Big Hype Marketing Built a Small Agency for the Jobs Brands Usually Split Five Ways

There is a small but important moment in Big Hype Marketing's account of its work for Pei Wei. The agency had been hired to revive the restaurant chain's social presence, a phrase that sounds simple until you ask the obvious question: which social presence? On Facebook, customers were older and responded to promotions, giveaways and new dishes. On Twitter, jokes about television, celebrities and whatever happened that day could travel. On Instagram, the appetite was visual - glossy food, memes, bright graphics, Jet Tila and a certain willingness to be silly.

The answer was not one campaign resized three times. It was three editorial strategies sharing one brand. Big Hype says Pei Wei's Instagram following moved organically from 12,000 to more than 16,000 in a year, Instagram engagement rose 107 percent and Twitter engagement rose 132 percent. These are the agency's own case-study figures, not independently audited results. But the useful part is less the score than the method: learn what each room is for before speaking in it.

01 / The originA publicist adds the rest of the machine

Julie Leffler came to this problem through publicity. She worked at Hollywood PR agencies on home-video releases, celebrities and premieres, then managed marketing and public relations at action-sports company Hurley. In 2006 she opened Prestige Public Relations for fashion and lifestyle brands. Nine years later, Prestige became Big Hype Marketing as the offer expanded into search, websites, influencer work, graphic design and print.

That sequence matters. Many digital agencies begin with a channel - paid search, perhaps, or web development - and bolt a story onto it. Big Hype began with the story and accumulated the means to express and distribute it. Its current menu runs from market research, naming and brand messaging to Shopify and WordPress builds, photography, video, email, paid media, SEO, social management and public relations.

The commercial logic is coordination. A growing company may be large enough to need all five boxes but too small to employ a specialist in each. The usual substitute is a loose committee of vendors, with the founder serving as unpaid translator. Big Hype sells one accountable team. Clients are paired with an account manager, involved at major milestones and offered either finite builds or continuing management.

02 / The evidenceDates are a better test than slogans

Consider a box of dates. Coachella's Best Organic Dates already had a logo, package and website when it approached the agency. What it lacked was a reason to be remembered among farms selling an unfamiliar-looking brown fruit from the same valley. Big Hype coined a design direction it called “rural luxury”: working-farm texture paired with rich neutrals and more polished packaging.

Then it carried that idea through the whole operation. The team refined the identity and packaging, built a custom Shopify store, shot the product, managed social and email, recruited micro-influencers and made more than 60 recipes to show customers what dates could actually do. The agency reports that monthly online revenue rose from roughly $4,000 to as much as $40,000, while the social following moved from 227 to 2,200.

Figures are reported by Big Hype in its public case studies. They describe selected client outcomes and should not be read as typical guarantees.

For Food Network personality Aarti Sequeira, the reusable object was not a recipe library but a personality system. Big Hype created a logo, colors, messaging and photography around family, faith, food and Sequeira's “Spice Queen” identity. Those assets migrated into a custom website, products, appearances, newsletters and sponsorship work. The agency says her Instagram following grew from 69,700 to 318,000 and Facebook from 68,000 to 323,000 by February 2023.

The three examples reveal the same habit. Big Hype does not merely make content. It first decides what can be reused: a flavor-profile graphic, a bank of lifestyle photographs, a packaging vocabulary, a celebrity partnership, a recipe. The expensive creative act becomes cheaper every time it appears somewhere else.

03 / What failed firstThe enemy is usually generic work

Big Hype has not published a founder's chronicle of a failed campaign or the exact price of these engagements. Its case studies do reveal the condition clients wanted to escape. Pei Wei's feed looked like a common fast-food chain and lacked a social strategy. Coachella's Best possessed separate marketing pieces but not a coherent identity. Sequeira had fame and an audience but needed a brand system that could live beyond television.

In each instance, the first failure was fragmentation. A logo existed without language. Channels existed without jobs. Attention existed without an asset that could contain it. What changed the work was not a new platform. It was a decision about the center: youth and family for Pei Wei, rural luxury for the date farm, and family-faith-food for Sequeira.

04 / The small-shop advantageThirteen people can still contain multitudes

Big Hype is listed at roughly 13 employees, with LinkedIn placing it in the 11-to-50 bracket. Its public team includes account executives, social coordinators and a web developer, while its client work implies a broader bench of creative production. A Chapman University intern who worked there in 2025 described colleagues joining from Texas and El Salvador, alongside a Newport Beach office populated by two dogs named Ziti and Tovi.

The culture Big Hype advertises - kindness, teamwork, transparency, quality, fun and learning - is conventional language. The operational detail is more persuasive: account managers, in-person collaboration and client check-ins at major milestones. Those rituals are how a compact group avoids becoming a collection of unrelated freelancers.

Cost remains deliberately variable. Big Hype does not publish a company rate card. On its site, it says social-management pricing across the agency market commonly ranges from $2,500 to $10,000 or more per month, depending on platforms, content volume, production, influencers and advertising, then notes that its own packages are customized. Buyers should therefore compare scopes, ownership of creative assets, media spend, reporting cadence and exit terms - not a single monthly number.

The model will not suit everyone. A mature enterprise with strong internal leadership may resent an outside team touching so many functions. A company that needs only a technically difficult migration, a national media buy or a regulated performance channel may benefit from a specialist. And a founder unwilling to participate in discovery can turn “personalized” service into expensive guesswork.

But for the awkward middle - too ambitious for improvised marketing, too small for a complete department - Big Hype occupies a useful position. Its name suggests the climax. Its work is mostly about the wiring behind it.