending more time looking at P&L and less time doing what I love and, quite frankly, am much better at.

It was time to bring in the big guns. Enter Emma Sherrard-Matthew, former Global CEO of Quintessentially and a downright baller. As always with Alpha Kilo, if we’re doing this, we’re going ALL IN. No B level board members. No more fcking around and finding out. It’s time to take this little jewel of an agency to the next level. Not size-wise mind you, but performance-wise. Even when you’ve got a brilliant team, you’re getting the accolades, and absolutely crushing it, you’ve got to be keeping an eye on the future. But the trick is, dear Relatives, in order to create a truly game-changing, leveling up kind of board, you (founder) need to be willing to a. listen, b. compromise, and c. do shit you don’t want to do.

Let’s get into it.

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Amy reporting here today from London where it’s bright and early, 54F/12C and I’m running on 4.5 hours of sleep and a triple shot Americano. Lauren’s going to have a doozy of time editing this one 😏 Fun fact: I don’t for a second believe that founder bullsh*t that’s been sold to us for years that success is born of minimal sleep, and that those who go down after the owls and get up before the birds are somehow winning. LIES. This girl THRIVES on seven hours and is a machine on eight. Anything less and it’s fog city up in here. My lack of sleep though is not due to worry but EXCITEMENT. For those of you who follow the cosmos, we’re in some super situ where Venus and Jupiter are making it rain… and I’ll tell you what, I’m feeling it! That and (full transparency) the sun is coming up sometime around 3:44AM (you read that right - I’m citing my weather app for specificity) and my blackout blinds are seriously falling down on the job.

Expertise be damned! Fortune favors the curious.

Earlier this week, Chloe, who leads the Alpha Kilo charge over here in London, and I found ourselves in one of those spaces that stops you mid-sentence; the kind that doesn't shout about itself but absolutely should. It was there, soaking in the detail and intricacies of the post-modern architecture, that we got onto the topic of how these amazing discoveries always seem to find us. Chloe's observation was a simple one…in fact we find these spaces, these people, these objects, these moments of magic, because we are so unapologetically, gloriously curious.

Part of it is intentional, having very thoughtfully positioned ourselves in the design industry. You know what that covers, dear Relatives? Pretty much every damn thing. Not just furniture, fashion, and product, but places, spaces, and experiences. Ours is a world of luxury, and not in the way your loo roll labels itself as such. But because behind every beautiful object, thoughtful experience, exquisite space, and delightful interaction, there’s a designer, a choreographer, a creative who dreamed it up, and legions who brought it to life. Artisans, architects, engineers, inventors - humans, in all their staggering, glorious variety. What humans get up to is so infinitely fascinating, and for the sake of your business, particularly if you’re in marketing or comms, you should GET INTO IT.

Before we fully dive in, let’s look at what curiosity actually means. Our friends at Merriam-Webster define it as the following:

cu·ri·os·i·ty /ˌkjʊəriˈɒsəti/ noun

1. A strong desire to know, learn, understand, or discover something. Interest leading to investigation or inquiry.

It isn’t something passive. It isn’t sitting back and idly wondering. Curiosity is an act of wonder and motion, and it’s the action that gives it such extraordinary power.

Ruminate on this for a second: in the age of AI, answers are abundant, but QUESTIONS ARE SCARCE. Your competitive advantage lives in the asking; in going on exploratory missions that in the moment may have no commercial value or potential; in attending an event because the invite was remotely interesting. I promise you, there will be a moment when the lightning strikes and that nugget of information you gleaned, space you toured, piece of conversation that stuck in memory, or seemingly random installation you wandered into will come back into play.

About five years ago, when the world was tip-toeing its way back into public spaces, I went up to Santa Barbara (I was in LA at the time) to a place called Lotusland, where a friend sits on the board. Why? Who the f*ck knows. I was definitely intrigued by the name, and I do love that drive up Highway 1, so why the hell not? IT IS AMAZING - and pimp this, the woman who created it was a Polish singer in the 1920s who changed her name to MADAME GANNA WALSKA and then got into gardening. VIBES!!! The reason I bring it up here is this… I went, I loved, I dove deep and then I left. Truth be told, I haven’t thought about it much to be honest. And then, YESTERDAY! No lie. Five and a bit years later, I was on a call with a potential client about how we program unexpected moments of magic for clients and BOOM, out rolled the ol’ Lotusland reference. I set about getting them a private tour. A gentle flex that shows the extent our agency reach and the type of gems we can uncover for clients.

How do we do it? Curiosity, baby. Every time.

For my paying Relatives, we’ll now roll into five daily exercises to activate your curiosity. I’ll share the details on some gems where curiosity led me to the past few weeks, and a punchy little column I’m calling the A-K Curiosity Log, which includes one liners on things like What I’m Questioning 🤨, Current Rabbit Hole I’m Heading Down 🐰, and Top on My Go List 🛩️.

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Amy reporting here today from a moody morning in London where it’s 60F/21C and vibing like an overtired two-year-old looking for a reason to cry/rain but hasn’t quite committed to it yet. I love that we’ve entered into the blissful state of summertime, though work doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo. Beyond it being the design industry’s equivalent to award season (so many damn fairs!), there seems to be a fervour around getting sh*t done at speed. Maybe people are simply looking to pack it all in so when their actual holiday arrives, they can properly unplug. Gone are the languid days of yore where the summer months were anchored in strategy and planning, two stages that pair nicely with afternoon aperitivos and gentle post-BBQ hangovers.

Peers Make for Powerful Allies

Welcome to week one of the NEW IR! Today I’ll be exploring the power of a prolific peer network. All y’all will get the ruminations. Our paid Relatives will get the roadmap on how to build one.

It’s been my experience that in the PR industry, “competitive” agencies are by and large complete assholes to each other. It rarely matters if one specializes in something the other has no understanding of, such as financial comms and design, they square off like the newsroom fight scene in Anchorman 2 (the better of the franchise, if you ask me. Discuss in comments). It such a ridiculous concept to Alpha Kilo for a few reasons:

1. We live in a world of abundance and there are PLENTY of clients to go around. Stop fighting for scraps. It’s such a bad look.

2. Schoolyard intelligence tells us that putting one person/agency down to lift another up only ever reflects badly on the sh*t-talker.

3. If you truly know your strengths as an agency, you should also know your weaknesses. My suggestion is to lean into making friends with agencies who compliment your expertise. You’ll find everybody wins and a happy client is a happy life - for all of us.

During NYCxDesign week, Lauren and I had the pleasure of meeting kindred PR spirits, the brilliant Julia Duke and her colleague Claire. Their work doesn’t simply focus in an adjacent industry, it’s one of our cores - design. Instead of taking the standard approach of ‘we’re going to sit here and peacock about our HUGE clients, how BUSY we are, and DEAR friends in media’, we had the most delightful lunch exploring ways we could support each other and collaborate on future projects. That’s what we call a PEER. So how do you build a robust peer network of brilliant humans? Let’s get into it.

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Amy reporting here today from a beautiful morning in London where the sweltering heat has eased up, thank heavens, and it’s 71F/22C. While I speak to my co-founder, Lauren, about a billion times a day, rare are the moments where we actually get to spend proper time together. One of the joys of our recent trip to NYC for the art/design event smatterings was to be able to do just that - hatch plans, reset systems, drink copious amounts of champagne in the heat. There’s not a day that passes that I’m not grateful to have her in the co-pilot’s seat on this wild adventure we call Alpha Kilo.

Let’s mix it up a bit, shall we?

Over the course of one of these champagne-fueled founder meetings, we decided to mix it up a bit on the Industry Related front. What started as a fun experiment to flip the agency newsletter on its head has actually turned into our most engaged platform. So since this seems to be working out, we’re putting some rigour behind it.

Not to worry, dear Relatives, it shall remain filterless and fact-filled as ever. I’ve always felt that as an agency we’re in pole position to critique the industry and those related to it (see how we got our title there?) in that we’re not obliged to advertisers and our clients love us for our straight-shooting, no BS, get ‘er done ways. Now, let’s pause for a moment for a gentle reminder of the dictionary definition of the word CRITIQUE:

Critique (noun)

1. A detailed analysis and assessment of something, especially a literary, philosophical, political, or artistic work.

2. A review or commentary that evaluates strengths, weaknesses, and overall quality.

Skillful critiques are those that, while they may highlight the ridiculous or potentially negative, also uplift and sharpen focus on quality. We also have the extraordinary opportunity to interact with incredible humans around the world who open up our minds and expand our aperture, allowing us to see the playing field from varying perspectives.

So if you’re wondering why we’re here in this world of Substack, there you have it. Our intention here is to create something where the reader walks away with insight, whether they agree or not. We’re not here to be right. We’re here for dialogue. And honestly, connection. And since y’all have shown up for us, we’re going to amp it up and start showing up for you properly.

For starters, I now have time booked in my diary each week to write up these missives, so you should find them in your inbox most Thursdays going forward. And we are going to be bringing on some different voices more regularly - Casey will feature, and you will be getting more from Lauren. Maybe even a guest writer or two.

We’ve refreshed our subscriber programme - and by refreshed, I mean we actually defined it. Paid subscribers will get access to longer-form content, interviews with the incredible humans I meet along the way (from C-suites to artisans); all kinds of guides (city, fair, etiquette, you name it), and what we’re calling the Alpha Kilo Hotline, which is essentially where you can hit up the team directly with questions or favours. If feasible and STREET LEGAL, we will respond promptly.

Turns out, Substack has a tier called Founder. Odd title for people joining 18 months in, but hey, we’re going with it. For those amazing humans, we’re giving you access to our curated global gatherings from Aspen to Abu Dhabi, and every major luxury market in-between. The guest list for these events is INTENTIONAL; we handpick invitees to foster genuine delight and exceptional exchange. We take pride in events that spark meaningful connection, whether to brand or human. So for those who click in, unless you’re already in our network, you’ll receive a short questionnaire. What interests you, what drew you to us, what type of events you prefer, and so on. Sound like a pain in 🍑? Well sugar, you’re paying a premium for this access, and we’d like to ensure you get your ROI on that investment 10x over.

We hope that by mapping this out for you, dear Relatives, you’ll have the opportunity to get more from us - and get in on the fun. We’re so grateful to have found our people that GET IT, these ever off-the-cuff, top-of-mind, sometimes coherent interpretations of our world. It’s our pleasure to continue this crazy project, and grow it with you.

Thanks so much for reading, dear Relatives! Next up on the ole editorial calendar, I’m tossing around either the Power of Peers or Notes from Month One of Having a Board Director (alt title: wait, did I just hire a boss for myself?). You may have noticed I haven’t mentioned an NYCxDesign review… mainly because even after typing that sentence, I got nothing. If the muse arrives, I’ll let you know of course.

With love from Alpha Kilo ❤️

Casey reporting here from New York where, upon writing, it’s 72F/22C and, in the past week alone, I’ve found myself toggling between a Creative Week kickoff at Rizzoli celebrating R/GA’s near 50-year legacy in shaping the internet and a deeply committed visit to Six Flags New Jersey, which, in its own way, qualifies as experiential design.

Having done NYCxDesign previously from a London vantage point, this will be my first as a New York resident, which mainly means slightly better logistics, slightly worse self-control, and a much stronger opinion on which borough deserves your time.

NYCxDesign is less a “week” and more a city-wide sprawl of openings, installations, panels, dinners, drinks, and the occasional moment where you find yourself deep in conversation about materials at 10:45pm on a Wednesday. Having now approached it from both sides of the Atlantic, here’s a short prepper’s guide, less survival, more strategy.

First, cluster your activity. This is not the week to romanticize crossing Manhattan multiple times a day. Pick your zones and commit. NoMad, Tribeca, Soho, and, if you’re doing it properly, Brooklyn. The calendar will tempt you otherwise, geography will correct you quickly.

Respect the power of a “night.” NoMad on a Friday becomes its own ecosystem. Showrooms stay open later, people linger, and suddenly you’ve seen five things you didn’t plan to and met three people you’ll email on Monday. It’s less about any one event and more about density.

On that note, we’re particularly excited about what our clients are bringing to the mix. Blu Dot is taking over their NoMad store with Field Trip, a photographic love letter to Minneapolis built around their Field Lounge Chair. It’s thoughtful, slightly unexpected, and one of those installations that rewards staying longer than intended, with proceeds supporting a local community food network.

Further downtown, Humanscale joins forces with Resource Furniture at Afternoon Light for a four-day activation exploring the modern home office. It’s a smart reflection of how we actually live now, hybrid, space-conscious, and in need of environments that don’t quietly destroy our posture. Expect considered ergonomics, transformable systems, and a genuinely cohesive approach to living and working under one roof.

And for those starting the day slightly more virtuously, iF Design is co-hosting an Innovation Breakfast with LIXIL, one of those early moments where the room is sharp, the coffee is strong, and the conversations tend to stick.

Beyond our own orbit, there’s plenty worth navigating toward. Scott Newlin’s After Hours at Sake Bar Asoko is a late-night Chinatown moment built for when the showroom circuit starts to fade, bringing together a tight group of studios for something more intimate, and slightly less programmed. Expect new works, good sake, and a crowd that’s actually there to engage rather than just pass through.

Downtown, ForScale are taking over COLBO Next Door alongside BANKSTON with a party built around a “manifesto on touch,” which is either exactly what we all need after years of screen time, or at the very least a very good excuse for a drink. With graphic design by Lowrie and spatial work by Currie Ritchie and Caleb Engstrom, it promises to land somewhere between design discourse and a genuinely fun night out, which, frankly, is the sweet spot.

And then Brooklyn. Newly local, I feel obligated, but also entirely justified, in saying, go. The Dumbo Design District is one of the newer clusters in the NYCxDesign landscape, but it’s absolutely worth the trip. Todd Bracher’s book talk for his new monograph Observations, Research and Design, published by Phaidon, takes place at Hudson Wilder and is exactly the kind of programming that rewards stepping slightly outside the main circuit, thoughtful, grounded, and a useful reset from the pace of Manhattan.

Also in Dumbo, Untapped Journal is celebrating the launch of its latest print edition with a performance-led evening that leans more cultural than commercial, live music, choreography, and a focus on domestic rituals. It’s a good reminder that not everything during this week needs to be loud to be memorable.

Equally important, don’t over-program yourself. NYCxDesign is not an endurance sport, despite what your calendar suggests. The best moments happen in the gaps, the walk between venues, the second drink you didn’t plan on, the introduction that turns into something useful three weeks later. If you’ve scheduled yourself down to the minute, you’ve missed the point.

And finally, a brief but necessary note on footwear. It should be both stylish and genuinely comfortable, a balance that sounds obvious but proves surprisingly elusive by day three. There’s been much discussion on this recently, with some particularly strong opinions coming out of Milan, shout out to Wrong House for keeping score, and NYCxDesign is no different, the wrong shoe will quietly derail your entire week.

NYCxDesign is a lot, but it’s also one of those rare moments where the entire industry shows up, slightly over-caffeinated, slightly over-committed, and very open to connection. Approach it with a plan, leave room for the unexpected, and choose your shoes wisely.

See you out there.

Thanks so much for reading, dear Relatives! For those of you who follow us on Instagram, we’re planning on doing more of the Industry Related Interviews on @alphakiloltd. We’ll keep them going as they seem to be a hit. We’ve also been told to get our LinkedIn shit together, so for those of you over there, expect.. something idk 🤷🏼‍♀️ As for Industry Related, we’ll let the Muse take the wheel - perhaps a NYCxDesign recap or maybe other ruminations that come from conversations had during the week, editorial calendar be damned!

With love from Alpha Kilo ❤️

Amy reporting here today from London, where it’s 61F/16C and the trees are finally blooming properly. Of course, with that Springtime beauty comes the allergens, which are currently hosting a swirly dirly disco party that affects even the heartiest of sinus cavities.

I returned from Milan Design Week on Friday. After seven days of non-stop walking, talking, harvesting my memory in search of a name, skimming non-design emails while navigating streets filled to the brim (if I haven’t responded — send it again plzzzz), averaging four hours of sleep, and running on coffee, prosecco, and the occasional pasta, I spent a few necessary days in my chrysalis. I’ve also been processing my vibe on the whole week.

Let me start by saying I really loved this edition of FuoriSaloni, Salone, Milan Design Week, or whatever the hell you want to call it. The weather was ideal, the city was alight with brilliant minds and beautiful people. There was a loveliness to it that may have come from the nostalgia of my TWENTY years of attendance, or maybe it was simply my frame of mind as this year I intentionally curated an itinerary of small and meaningful moments as touch points amidst the chaos.

Sure, we were AGGRESSED (as my dear Italians say in translation) by fashion brands and their hours-long queues filled with aspiring influencers, content-crazed bystanders, and not a single human with any ACTUAL BUSINESS to do during the week. My musings from last year seem to still ring true - the fashonisation of Salone, and the subsequent masses that follow the glitz and celebrity it brings, act in direct opposition to what most of us are looking for in Milan - inspiration, connection and thought-provoking dialogue.

That said, there were installations that truly moved me (Uzbekistan, to name one, which poetically grounded craft in cultural survival); exhibitions that grounded design in humanity (Triennale Milano was chock full of them); meetings that made my mind spin with incredible ideas (refurbishing old school gas stations into beautiful moments of respite); and conversations that genuinely antagonised my thinking alongside some good ole side-splitting laughs with design friends I see rarely outside of this week.

So on one hand I could say, what more could a girl ask for and end this post here….

EXCEPT.

Except there is one niggling thought that keeps going through my head.

What are we doing here?

WHAT ARE WE DOING HERE? Where is the intention? How many brands are showing up just to show up, rather than with a clear and defined desired outcome?

I'll remove the actual Salone del Mobile from this conversation for now because if you were up at the fairgrounds (bless your heart), there is no doubt of your intention: to do business, write orders, get it done. But the rest of it? The Fuorisalone, the brand activations, the insane marketing spend? It’s hard not to ask: what is the point?

Design is about humans. If fashion is exclusionary, design is its accessible, democratic counterpart. Art is for yourself, design is for others. It is, at its core, a discipline that centres on human experience, one that is meant to welcome people into a conversation and spark inspiration. Which might be exactly why people with no industry ties flock to Milan during design week. During fashion week, the door gets slammed in their face. During design week, it's propped open… and that was always the point.

Cast your mind back 15 years to when Fuorisalone started taking off and brands outside traditional furniture and interiors like Lexus, Samsung, and Airbnb (HAYYYY! ✌️) began showing up. The mission was clear: inspire the design-curious, build community, and demonstrate the creative industry's power to provoke change across industries. We spent years courting exactly this kind of broad, enthusiastic audience. Fast forward, and rather than celebrating what we built, we're resenting the people who show up. (Firmly looking in the mirror here too.)

But here’s THE RUB: if design at its core is meant to welcome people into a conversation and spark inspiration, that feat becomes nearly impossible at Salone’s current scale. I'm no maths genius, but the ratio of time spent waiting in line (hours) to time spent in the actual space (minutes) makes a meaningful experience nearly impossible.

One brand bragged about a forecast of 50,000 people through their doors during the week. Is that a good thing? Crunch the numbers across open days and hours, and that's a staggering volume of footfall, but is anyone having a meaningful experience? I'd wager 99.9% of attendees are there for the content grab: to post, to prove they were there, to get the EXACT same shot that will be all over every feed. But did anyone leave inspired? Did anyone trotting through even catch the name of an artisan or maker, learn something new about their craft, or understand the vision of the brand? HIGHLY DOUBTFUL.

As communicators, we understand the value of brand building and that many of these activations aren't meant to lead directly to sales. We’re here for it, don’t get me wrong, but shouldn't we at least be creating environments that centre on human experience? That allow people to learn, talk, and engage more deeply? Even in the most compelling installations, rich with storytelling, there seemed to be a complete absence of any call to action. The idea appears to be: let the masses get the content and hope for the best. Well, dear Relatives, that’s not a bet I’d be willing to take.

There was also a great deal of talk about craft this year, so much so that we may be entering a full-blown CRAFT-WASHING era. Can mass exposure alone drive genuine, long-term support for artisans? How far does hype go with heritage? It seems many brands offer "platform" as justification for not paying properly. From what I observed, the artisans were largely there in service to the brand, not the other way around. Were they credited beyond FONT SIZE 8 descriptions? Tagged properly in posts? Have these arrangements led to commercial success for the makers themselves? You'd have to ask them, but many we know who've gone down that road can tell you how little this kind of "collab" delivers in the long run. As a test: ask anyone who walked through Louis Vuitton's Objet Nomades to name the artisans behind three of the works… without reaching for their phone.

In anticipation of the Milan madness, we at Alpha Kilo decided to flip the script. If our goal is to make connections that ultimately, at some indeterminate moment in the future, bear fruit, shouldn’t we create an atmosphere that allows such connectivity to take root?

The ingredients: no more than thirty carefully curated guests (a feat during this week, let me tell you), a beautiful space, and a shared theme, but no set panel, no formal discussion. A dînatoire, so guests knew they'd be fed but weren't committed to a seat or a schedule (our invite went out before the T Mag article, just saying 😏)…

Not going to lie to you, I had low expectations, and in doing so, had never imagined how exquisitely it would come off. It was absolutely brilliant. People came and STAYED. They found common threads, previously unknown. There were curators, architects, press, artisans, designers, and investors - hailing from Abu Dhabi to Aspen. Conversations were had, connections were made. It was truly magical.

What it proved, to us at least, is that most people attending Milan Design Week are craving these exactly these type of moments of intimacy and connection. Give us a call to action, and we'll take it. As the first line of the Alpha Kilo Work/Shop manifesto states: the closer we get to the synthetic world of AI, the more humanity becomes the luxury.

Make these moments matter. Milan draws an audience from points across the globe that - if you sift through the random content seekers - is ripe with talent, vision, intellect, perspective, and creativity. Take the time to find them and create an environment conducive to convening, engaging, and enjoying a particularly special time and space. Give them insight and understanding they hadn’t been exposed to before, and the time to process it. That’s how you’ll win in Milan (or anywhere really). That’s how your brand will gain resonance.

There’s your ROI.

OH and one final note to renew your faith in humanity. A gentleman who shall remain nameless sauntered up to the press desk at the Triennale and announced he was An Influencer, only to be met with a collective eye-roll and simultaneous nausea from a group ranging in age from late twenties to early fifties, representing different points around the globe.

Maybe hype has finally jumped the shark. Here’s to getting back to the humans.

Thanks so much for reading, dear Relatives! For those of you who follow us on Instagram, we posted some Industry Related Interviews from Milano on @alphakiloltd. We’ll keep them going as they seem to be a hit. Next up, I’m going to scratch the surface a bit deeper on the power of small gatherings versus big blowouts - and Relative-favourite contributor Casey returns to give you a guide for NYCxDesign.

With love from Alpha Kilo ❤️

Amy reporting here today from a beautiful Sunday morning in London where it’s 53F/12C. I’m not going to lie to you, dear Relatives, my ADHD is on overdrive this morning. I’ve got so many things I’d like to do that my mind is moving at a speed that isn’t letting me get even just one thing fully finished. Wish me luck! Now where were we… Ahhh yes, for those of you who read last week, we now know the origins of PR; let’s get into what it actually means today.

In many ways, PR is radically different today due to a radically different media landscape. A few STATS on the changes from 2008 to most recent stat-taking time of 2025 to put in your pipe and smoke as you read along:

The economic model collapsed first.
Newspaper advertising revenue in the U.S. fell from $37.8bn in 2008 to $9.8bn in 2022. Relatives, we’re talking a 74% DECLINE. This effectively dismantled the financial engine that sustained large-scale editorial operations.

The product survived, the infrastructure did not.
Newsroom employment dropped 26% between 2008 and 2020, with newspaper newsroom jobs down 57%. Editorial output didn’t disappear, but it became dramatically under-resourced. What that means in layman’s terms is that to be a journalist these days, you probably need a side hustle or an OnlyFans page to survive.

Local media has been DECIMATED.
Over one-third of U.S. newspapers have closed since 2005, leaving 55 million people in areas with little or no local news coverage (🤯!!!!!!) Entire geographies now operate without consistent editorial scrutiny. Assuming you’re landed in the world of Industry Related as you have some interest in media, that stat alone should rock your world.

Audience behaviour fundamentally shifted.
By 2024, 71% of UK adults consume news online, and 52% via social media, meaning distribution has largely moved from owned channels to platform ecosystems. It also means platforms like Tik-Tok and Instagram dominate discovery. Globally speaking now, 65% of people get their news via social video, reflecting a decisive shift toward algorithm-led, short-form, and personality-driven formats. God help us.

Trust and attention are weakening simultaneously.
Global trust in news sits at ~40%, while news avoidance is at record highs. Not that you can blame people, all things considered, but the fatigue is REAL.

If you’re still rating your PRs on AVE (advertising value equivalent), you are wildly behind the times, my friend. There’s not enough A to begin with, and clearly not enough titles, not to mention no one system has emerged to actually give metrics to the impact of cross-platform brand engagement. (Funny how the brands that judge their PRs on AVE are often the ones who have cut their ad spend dramatically, if not altogether 😒)

So if the **CREDIBLE, RESPECTED, ACTUALLY INFLUENTIAL** titles one has to place editorial stories in are shrinking and many of the “personalities” reporting, especially in the luxury/consumer lifestyle sphere, have the expertise that can only be described as derived from vibes, a penchant for recording videos of themselves in their car in parking lot of a Burger King, and a degree from a MLM scheme, where does that leave us?

While the media landscape may seem rather dark, we have found ourselves in quite a bright moment. The cultural curators that are the creative community surrounding and supporting said landscape (writers, editors, stylists, photographers, publishers, designers, the film world, some of us PRs 😏) FLEX in scarcity, identity, and cultural reinvention. We know that road well.

There are, in fact, a largess of media outlets with actual influence these days to cast adoring eyes and interesting stories at, but consider this… it’s no longer about mass distribution and big numbers. True needle-moving cultural impact is about the curation of placements across a handful of considered larger titles (the Wallpaper*s and HTSIs of the world), indy specialist and local pubs, substacks (HAYYYYY), smart podcasts, and select broadcast.

In the world of Alpha Kilo, (the plane is now coming in for landing on this article), our strategies are a combo of targeting the aforementioned, alongside a (robust as the marketing budget will allow us) calendar of moments where we engage our audiences in REAL LIFE. PRs these days need to be the Vernon Davis (look him up) on your field - taking your brand narrative and skillfully running it through every touch point from email to exhibition.

First line of our Work/Shop manifesto (yes, this is me, quoting me), “In an age defined by AI acceleration, digital overwhelm, and frictionless everything, humanity has become a luxury.” Now is the time to have as much human engagement as your marketing budget can muster. Show up IRL authentically and you win. The people you hire to handle brand Relationships should be guiding you in just that - how you show up impactfully.

PR these days isn’t here to draft up a press release and “spray and pray” that one of the 3587 journalists on some dusty list will read it and then actually report on it. Your PR team should be helping you define your audience and then pull on the levers across multiple touchpoints to ensure you reach them in a thoughtful, carefully curated manner. In our world of luxury PR, a brand doesn’t need 1BIL people to have eyes on it, they need like 250 to actually buy it and become lifelong clients. And they need to meet them where they are.

Brilliant PR teams should act like an extension of your internal team with a level of excitement and genuine interest in your product that at least comes close to your mother’s.

They should be your biggest cheerleaders, the ones that know how to capture and keep the audience engaged in the game.

Their rolodex should make yours look like the school roster of a kindergarten class in rural South Carolina.

They should excel at telling stories through space, creating narrative-driven installations and events that bring your product and/or purpose to life.

They should connect you with partners that expand your view, bring cultural perspective, offer opportunities, and build your market and audience.

Their ideas should not only be original and plentiful, but executable - and exponentially made better by the shared input of the whole team.

Lauren and I made a decision at the end of last year that going forward, we would cull and curate our client list so that those we work with understand our role as outlined above. Many are the agencies who will do exactly as you tell them, whether it’s a terrible idea or not. If that’s what you want, we can give you their numbers. When you win, we win. We’re in this together or not at all. We respect your expertise, you respect ours. And we laugh… a lot. Overused but true trope: It’s PR, not ER.

I’ll leave you with Alpha Kilo t-shirt motto #42 “In the world of PR, it’s all about the R”. Read: the RELATIONSHIPS. The relationships with media, with curators, with dignitaries, with your end client. Put it this way, if the PR team for your luxury brand doesn’t live in those circles, it DOESN’T KNOW THOSE CIRCLES. You will never successfully target an audience without an insider.

PRs are the insiders, the sentinels, and your access point.

Choose.Them.Wisely.

Thanks so much for reading, dear Relatives! I know many of you are like me and drowning in Milan invites, recommendations, etc., but prepare yourself for yet another tomorrow, when the Alpha Kilo one drops. Industry Related exists as our idea of a better model for a PR agency newsletter, so occasionally, we do feel compelled to actually bring our Client Babes into the mix.

Our paid subscribers will get a print-ready version - and an invite to a private event at Casa Fornasetti I’m hosting on Monday. Fun fact: our goal is to have the smallest, most intentionally impactful event of the week where actual conversation unfolds and collaborations explode… we’ll see if it works!

With love from Alpha Kilo ❤️

Amy reporting here from London where it’s a beautiful morning at 48F/9C, and by the looks of it finally warming up a bit. I love that the UK still goes ALL IN on Easter - they love a daffodil, an amped up Sunday lunch, and a good reason for a constitutional (as do I, dear Relatives). It’s a four-day weekend here, and with weather like this everyone will be out in the sunshine, soaking it all in. On my mind this glorious morning is of course Milan Design Week, the evolution of the English language in the age of AI, and, as always, werk werk werk. Luckily for me, I so enjoy the labour of my job that I happily roll over aspects of it all day like a stone in the rushing stream of my mind. Which leads us to the question, what exactly IS my job - and what is PR in 2026?

Let’s start with a bit of history, shall we?

I don’t think many of y’all who have engaged an agency or publicist - and frighteningly even those who work for agencies or as publicists - have ever explored how or why PR came into being… so I’m here to give you the highlight reel, dear Relatives. Going back to the roots always gives perspective on the future, so let’s do this (and quickly, you say). Though I would argue Machiavelli is the OG publicist, for the sake of time and length, we’ll fast forward to the birth of modern day PR around the turn of the 20th century.

While the UK was ages ahead in print media and understanding its hold on public opinion (think like a century or two), the Americans were like, how can we make some coin out of this job (nb: tracks 😏)? Three moments in the early 20th century are credited for starting to define the PROFESSION of public relations - or as they called it then, strategic persuasion (ooooh, can we return to that title instead??).

• Ivy Lee introduced the first press release (1906) and advocated for transparency and factual communication

• Edward Bernays (nephew of Freud, as it happens) applied psychology to influence public opinion, famously linking products to identity and desire

• Campaigns like “Torches of Freedom” reframed smoking as female empowerment, an early example of cultural narrative engineering

Aside: henceforth, you can call me a Strategic Persuasion Engineer (trademark ME).

The aforementioned dudes are credited with forming the first ever PR agency called The Publicity Bureau in Boston in 1900, however, their focus was mainly on influencing public opinion at large without a specific focus on media.

Globally speaking, from the 1890s, print publications were the dominant long-form media shaping public opinion on a mass scale; radio, I believe, being the short form. However, the 1940s-1980s (I’m really trying to truncate this, people) is when they started cooking with gas; we call this the Mass Media Era, when radio, television, and cinema gave brands unprecedented reach while publications like Vogue, Harpers Bazaar, Tatler, Architectural Digest, and Country Life became the arbiters of taste. Pioneering companies such as Coca-Cola, NASA, DuPont, and Ford Motor Company started to build core corporate functions around PR.

As Alpha Kilo operates between the US and UK (and have opinions on PR style between the two), it’s interesting (for us) to explore the key structural differences in the industry between the two countries. Namely, and perhaps tellingly, is that where influence in America was/is driven by scale and aspiration, in the UK it is/was driven by credibility and authority (intentional flip/flop on those ises and wases).

So to break it down, the American Model is as such:

• PR emerges from capitalism (surprise, surprise) + media pressure

• Early agencies + early corporate adoption

• Fast move to strategic counsel

And the British Model:

• PR emerges from government + institutional communication

• Agencies come later

• Stronger roots in press relations and information control

What’s always struck me is that the UK seems to produce a particularly strong calibre of PR, and quite frankly its why we started Alpha Kilo here, and not stateside. Operating in a more popular (read: avidly consumed), trust-led media landscape, dominated by institutions like the BBC, reputable broadsheets, and a small number of highly authoritative titles (World of Interiors and the like), meant that success relied less on scale, as it did in the States, and more on editorial judgement, credibility, and deeply held relationships.

For years, print publications here weren’t simply part of the consumer media mix; they functioned as an intellectual backbone, shaping taste and cultural zeitgeist with a level of authority that arguably endured longer here than elsewhere. Add to that the BBC’s ICONIC legacy and the near emotional attachment to it by the populous at large, and you have a system that rewards thoughtfulness, precision, and cultural literacy. And those attributes, my dear Relatives, mirror that of those we hold at Alpha Kilo.

So why the bad rap on both sides of the pond?

So when did PR start getting a bad rap, you ask? From the jump, I’m afraid. Yeh - turns out at least some of those bros at The Publicity Bureau weren’t really into the whole honesty vibe. Where’s the psychological fun in that? Manipulation and manufacturing desire were more their forte. Then, in the 50s/60s, we roll into the PR world of gloss and fantasy (The Age of June Cleaver, for those who get the reference). SPIN IS BORN and the sheen starts to wear off. Or perhaps the gig was up as people in the 70s/80s were like YEAH, NO. Enter the term Spin Doctor, coined in the 80s, which really drives home the image of wine-swilling, shallow, and performative PRs. By the 90s, everyone in the profession was assumed to orchestrate vapid stunts and spend all day at the Monkey Bar, 82 sheets to the wind, “selling in a story”.

Believe it or not, that arguably wasn’t the actual LOW point for the PR, reputationally (and truth be told, FCK reputation - if I still got to spend my days swilling champagne at Monkey Bar or even my new fave Martino’s with my journo friends). We took some hits between 2008-2015 in particular. I’m going to skim through these as this is getting quite long - AND it’s uncomfortable for all of us. The financial crisis of 2008 and the advent of the internet spawned a lifting of the veil moment which made it appear that all PR was doing in fact was protecting Big Corporate and The Elites. Social media could sniff out any type of PR maneuver at a rate that made even the most highly skilled PRs throw up their hands in defeat. The playbook of the great gatekeepers of the past who skillfully controlled image of both brand and human went up in flames. Don’t even bother to look up what happened to the once great Bell Pottinger.

Oh yeh, then print media up and died.

Now I’m even asking myself how we (and print!) survived, but we did and we did more than that… we ADAPTED. A story of resurrection on Easter Weekend would you look at that. More on the evolution of PR next time on Industry Related, quickly followed by our Milan Design Week recs.

Thanks so much for reading, dear Relatives, and much love to our subscribers! We see you and appreciate you.

With love, Alpha Kilo

Amy reporting here from today from my new flat in London where it’s Spring Chilly at 50F/6F, and I’m enjoying settling into a new home and routine after travelling for yonks. I’m not gonna lie to you, my dear Relatives, on one hand I LOVE a house move if only for the opportunity to redecorate - old feels new again in new spaces. That said, I have at least 8 boxes lying around that I’ve opened and asked myself, “What the hell is this crap and why did I pay to move it?!”… and yet I can’t seem to let it go because, you know, waste. 🙃

This post is going to be a slight departure from our norm as it’s an ode to an adored office space. Why? Because the spaces we occupy matter. So sorry folks, no affirming data points this go round.

As you may have gleaned from the paragraph above, I’ve recently moved, and for those of you who remember that I lived above the shop, you will have deduced that what that actually means is that Alpha Kilo has left Number 11 Savile Row - our much-loved, ghost-ridden, gorgeous Georgian office space in one of London’s most iconic streets. DAMMMMNNN. When I put it like that, maybe we should move back in…. NO. No. It was a beautiful space, but in the immortal words of Kenny Rogers, you’ve got to know when to hold ‘em, and know when to fold ‘em. It was time to leave.

As I cast my mind back to when we moved in, it feels like 100 years ago. Picture it: July 2019, small agency punching above its weight takes on mixed-use space with iconic address - and to make it work, the founder (moi) moves into the flat above. We couldn’t afford much more than the rent and business rates, so we made do with a minimal amount of office goods and my friend’s divorce furniture. Listen, it has a glass cupola and sash windows, so we were going to make it work, hell or high water.

Nine months later: Covid lockdown and not much going on except for the ghosts as I landed back in the States for what I thought would be two weeks and turned into six months before I could even board a flight. Lauren and I set up an LLC just in case I never got back (if that sounds nuts to you, you clearly didn’t attempt to travel between countries during 2020-21). In the following years, we quietly expanded, added some furniture and accoutrements, had some great events including one Christmas party where the amazing Maggie Carr served up her Dad’s recipe for margaritas and the entire house, ghost included, got rocked. We finished the night with Dominos and a journalist telling me it was the best Chirstmas party she had been to that season. (Whether or not they admit it, everyone loves Dominos late night).

Enter 2023 and the brilliant Georgie Grandy. Sometimes it happens that the best ideas are born out of great friendships. As a gallerist for emerging British artists, she had been doing a series of pop-up installations called Art+Interiors around London, mainly in retail properties. So of course over a dinner with a decent amount of bubbly, we spawned the idea to take the project to the next level in Savile Row. Renovate the office level, bring in our client’s products and related brands, let everything be for sale or order, and of course, programme the shit out of it (we are a PR agency at the end of the day). The brilliant interior designer Alice Leigh beautifully transformed Number 11 into a space of time that was nothing short of a miracle. It was absolutely stunning.

What was meant to run for about three weeks between the London Design Festival and Frieze London ended up rolling until the end of the year. We hosted parties, salons, breakfasts, dinners, dînatoires, workshops (of course), podcasts, and more - as I said, we programmed the hell out of it. At some point during this inaugural run, Hermes Home & Interiors division here in London asked us to do a workshop for their retail team on storytelling in space - and from there, Work/Shop, as we know it today, was born.

Three years on, it’s been a wild ride. Work/Shop is growing and expanding beyond what we could have ever imagined back then. Casey finally got his US visa and left for New York, Walker moved back home to Edinburgh, and I was spending a hell of a lot of time in the States as the team and business grew over there. Personal histories weren’t the only change. Structurally, I’d be lying if AI hasn’t had some influence on how we hire. An example being I never had much success finding an EA that worked out for more than a year (namely due to my control issues, truth be told 😏) until Chaucer (ChatGPT) came along.

Flexibility has always been a fundamental part of the business, so at best we were getting about three days a week with team in office - and in summer we have a work-away scheme, so even less. Fezziweg (said ghost) was feeling lonely. After two more fairly extensive zhooshes, it started to dawn on us that there’s only so many times you can reinvent a space before it starts to feel wasteful. It was time for Number 11 to have a rest and be loved for all its beauty without being under near-constant renovation. We found the perfect steward for the space (and Fezzi) - a tailoring school, no less! - and said goodbye with gratitude for the incredible memories and grace for all we learned in that storied house. When the time comes, I hope a tiny part of our spirits haunt those gorgeous rooms - and maybe lock a person or two in the bathroom as well. (IYKYK)

Watch this space for what comes next as we’re cooking up something incredible - and, as always dear Relatives, you’re all on the list.

Up next, I imagine it will be something related to Milan Design Week as we’re rollin’ up on it QUICK… but who knows, we like to keep you on your toes. 🤗

Thanks so much for being our loyal subscribers, dear Relatives!

With love from Alpha Kilo

She’s BAAAACK! (Read that as you wish, which I imagine is either in Oprah-open-armed-giving-away-a-car style OR the lady from Poltergeist warning against the return of evil). Apologies for the radio silence, dear Relatives! I’ve been on what I deemed my own personal Eras Tour, where I hit Boston, NYC, Nantucket, DC, Cleveland, and LA over five weeks. On one hand, it was a lovely and inspiring trip, meeting and reconnecting with so many incredible humans; on the other, I’m very happy to be back in London, where on this bright, if a bit chilly morning its 40F/4C, and Spring has blossomed beautifully. My creative energy has been restored as sure as my battery has been drained.

Y’all remember Medium? Years ago (2019 to be exact), I wrote a piece on how the rules of a dinner party should govern client selection. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately as Lauren and I make a conscious effort to return to the roots of Alpha Kilo and the work that brings us joy. When it comes to the business, that joy, and ultimately our collective success, is directly linked to the brilliant humans we choose to work with both inside the agency and out.

Your clients are your Reference Group. Choose them with care.

In today’s economy, the idea of being selective about clients may sound counterintuitive when you’re trying to manage cash flow, scale the business, keep your team happy, and all the other pressures that come in the midst of a belt-tightening era. But hear me out. There are some serious business advantages when you bite the bullet and make the decision to curate your client list.

Let’s start with my definition of the elements that make for a riotous dinner party and, in my humble opinion, are essential to a brilliant client list:

• Highly selective

• Intentionally diverse

• Engineered for meaningful collision

• Designed for unexpected adjacency

Now, let’s get into the business advantages of a proper curation.

1. The Network Effect is REAL.

In a curated ecosystem, clients interact, overlap, and influence each other, which isn’t just creatively interesting, it’s commercially efficient. It’s a beautiful thing, and it also allows budgets to go farther through co-marketing and amplification of reach. Furthermore, it presents opportunities for your team to cross-promote, which inherently creates a better, more interesting pitch to journalists while also saving hours on the ole time sheet.

Data behind my vibe (DBV):

• Co-marketing and partnership-driven campaigns have been shown to deliver up to 28% higher ROI than paid channels, while also expanding reach by tapping into multiple audiences at once.

• HubSpot research tells us that shared exposure means budgets go further by effectively multiplying distribution without multiplying spend. In fact, co-branded campaigns can increase visibility by up to 30% simply by combining audiences.

2. Amazing Clients Attract Amazing Clients

I feel like this one is a bit self-evident, but I’ll extrapolate nonetheless. The company we keep matters - both professionally and personally. In an agency context, that translates quite simply: when you work with brands that are operating at the top of their game, who are category leaders with strong positioning, it will attract more of the same. Brands with shared values want to get a seat at your table. A curated client list becomes more than a portfolio, it becomes a filter that draws in brands that want to be in that company and quietly screens out the rest. Access is everything, and great agencies are the gatekeepers.

DBV:

• Referrals and network-driven introductions convert at 3–5x the rate of cold outreach, and high-performing businesses are significantly more likely to cluster within trusted networks.

• There’s also a signalling effect. Research from Edelman shows that brand trust and association are among the strongest drivers of decision-making, often outweighing product or price alone. In other words, who you’re seen alongside matters.

• 84% of B2B decision-makers start with referrals as told to us by Nielsen Trust in Advertising.

3. Fun Fact: It also makes Financial Sense.

When a misaligned company comes calling, dangling the carrot of deep pockets, remind yourself two things: it’s easier to replace clients than team (A-K merch slogan #28) and misaligned clients are one of the top drivers of margin erosion in agencies. You can create the most incredibly supportive, idea-driven, brilliant cocoon of a work atmosphere, but if your clients are dicks to your team and essentially abusive, you will lose some brilliant team members whom you’ve invested months or even years training and nurturing. But before they go, productivity will slip, stress will increase, and your carefully curated atmosphere will be shot. In short, it’s penny-wise, pound-foolish.

DBV:

• Studies across professional services show that poor client fit leads to scope creep, increased revisions, and lower effective billable rates, all of which quietly erode margins. In fact, research from Harvard Business Review highlights that a small percentage of misaligned clients can consume a disproportionate amount of time and reduce overall profitability.

• The cost of replacing a knowledge worker is estimated at 1.5–2x their annual salary when you factor in recruitment, onboarding, and lost productivity.

I feel like I could go on here, but I think this one is getting a bit long and there’s an adorable cavapoo (I’m dogsitting!) giving me strong non-verbal signals that it is time for her walk. I will leave you with this… even when - NO ESPECIALLY WHEN - times are tough, I implore you to bite the bullet and choose the humans you would be happy to get stuck in an airport with for hours on end. That counts for both clients and team. Choose the people and projects that spark life and ideas across the agency. Beyond all the DBVs above, they will feed your soul and make your days far more enjoyable.

Thanks so much for being our loyal subscribers, dear Relatives! We’ll be rolling out to Milan Design Week soon, as well as getting into gear for a brilliant NYCxDesign. Watch this space for our insights, reviews, and random thoughts on the design industry equivalent to The Season.

Until next time, with love from Alpha Kilo

Amy reporting here from what feels like the coldest place on earth at the moment, Boston. It’s a ridiculously frigid 0F/-17C and whilst it’s a beautifully sunny day, we’re told there’s another storm on the way tomorrow. There are many things I love about this town, but I am seriously impressed with how nonchalant New Englanders are when it comes to a deep freeze. It’s like the English with rain - it just is - and the less fcks you give about it, the more respect earned across the board.

Need to stack up some new clients? Try meeting up with folks IRL.

I will soon be tootling down to NYC on the train this afternoon ahead of a week jam-packed with meetings. So stacked that indeed it spawned this very post. I’m tempted to digress into my resurgent love of train travel, but I will stick to the point at hand. When the business pipeline seems to be slowing, your best bet is to get off your tush and go meet up with some humans. Humans you know, humans you’ve met at an event, humans you’ve worked with, humans you met through friends, humans you’ve been introduced to but have not yet met… you get the gist.

For years, I’ve belaboured the fact that we at Alpha Kilo do not have a formal new business strategy. We’ve been fortunate in that new business just flows in in a steady and sustained way. That said, there have been times when I’ve been keen to scale or grow in a certain area or geography, and felt a bit stumped on what constitutes a PROPER new business strategy.

For those of us who didn’t attend business school, it at times feels like there is some pre-determined, heavily studied way of doing things that we missed out on due to our (my) aversion to standardised testing. In such times, I revert to those who have gone and to whom it served well. I once asked the brilliant CCO at Harry’s what she would recommend for garnering new business given her particular genius at scaling brands. Her response essentially dispelled my doubt in seconds: KEEP AN EXCEL SPREADSHEET. No need for an app or some expensive platform, just the old glorious workhorse that is Excel. On said spreadsheet, make a list of people you know or met and where they are based. When in port, meet up with them. Et voila. That is your new business strategy sorted. You’re welcome.

Don’t fret, I won’t leave you without some STATS. As always, I did a bit of digging so I could back my vibes with some data. Here goes.

1. A global study of 9,000 professionals found that respondents expected to generate 36% more revenue and close 37% more deals if key meetings were face-to-face rather than virtual.

2. A Stanford Business School insight showed that pairs interacting face-to-face generated 15–20% more ideas compared with virtual interactions. Alpha Kilo merch slogan #42: Ideas are like hot springs. Get out there and get a read on what people are leaning into. That’s the surest way to capture the ever-elusive cultural zeitgeist at the heart of brilliant ideas. And brilliant ideas are core to every successful creative business.

3. Research from a global survey by Accor of business professionals suggests that participants believe one face-to-face meeting has the same impact as about three virtual ones, especially for closing deals or building serious business momentum.

4. Qualitative industry data shows that meeting and keeping active contact with professionals expands your visibility in your ecosystem which leads to more referrals, mentorships, and introductions over time.

5. It also works for those of you looking for a new career. A 2025 worldwide survey found 70% of people were hired at companies where they already knew someone.

Even I, someone who struggles with bouts of social anxiety (see my post on that here), find it absolutely delightful that the crux of my role is to just go out and meet interesting humans, doing interesting things. People are amazing. If you don’t think so, I implore you to go out and expand your circle. By and large, they’re happy to help, to make connections, to riff on ideas with you. I know I am.

Hit me up next time you’re in town.

Thanks so much for being our loyal subscribers, dear Relatives! Speaking of IRL (Industry Related Live - see what we did there 😏), watch this space as we’re planning on a Spring re-launch. I’ve also brought with me this adorable wee microphone my niece gave me for Christmas to do short, five-question interviews with people I’m meeting up with this week. I’m planning to post them here and see if they stick.

Until next time, with love from Alpha Kilo

Amy reporting here from a bright and frigid London, where it’s 37F/3C with bluebird skies and a wind that chills right through to the bones. Crowds are out savouring those final days of what for most was a long (and hopefully luxurious) break. As I learned when I moved to London 18 years ago and embraced the holiday habits of those on this side of the pond, two weeks is the ideal amount of time needed to properly unplug. It allows for a few days at the onset to wind down, get out of work habits, refocus on life and loved ones, and completely reset.

Cultivating a Habit of Laughter

Each year, Lauren and I come up with a mantra which we set as our guiding star for the agency; a slogan to repeat and return to throughout the year. In recent years, we’ve had “Clarity is Kind” (thank you, Brené Brown), “Elevate Every Day” (thank you, Harry’s), and this year, we’re going with “Cultivate a Habit of Laughter“ - this one pulled from the book The Greatest Salesman in the World by Og Mandino. A short read I devoured over the holidays, packed to the gills with brilliant advice.

2025 was a doozy of year. For Alpha Kilo, the Year of the Snake wasn’t fcking around. So while we were elevating everyday moments along the way, we were also experiencing shedding and stillness - times that made us look at each other and say WHAT IS HAPPENING? Looking back on it now, it was all made bearable by moments of laughter. Those times when we couldn’t help but find the humour in any situation that was thrown at us.

So to kick off this new year properly, we are leaning into laughter. As Mandino points out - if happiness is your aim, laughter must be your guide. In order to sustain ourselves throughout the year, I’ve done a bit of fast and furious research which I’m happy to share with you. Here are a few ways to add a bit of humour in high-performing and high-pressure situations:

1. Reframe Tense Situations as Stories

   When situations derail or go wildly off-piste, take a deep breadth and imagine the camera crew from The Office in the room. If they and their brilliant editing team were on hand, what would be the edit to draw out the most laughable moments? Finding and naming the absurdity of a situation (“Well, that escalated quickly”) releases pressure without assigning blame. Let’s take a young team member sending me an accordion file via Fedex instead of the company checkbook. Sure I could’ve lost it on the waste of money and unnecessary delay, OR, ORRRRR, I could just call up a few fellow Gen Xers and have a good laugh at the idea of younger generations not being familiar with something SO every day in our youth (which is exactly what I did - and I still love sharing this story with my peers).

2. Create of Culture of Lightness from the Top

   If you’ve set a goal of landing a promotion this year, remember laughter at work is most often a leadership signal, not a personality trait. There’s confidence and strength in it. When you can admit small missteps out loud and deploy self-deprecating humour, it signals humanity in leadership and encourages others to do the same. Studies in organisational psychology consistently find that self-deprecating humour, used judiciously, increases perceptions of competence and authority.

3. Allow Laughter to Co-Exist with Serious Work

   One of the biggest myths is that laughter undermines professionalism.

   In reality, laughter reduces cortisol, improves problem solving, builds trust quickly, and signals psychological safety. I’d argue that some of the most serious, strategic teams laugh the most. And it’s not just me, according to a Gallup study, employees who have a good laugh with coworkers are 23% more likely to feel engaged at work - which is a key driver of productivity, retention, and discretionary effort.

One thing that should be self-evident, but I will point out here so we’re clear -laugh with people, not AT them. The latter not only undermines all of the points above, but you’ll find yourself labelled the office dckhead and most likely on a short list of whom to cut when the first opportunity arises.

I encourage you to find humour in your workday and beyond. We all know of the extensive health benefits of a good laugh, but from a professional perspective, it will build greater group cohesiveness, improved morale, and motivation, all of which are core ingredients of high-functioning strategic teams. Furthermore, it delivers the incalculable gift of something we could all use a bit more of these days - JOY.

Thanks so much for being our loyal subscribers, dear Relatives! We’re back in action this week and excited for the year ahead. We have set a goal to launch the Industry Related podcast and bring back our IRL events (Industry Related Live - see what we did there 😏).

May 2026 bring you laughter, success, joy, and infinite inspiration!

With love from Alpha Kilo

Casey reporting here from New York City where it’s a frigid 25F/-3C and the air smells faintly of hot pretzels, ambition, and… honestly, my own confusion at how I’m meant to cross the street without being run over by seven directions of traffic. I’ve officially relocated - visa secured, suitcases unpacked, and in a moment of self-reinvention somewhere over the Atlantic, I gave myself the lightest Samantha-Jones-inspired PR refresh (just one episode’s worth, not the whole franchise).

London to New York isn’t just a move; it’s a shift in professional tempo I’m still calibrating to. In London, PR operates with a certain editorial elegance - a narrative brewed like proper tea: steady, thoughtful, not rushed. New York doesn’t so much brew a story as ignite it. Editors email from taxis, pitches get approved at 10pm, and the idea of “normal working hours” is more of a polite suggestion. A subject line here has to function like a headline and a rallying cry and occasionally a small adrenaline shot.

My first glimpse into the city’s cultural logic came on a Thursday evening, when a friend invited me to “a casual opening.” In London, that would imply a glass of wine and a civilised exit by 9. In New York, it meant a queue that wrapped around the block, a DJ already at full volume, and someone earnestly pitching a brand collab while balancing a slice of pizza on their forearm. The atmosphere was both chaotic and kinetic. Here, even Thursday has somewhere to be.

Then there was the roach in my apartment - my first official roommate and, judging from its self-assurance, a creature with very big career plans. I like to think London trained me for negotiation, but this was cross-species diplomacy. We’ve since reached an understanding, mostly involving me pretending I don’t see it.

But here’s what my PR brain is noticing beneath the chaos: the fundamentals are the same, but the frame is different. New York rewards clarity at speed. You can’t hide a soft pitch inside fluffy paragraphs, because by the time someone reaches the second sentence, they’re already walking into a meeting, hailing a cab, or stepping onto a rooftop for an event they RSVP’d to ten minutes ago. Everything here moves quickly, including opportunity.

At the same time, the city has this disarming way of letting you in - quickly, warmly, almost suspiciously so. People collaborate after one coffee. Editors you’ve never met introduce you to three others. Conversations turn into ideas, which turn into meetings, which turn into plans before you’ve even finished the drink in your hand. It’s accelerated relationship-building, but with sincerity threaded through the speed.

So that’s me, reporting from my new home base. Now a publicist rather than a PR, new skyline. London-trained strategy with New York urgency. And if I’ve emailed you at 6am your time, rest assured: in this city, someone has already replied.

Thanks so much for being our loyal subscribers, dear Relatives! Next week, we will explore the Power of Peers - how those from jobs and clients of old are to be nourished and cherished.

Keep warm out there, y’all!

With love and gratitude, Alpha Kilo

Happy Thanksgiving, y’all! Amy reporting here from Nantucket, where it’s a beautiful autumnal day, 47F/8C with bluebird skies. The town is quiet at present as families prepare for feast and football. I love this holiday so much - a day to gather, give grace and gratitude surrounded by the ones you love. It’s a holiday for everyone, and there’s no prescribed method of celebration. For Alpha Kilo, Lauren and I made it a company-wide high holiday so the UK team is off for a long weekend as well, with the caveat that they too must spend the day in gratitude. On that note, we’re grateful for all of you, dear Relatives!

Whoop! We Turned 10!

Ten years ago, we started Alpha Kilo with one big client (Airbnb in its halcyon days if you’re wondering), a boatload of ideas, and the belief that if we kept hard work, great relationships, and creativity as our north star, we would bring the world to our feet. While a lot of that is still true - creative ideas are still the driving force behind the strategies for our clients, and working with good people remains non-negotiable - what we’re building and what we want from it has grown and shifted in ways we could not have imagined back then.

Running a PR agency for a decade, with a constantly shifting media landscape, is part endurance test, part constant reinvention. It’s equal parts intuition and data, people and process, storytelling and spreadsheets. We’ve learned a lot along the way, no lie often the hard way, and we’re still learning every day.

The following is what ten years of running this agency has taught us and what we’re still figuring out. It’s part inherited wisdom, part observation - drawn from people who are more art school than business school, but who’ve succeeded all the same.

We hold these truths to be self-evident.

1. Working to Scope is what keeps the lights on.
   This one took a while to sink in as we are the kind to get fired up for good ideas. A few years back, we worked alongside an agency that would more often say to the client, “we can scope for that” than “ok, we’ll get it done”. We thought, what dicks.

   Oh, how the times have changed. Whilst we’re still here to go all in, there are reasons SCOPES OF WORK exist. Sometimes you will need to say no, not out of lack of interest or willing, but because the client simply hasn’t given you the budget for the staffing and resources required to do it properly. And if you can’t do it properly, don’t do it.

2. The best work comes from partnership and collaboration, not service.

   Early on, we thought “client service” meant saying yes to everything. We had experienced too many times when PRs would tell clients every reason under the sun that something couldn’t work or why no one would write about it. All of this after they had sold them in and locked down the contract on being able to execute just that request. Our relationships with clients work not because we say yes to everything they ask for, but because we’ve learned to honour the request, get underneath the ask, while drawing clear lines in the sand where we will and will not go. Over time, we realised that the best outcomes, the campaigns that really move the needle for both brand awareness and bottom line, come from true partnership, honest input, a respect for the experience and expertise of everyone around the table. When there’s trust on both sides, a collective goal and collaboration, as well as the space to challenge ideas, the work becomes bigger than any brief - it becomes a shared story that we can all be proud of.

3. Creativity loves structure.
   It might seem counterintuitive, but the more systems we’ve built, the more creative we’ve become. Clear processes don’t stifle imagination as we previously thought; they protect it and allow it to flourish. They give teams the confidence and freedom to experiment because the foundation is solid.

4. Relationships are the best currency.
   One of the reasons we got into this business is our love of creative humans, artists, inventors, and entrepreneurs. It is literally our job to speak to and about incredibly inspiring and brilliant minds that are changing the world around them. Drawing the constellations between these stars is one of the most important and fulfilling things we do. We have found that bringing people together without agenda or expectation reaps rewards for the agency on so many levels - and over so many years - from opening doors to driving new business, the rewards of bringing people together have come back tenfold, and beyond.

5. Clarity is kind.
   As PRs, we carry a reputation of being spin doctors as those who can put a shine on anything, hide the “truth”, put lipstick on the proverbial pig. If that’s what you’re looking for, we are NOT your agency. That is not our brand. Journalists respect us because we don’t come at them with bullshit. We work with brands and humans operating at their highest level, who honour practice and process, and because of this, there’s no need to spin yarns. Both within our own teams - and with our clients - communicating clearly and effectively is the key to success. Whether it’s recognising when someone isn’t the right match for our team, being upfront with clients about outcomes, or putting clear boundaries and contracts in place - even with the people we love working with - our guiding belief is simple: clarity is kind.

A few one-liners that one day will become A-K merch

1. The first person to hire is your finance guy, and the last one you should listen to if you want to grow.

2. It’s easier to find new clients than new team.

3. Don’t ask questions you don’t want to know the answer to.

4. Simply talking to people is the best new business strategy.

5. Don’t borrow trouble. (credit: My Mom)

What We’re Still Learning (and here for advice on)

1. How to grow without losing our soul

   Scaling an agency means building systems and hiring loads of humans, but for us, it’s simply not worth it if we can’t preserve the beating heart of the business that made people want to work with you in the first place. We’re still learning how to grow intentionally, to say no when we need to, and to evolve without becoming unrecognisable to ourselves.

2. How to disconnect
   Owning an agency means there’s always more to do. The work never really stops, but creativity needs pauses, and leadership needs perspective. We’re learning to build in breaks, to step away, and to trust that the business can thrive even when we’re not online. We have such a brilliant team - seriously some of the absolute best in the business if we do say so ourselves - we need space not just for ourselves, but to give them the space to thrive and grow.

3. How to make barters work

   Seriously, has anyone here had success with barters where it doesn’t end up with one side (or both) feeling like they’ve been screwed? We’ve tried contracts, detailed scopes, seemingly all the things, but ultimately, our experience has been that if money isn’t exchanged for services rendered, there seems to be an underlying feeling of being unappreciated or taken advantage of… There must be a world where this works, and we love the idea of it, BUT HOW?!

In the spirit of Thanksgiving, here’s a HUGE SHOUT OUT to all of those who have been a part of our story these past ten years. To our brilliant team. To the journalists, the clients (big, small, and everything in between), the friends and family, the doubters, the shit-talkers, the believers, and our biggest fans. To all those who have taken a chance on us, believed in our power to bring stories to life, brought opportunity, and given us bandwidth to bring crazy/amazing ideas to life. To our peers and those we have learned from along the way. To those who have shown us kindness and clarity. To those who have given us grace when we stumbled, dropped balls, or didn’t show up as we wished. And finally, taking inspiration from ole Snoop Dogg, let’s give thanks to US.

To you and me girl.

To Alpha Kilo.

Thanks so much for being our loyal subscribers, dear Relatives! Next week, Casey is up with his Notes on New York, seeing the city with the fresh eyes of the newly relocated. Or something else entirely as that’s how we roll here!

Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours!

With love and gratitude, Alpha Kilo

Amy reporting here from Nantucket where it’s a stunningly beautiful autumn morning, sitting at a crisp 60F/15C. New England really knows how to DO Fall. It’s SHOWTIME for this part of the world and boy, does it hit those vibes to perfection: leaves in brilliant hues slowly dropping, bluebird skies expansive and bright, brick sidewalks lined with pumpkins and gourds, woolen sweaters and scarves highlighting rosy cheeks. A 10/10 in my humble opinion.

DRAWING CONSTELLATIONS AMONGST STARS

One of our superpowers as an agency is what I like to call 'drawing constellations amongst stars.’ We circle the globe, meeting incredible creatives and visionary brands - and BOOM! - an idea comes to fore. Sometimes it’s fully formed like X needs to meet Y and do Z, and many times it falls into… I’m not sure what is going to come from this meeting of the minds, but you two need to connect. That alchemy is where the magic happens - where truly amazing brand collabs, events and experiential, and - most importantly - true friendships are born.

It’s such a gift to be able to work in the industries we do (art, design, and luxury goods, for those of you who may be new here) and bringing people together is the most satisfying part of our job… that, and when the sales and ROI start jumping, proving our PR and brand marketing value.

Especially in these times of economic uncertainty (or perhaps FEAR is a better word 😏), I’m often asked why I do it without getting directly paid for it… and full disclosure, we’ve struggled with how to support the agency with this gift. Now some brands, like Diageo Luxury, tap us specifically to bring creative juice to their product releases, both from designers to experiential, but many times the flex comes simply with a belief that it will come back to us in spades when the time is right.

To be honest, it’s a lot like answering the call of the muse and truly, most times when she strikes, I would simply love to see the collaboration come into the world. But that said, being generous with your contacts and bringing people together provides SO.MUCH.MORE. Here are a few reasons - and I even tracked down some DATA as we do - to support the argument:

1. Do it for yourself. A well-crafted introduction isn’t just networking, it’s a dopamine hit worthy of addiction. Our friends who have studied behavioral science and Positive Psychology would say making introductions creates the following wonderfully self-serving outcomes:

   • The Helper’s High: Introducing people releases oxytocin and dopamine, strengthening your own sense of purpose and belonging.

   • Mutual Elevation: When we witness kindness or competence (like a thoughtful introduction), we feel inspired to act the same way, hence what is known as “moral elevation.”

   • Social Contagion of Goodwill: Positivity spreads through networks - one well-pitched connection can ripple across many relationships.

2. The Long Game of Connection

   Fun fact: people who consistently make introductions become trusted “nodes” in their communities, experience more opportunities and serendipity, and report higher levels of well-being and satisfaction.

   Ever heard of something called “The Social Capital Theory”? Well dear Relatives, their research tells us that those who occupy broker positions in social networks (i.e. those connecting clusters of humans that otherwise wouldn’t meet) hold disproportionate access to new opportunities and resources. If that doesn’t motivate you to fire up a few email introductions post haste, I’m not sure what will. (Side note: also contemplating adding NODE to my LinkedIn bio…)

Ok, since that was like 5 reasons and not 2 as the numbers denote, let’s get on with The Art of the Introduction. Here are a few of my tips to making a beautifully brilliant connection:

Contextualize: Briefly state how you know each person and why you’re connecting them. I like to start with, “I’m delighted to connect you here with …”

Elevate: Frame each person with warmth and respect (“He has a grasp on the luxury market in the US that only rivals our own…”).

Invite: Suggest a shared interest or potential synergy (“I thought you two would enjoy comparing notes on sourcing innovative sustainable materials…”).

Get out of the way: Close with something like “I’ll leave it with you to connect and am excited to see what comes of this meeting of the minds.”

Do it with a sense of generosity, not expectation. Don’t expect the thank you for holding the door, just do it because you’re an enlightened, generous human - and all the reasons above. This builds trust in your network.

If you’re looking to grow your business or just get a little bump of positivity this week, why not ask yourself “Who have I recently met that I could thoughtfully connect with someone else?” It keeps your network alive with purpose and meaning, rather than transaction. And let me tell you, I am SO OVER the transactional these days. But more on that next time!

Thanks so much for being our loyal subscribers, dear Relatives! Next week, we’ll either be diving into my detest for the transactional or Casey’s Notes on New York as seeing the city with the fresh eyes of the newly relocated. Or something else entirely as that’s how we roll here!

Until next time.

Love from Alpha Kilo