The chairs were pink. They were also in pieces. In February 2026, as Adrienne Eckert Petersen opened a new office for Skirt PR, her family helped put the place together. Her husband hung shelves. Her children assembled desk chairs and sorted supplies. A founder who makes a living arranging how brands meet the world was watching her own children get acquainted with the business, one loose component at a time.
She remembered a different opening, more than twenty years earlier: carrying boxes herself, putting furniture together, eating takeout on the floor before there was a desk. The contrast mattered to her. In describing the move, she gave the family’s participation the kind of attention a business announcement usually reserves for square footage.
There is a useful place to begin a story about Petersen: down among the furniture. Skirt, the Chicago communications agency she founded at 25, has worked with fashion labels, beauty businesses, cultural institutions and consumer brands. But the office move supplied a more personal measure of its longevity. The company had become something her family could help build.
A communications degree, then a company at 25
Petersen graduated from Purdue University in 2000 with a bachelor’s degree in communications, a concentration in public relations and a minor in English. Her professional start took her to New York City, where she worked at agencies before establishing her own business in Chicago in 2003.
The combination of communication and English is an apt preparation for the work she chose. Public relations involves finding an angle, making it intelligible and deciding whom it might interest. An English minor does not guarantee a good pitch, of course. It does at least introduce the idea that other people have to want to finish the sentence.
By 25, she was responsible for more than the sentence. Founding an agency makes the person proposing the creative idea responsible for the business that must deliver it. The work acquires an administrative afterlife: someone has to manage the people, the promises and the next assignment. Petersen’s later role as CEO encompasses the agency’s growth and management as well as its brand.
That early decision remains the firm’s defining biographical fact. Skirt began as a young publicist’s company and has continued through a succession of ways to attract attention. Its founding year predates the blogger partnerships, Instagram content and influencer programs that would become part of its work. The career has required both a point of view and room to change the delivery.
A name with a wink
Skirt carries a small joke in its name. Petersen chose it for two meanings: the garment, a reference to the agency’s fashion roots, and the publicist’s ability to skirt an issue when necessary. It is a name that arrives dressed for work and already knows how to keep a conversation moving.
The fashion connection became part of a wider remit in beauty and lifestyle. The firm’s work has included Birchbox, Rent the Runway, Warby Parker, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and Condé Nast Publications. That range places a beauty subscription business, an eyewear brand and a cultural institution in the same professional address book.
For a founder, such a roster raises an interesting creative problem. The point of employing a communications agency is to make a particular organization recognizable. Each client arrives with a different audience and a different reason to seek its attention. A museum and a retail business can share an agency without sharing a voice.
Skirt describes its programs as tailored to clients’ needs, goals and budgets, with a measurable effect on the business. The practical implication is that fashion sensibility can open a conversation, while the assignment still has to survive questions about purpose and results. An attractive invitation has its duties. It cannot spend the entire evening admiring itself.
When the guest list became an audience
In 2014, Skirt’s team was already talking about bloggers as people whose readers trusted their opinions. The team sought an individual voice, a fit with the brand and a relationship with readers. Its advice emphasized consistency and the quality of that relationship. Follower totals were only part of the picture.
This was a useful distinction for an agency working across publicity, social media and events. A guest at a launch could also be the person explaining the experience to an audience elsewhere. The invitation and the eventual post belonged to the same conversation. The firm’s interest in bloggers connected its event work to the growing influence of individual publishers.
Those relationships also carried Skirt beyond Chicago. The team described a 2013 Birchbox tour that took in Washington, Chicago, Dallas, Miami and San Francisco. It was also working on Lincoln Park Zoo’s Zoo Ball and Brides Bubbles & Bliss. There were national itineraries alongside Chicago occasions, with the agency moving between them.
Publicity can look wonderfully effortless after it has happened. Beforehand, it involves a series of choices about fit: the setting, the invitation, the people and the story they might take away. Those examples show the variety of settings Petersen’s business had to accommodate. They also explain why its identity extended beyond getting a name into print.
The agency has to join the conversation, too
A communications business has an audience of its own. Skirt maintained a blog, Work That Skirt!, and used its social channels to bring people into the agency’s world. An older team introduction described Petersen as an avid traveler and a gourmand with an affection for Slim Aarons’s photography. The founder’s tastes were allowed onto the page alongside her job title.
That is an appealingly specific reference. Aarons offers a recognizable visual world to someone describing her taste; a declaration of being passionate about creativity would require considerably less commitment. The detail gives Petersen an aesthetic preference rather than another executive adjective. Travel, food and photographs make a more interesting introduction than a list of competencies.
Skirt’s own content also drew attention beyond its client work. A 2019 examination of agency Instagram practices singled out the firm’s use of helpful blog material and story highlights. The example was modest and practical: give an arriving visitor something useful to read, then make it easy to find.
There is a professional courtesy in that approach. An agency asking brands to respect an audience has to consider what it is offering its own. Petersen’s business has had to be both the adviser and the example, maintaining a public identity while helping other organizations develop theirs. The firm’s name supplies personality; the ongoing work gives people a reason to return.
Faster tools, a human decision
Petersen’s recent reflections suggest she is still interested in how the work changes. In December 2025, she described her team meeting to plan for 2026. They considered what to expand, what to evolve and how to become better partners and storytellers. Her account emphasized discussion, challenged assumptions and the ambition shared around the room.
For a founder, planning with a team changes the authorship of the next chapter. There is a business to examine together, rather than an initial idea one person must persuade others to believe. Petersen’s account gives colleagues a place in that process. The creative firm is doing some of its creative thinking about itself.
By April 2026, she was writing about artificial intelligence in marketing. She welcomed the speed at which it could produce creative options while reserving decisions about taste, nuance and relationships for people. “You can’t automate trust or shortcut credibility,” she wrote. Her argument connected new production tools to an old professional obligation: exercise judgment about what deserves to be sent.
“You can’t automate trust or shortcut credibility.”
Adrienne Eckert Petersen, April 2026
The position fits the kind of agency she has built. A larger supply of possible messages makes selection a substantial part of the job. Someone still has to consider the recipient, the timing and the history of a relationship. The software can provide alternatives; the person representing a client has to choose one and stand behind it.
A chair at her own table
The office photograph offers a welcome change of scale from that debate. Under timber beams, beside exposed brick and tall windows, pink chairs wait for assembly. The room is visibly in progress. Packaging is on the floor. Here is an agency opening before anyone has had the good manners to clear away the boxes.
Petersen wanted her children to understand her working life as creative, collaborative and meaningful. That intention gives the family’s participation a purpose beyond helping with a move. They could see the work taking physical form, with a place to sit at the end of it. A company can be an abstract presence in family life. A chair is admirably concrete.
Her career now contains both versions of the opening: the founder doing the lifting alone and the family helping with the next office. The second does not erase the first. It gives that first room a future she can share. More than two decades after starting Skirt, Petersen was still building the furniture. This time, she had company.