Mallory Blair took a look at the PR industry and approached it like no one has before. With a curiosity for online communities and a passion for thinking completely out of the box, Mallory co-founded Small Girls PR with no former PR internships or college experience. Representing your fave brands like Hinge, Billie and Mejuri, Small Girls has helped take brands from startup to household name status.
We chatted with Mallory to hear what it's actually like starting your own business in your 20s, how she unintentionally created her impressive network, and some #realtalk on putting in work to fulfill your dreams.
HC: How did you get involved in the public relations industry?
Mallory Blair (MB): I never interned in PR (public relations). I never worked in PR. I don’t think I even heard the term PR both of the times I was in college. Just in general, public relations and marketing is something that’s much more at the forefront for consumers today than it was 10 years ago. Millennials and Gen Zers are so much more involved in the messages that brands create today, whereas 10 years ago, that wasn’t the case.
Before I started a PR company, I had an idea that was agnostic to any particular industry. Public relations is creating and portraying a preferred message for brands and connecting that message to a consumer, and that’s exactly what this idea was. It was where public relations would go in the future. I was really involved in online communities, from online message boards to chatrooms, and especially emerging social media. My co-founder and I were using things like Foursquare back when it was called Dodgeball. We were two of the first thousand users on Tumblr. We thought, “you know what? Brands could be using these emerging technology platforms to connect really creatively with their target consumers and relevant audiences for them.” No one was really taking advantage of that yet. All of these platforms were so new — back then, Shaquille O'Neal was the only celebrity really on Twitter.
At the time, we already had a really good lay of the land, and public relations business were definitely not doing that yet. We thought, “let’s follow where the public is going and not where it is now.” That’s why we decided to call it PR. Calling it PR was a risk; I always joke that we started our company in reverse. We started with social and experiential, and then we eventually built out to more traditional PR things, like messaging and brand position and identity. All the other PR agencies already had a really strong foothold there where we didn’t, but they were scrambling to understand and build that digital. So that’s how I started in PR — I had a vision of what PR could be, built it, and have been doing that since I began at 21.
HC: What are the biggest challenges you’ve faced in the industry and how did you overcome those?
MB: The biggest challenge that comes to mind isn’t about doing the work and getting more work, but really about building a culture. You have to figure out how to do everything, from setting up maternity leave policies to how to hire your first employee. Those are things I had to figure out by the time I was 21 and had to make every mistake on my own dime. It was trial by error. That was probably my biggest challenge, and for how fast we’ve grown — we’ve grown on average 50% year over year — I’ve intentionally split growth a little bit because I can’t handle it all.
HC: What’s been your most interesting or exciting experience with Small Girls?
MB: Before TaskRabbit was acquired by Ikea, we were with them for a long time. One of the first things they charged us with was breaking into women’s interests. They had a lot of business and technology coverage, but they really wanted to break into affluent women living in coastal cities. We had to think, “what do those women care about?” Knowing that TaskRabbit was a global brand too, we had to think about ideas that would apply in the UK as well.
We came up with New York Fashion Week, which was something that TaskRabbit really wanted to get involved with and be on the forefront of, even though they have nothing to do with fashion and they had no budget to even sponsor a tiny part of the fashion show or be involved in any way. So we came up with the idea to convert TaskRabbit into an Instagram hub and marketplace where we rewrote the copy for all the services they provide. For example, instead of building your Ikea furniture, TaskRabbit could build your new shoe rack to store all the shoes you bought at NYFW. Their delivery service got turned into having clothing samples taken back to a fashion PR showroom.
We effectively did a spoof of relaunching TaskRabbit as a marketplace where women and men could hire husbands or wives to follow them around during NYFW to take their photos, return their samples, and build their shoe closets — all for the inexpensive price of doing TaskRabbit for a day. That ended up going viral. Fashionista did a whole feature on it, and we were in Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle — not just in the U.S., but in multiple countries where we weren’t even offering the service. It was the largest driver for TaskRabbit that was organic and not paid in the entire history of the company. We love coming up with creative ideas that give actual benefits to our products and services.
HC: Do you have any words of wisdom that you find very valuable?
MB: My great-grandmother was also an entrepreneur. When I was a kid, she told me, she’s not so rich that she can afford to do something on the cheap. What she meant by that was, if you’re really trying to cut corners and not pay for every single detail, you’re going to get what you paid for. You’re probably going to end up having to redo it. She tried to impress upon me the idea of investing, whether it’s products, people or yourself.
HC: What do you think is one essential skill that someone in the PR industry should have?
MB: Interdisciplinary thinking. What I mean by that is being able to see something that’s happening in news or culture that aligns with the product or brand you’re working with. A quick example of that is when we created a partnership between Outdoor Voices and Casper mattresses. What do mattresses and athletic clothing have to do with each other? They’re both all about being inclusive. Outdoor Voices celebrates the idea of just getting out there and doing things no matter what your performance level is, and Casper is a one-size-fits-all mattress. They’re both very inclusive brands.
We produced an Outdoor Voices dog jog where joggers and their dogs did a mile run to celebrate people going out and doing things, and created these puppy pit stops at every quarter-mile with Casper dog mattresses. We wanted to show that even little dogs could run a mile too, and we wanted to be inclusive, not competitive. That’s an example of a really unexpected partnership that so many influencers and people took a shine to. They were able to understand within the new context what the brands were.
HC: What advice would you give a 20-something with aspirations in the PR industry?
M: When I was in college, I did a bunch of favors for everyone and anyone, anytime I had spare time. I helped people with the companies they were starting or they were working for, and I ended up having this unintentional Rolodex of people who felt like I had done a good service for them. When I started my company, I had tons of referrals for clients from people who could personally attest to the value of my work, because I had done it for them for free.
I think while you’re young and you have more time on your hands in college, use that free time to try and cultivate work experience, even if you’re doing it for free. You can afford to — I don’t have that same time now. All of the things we did for friends, for people who needed something we could fill, helped us when starting our company.
