Grindset for girls.
There’s a new wave of female-focused hustle podcasts.
Good morning everyone. I’m in-transit right now so sorry for any typos today.
Today’s newsletter includes: the second coming of the girlboss, alligators on Martha’s Vineyard, Lisa Bubbers’ new job, and how to design a new candy shop that’s blocks away from The Guggenheim.
Lisa Bubbers went from running brick-and-mortar piercing chain STUDS to PR holdings company, Orchestra.
and I got lunch yesterday at The Odeon. She is one of my smartest friends and I’m so grateful for her. While we were in-between a conversation about work and another one about life, BerlinRosen co-founder Jonathan Rosen came over to our table to say hi. You can’t sit in that place for lunch without seeing at least two people from your professional past.Later in the day, I emailed Jonathan saying we had to catch up. I’ve been curious about Orchestra, the holdings company that he is the CEO of that is now the parent company of BerlinRosen, Derris, and several other specialized agencies. Another fun fact about Orchestra is that they “power” Puck’s Private Conversation, and I don’t know exactly what that means but I’ll find out.
In Rosen’s response, he told me that they had just hired Lisa Bubbers as their Chief Brand Officer. “She’s going to work with our clients to marry data, creative, integrated - basically being an out of house consulting CMO for our clients.”
Hiring an out-of-house consulting CMO (like Bubbers, who has been a successful founder) for clients makes a lot of sense for a firm like Orchestra. Clients work with Orchestra not just as a PR firm, but also as a marketing consultancy that has access to a wide-range of data and case studies (their clients include everyone from Rhode, to the Washington Commanders, to Cava). “I'm personally loving the challenge of applying the nimbleness of a consumer founder mindset to this type of organization,” Bubbers told me this morning.
For those of you unfamiliar with Bubbers, she co-founded STUDS, a piercing studio that now has 34 brick-and-mortar stores around the country. In 2021, Spark Capital led their $20mm Series B. I called her this morning to discuss the move from a B2C to B2B leadership role, and how she plans to see out this position.
How Bubbers transitioned from STUDS to Orchestra:
“I had been at STUDS for six years. The brand is killing it. We just opened our 34th store, but I'm a very zero-to-one innovative brand builder thinker, and I was ready for my next challenge. I was really enjoying consulting, but I wasn't exactly sure where it was going to lead from a career perspective.
And I wanted to pick Jesse Derris’s brain. We grabbed coffee and I was like, I'm really loving doing strategy for different clients, but I don't feel like I'm getting the scale or challenge that I really want. And he was like, Funny you should say that we are looking for this type of role at Orchestra. And so that kind of was the impetus for the job.”
The current state of agencies… and what clients actually need:
‘We are really thinking of my role as leading North Star strategy across Orchestra, which is made up of ten agencies that are being integrated and combined into one. And we have incredible incredible expertise and knowledge across sectors given the talent that's at this 700-person company.
Brands need clarity and strategy that integrates, and it's no longer Go get your PR firm, go get your paid marketing firm. Businesses should be thinking about them holistically. Given the scale and the breadth of the clients at Orchestra, I'm thinking about, How do I help these clients think about things from a marketing strategy first, instead of a tactics-first strategy?”
On relating to founders she works with:
“I was a demanding client on the other end, I've been that pain in the ass. I definitely feel like having the empathy for the founder or the CEO or the CMO — having been in their position — I definitely feel like I can be a more strategic CMO on the agency side.”
Over a year ago, I wrote a newsletter about how I kept seeing photoshoots of influencers wearing poorly-tailored suits from Zara, in order to evoke an image of “entrepreneur” — I called the look, which always felt like a costume, Corporate Fetish. In the months that followed, countless headlines came out about the look. Some called it Office Siren, others called it inappropriate.
It used to be company first, media persona second. Now, influencers are investing in skirt suits and backdrop lighting for career podcasts before they've even figured out their CAC. The aesthetic of work — and the performance of ambition — can be more polished than the business behind it. It also becomes the attachment point for ads and subscriptions, and before long, the “building in public” content IS the business.
