There is a wall in Los Angeles that explains Brooklyn PR better than an elevator pitch ever could. It is a library of shoes, 16 feet high and 65 feet long, built inside the agency's West Adams showroom. The first two contractors backed out. The third finished it. This is funny until you realize the wall is not decoration. It is infrastructure.
A designer in Milan, Madrid or Transylvania can make an exquisite object and remain invisible in America. The object needs to arrive, on time, in the right room. A stylist needs to see it, pull it, fit it, return it and credit it correctly. A story needs to follow. Brooklyn PR works in that crowded space between the atelier and the photograph.
The agency describes itself as a celebrity-focused public relations firm. That is accurate but incomplete. Its menu includes market research, brand consulting, media relations, digital campaigns, social strategy, influencer relations, showroom partnerships and full event production. The useful product is the combination. A client does not merely buy a mention. It hires a small American landing crew.
01 / The founderThe career detour that became the method
Liza A. Vassell grew up in Brooklyn and once imagined becoming a lawyer. A summer internship at Morgan Stanley disturbed that plan. She arrived at orientation wearing cornrows and was told by human resources to take them out. In a 2024 interview, she called it her first “corporate slap in the face.” The encounter forced a practical question: if fitting into the room required removing part of herself, was it the right room?
Modeling took her to Europe. Fashion kept her there. She worked around houses including Elie Saab, Gianfranco Ferré and Giorgio Armani, and spent two years as creative director at BasicNet Group. One episode became her favorite proof of instinct. An unknown designer called. Other people said no; Vassell said yes. The designer was Elie Saab.
“I never follow what others do; I do what's right to me.”Liza A. Vassell, Los Angeles Sentinel, 2024
When Vassell left Italy, she expected to return to New York. Then a friend offered her family an apartment in California for two months. Los Angeles delivered 85 degrees in December. The weather changed the destination; her European network shaped the business. She founded Brooklyn PR in 2012, carrying the name of her birthplace into a city where stylists, premieres, studios and celebrities compress the distance between a garment and an audience.
02 / The mechanismA showroom is a form of media
Traditional media is counted in readers or viewers. A fashion showroom has a stranger unit of circulation: the number of consequential people who can touch the product. One stylist with a deadline can matter more than a thousand casual impressions. Brooklyn PR's competitive wager is that physical proximity still carries unusual leverage in an industry of digital abundance.
with a product
+ strategy + access
media, audience
Consider the Spanish label the2ndskinco. Its founders explained in 2013 that dressing celebrities in Spain did little for international customers. They needed a showroom and communications operation in Los Angeles, and named Brooklyn PR as the partner running it. ABODI Transylvania has likewise listed the agency as its U.S. PR contact; British label King & Tuckfield directs American press and styling inquiries to Vassell. These relationships clarify the customer: a brand whose design may travel more easily than its reputation.
The service stack follows the journey of that reputation. Research and positioning come first. Product launches, placements, influencer relations and social campaigns create routes to discovery. Media relations give the discovery language. Events add a room, a guest list and a deadline. Brooklyn PR's published event work includes Miami Art Basel, a Los Angeles fashion show, dinners and a Teresa Helbig trunk show.
03 / The businessThe invoice buys judgment and coordination
Brooklyn PR is a privately held services business, not a venture-funded platform. Its public footprint points to client engagements rather than subscriptions: ongoing public relations and showroom representation, plus campaigns, launches, consulting and events scoped around a brand. The agency's listed team is small - LinkedIn places it in the two-to-ten employee band - so the founder's judgment is not an abstract brand promise. It is part of the inventory.
That makes the firm different from a large network agency and from software that promises to automate outreach. Brooklyn PR sells proximity, taste and coordination. It knows the difference between a famous name and the right famous name, between an event that photographs well and one that merely costs a lot, between shipping a sample and making it usable to a stylist at 4 p.m. on a deadline.
The alternative is to assemble the bridge yourself: hire U.S. communications staff, rent showroom space, build stylist and editor relationships, manage loans and returns, run social campaigns, and find producers whenever an event appears. Large brands often do exactly that. Brooklyn PR fits a narrower customer - the fashion, jewelry, beauty, art, home or hospitality brand that wants access to American culture without first building an American department.
04 / The copyable ideaDo not pitch a market. Build the crossing.
The useful lesson here travels beyond fashion. When a customer enters an unfamiliar market, the problem is rarely one missing press release. It is a chain of missing context: who matters, what travels, when to arrive, how to follow up and which signals create trust. Brooklyn PR packaged the chain.
A founder can copy the architecture without copying the shoe wall. First, choose a sharply defined crossing - in this case, international lifestyle brands entering America. Second, keep the product close enough to demonstrate, lend or test. Third, connect strategy to execution so insight does not die in a deck. Finally, build a visible artifact of expertise. A 65-foot library of shoes says, before anyone speaks, that the agency knows how physical fashion moves.
The model depends on conditions that are easy to overlook. The product must survive attention. Samples must be available in the correct size and season. The client must be able to fulfill demand if a placement works. And the agency's relationships must match the brand, not merely look impressive on a list. Without those pieces, celebrity visibility becomes an expensive flash with nowhere to land.
05 / The room after the roomTeaching access, not guarding it
Vassell has called Brooklyn PR a teaching showroom. She also founded the Liza Vassell Foundation to mentor people interested in public relations, fashion and marketing. Her stated concern is the industry's imbalance - the way pedigree and privilege decide who gets through the door. She has said she wants to train people with the appetite for a career, whether or not they arrive from USC or from college at all.
There is a pleasing symmetry in that. Brooklyn PR helps brands cross from one market into another, and its founder wants young people to cross into an industry that can be just as opaque. The showroom is therefore two things at once: a commercial switchboard for objects and an informal school for people.
The company name still points east. Its working life is resolutely Los Angeles. Its taste was educated in Europe. The best description may be neither agency nor showroom, but customs desk: a place where products, stories and ambitions are inspected, translated and sent onward. Somewhere along the wall, 65 feet of shoes wait for their boarding call.