There is a peculiar moment in the life of a new company when its founders know what they have made but cannot yet explain why anyone should care. The product exists. The slide deck exists. Somewhere, a launch date is circled. The language, however, is a drawer full of unmatched socks. This is when most founders imagine hiring a publicist. Jesse Derris imagined something earlier.
Derris began in 2013, in a small co-working space on Manhattan's 55th Street. Jesse, who had come through political communications and agency work, started it with Lisa Frank, introduced to him by Warby Parker co-founder Neil Blumenthal. Their timing was useful. A new class of companies was bypassing stores, speaking directly to customers, and discovering that a handsome website could not, by itself, explain why a mattress or razor deserved affection.
The agency became associated with the names that made the direct-to-consumer era feel like an era: Warby Parker, Glossier, Everlane, Reformation, Harry's, Away, Bombas. The list is impressive but also misleading. It makes Derris sound like a talent scout with an excellent eye. Its more consequential skill was becoming involved while the talent was still deciding what act to perform.
Publicity arrives too late
The traditional sequence failed first. A company would make its important choices, approve its language, finish its packaging, and then summon a communications firm to generate attention. The publicist received a finished object and a request to make it interesting. Derris moved upstream. Brand positioning, voice, launch strategy, site and asset creation could sit beside media relations, influencer work, partnerships, events, and content.
Jesse Derris has described the connective tissue as an “earned media mindset”: the habit of asking why somebody would voluntarily click, repeat, visit, or care when you cannot simply pay for their attention. That question is useful well beyond a reporter's inbox. It can improve a store, a founder interview, an Instagram post, even the product itself.
The product was never a pile of press clips. It was coherence - a company saying the same interesting thing in every room.Derris's operating idea, in practice
This is how Derris differs from a conventional publicity shop. Its website now groups the offer into three movements. “Brand Development” covers the why, the positioning, the voice, and the launch. “Scaling Narratives” carries the story through consumer and enterprise media, thought leadership, market entry, creators, social channels, partnerships, copy, affiliate marketing, and events. “First-Chair Counsel” handles the tense material: crisis, change, internal communications, IPO readiness, and media training.
Clients buy that work through the familiar agency model - professional fees for advice and execution - but no public rate card exists. That matters because the hidden expense in this model is participation. A founder cannot outsource the foundational decisions and expect the agency to discover a soul in the copy deck. Derris's best-known work came from proximity to leaders willing to make narrative a management concern.
Project Mercury went looking for companies before liftoff
In 2019, Derris and creative studio Mythology made their upstream instinct explicit. Project Mercury invited early-stage founders to apply for a small cohort and offered brand, creative, and communications help from the beginning. Both agencies had sat around the table during Warby Parker's early days. Their conclusion was almost comically straightforward: if early collaboration had worked once, stop waiting for chance to arrange the seating chart.
The experiment reveals the transferable part of Derris's playbook. Enter before launch. Find the tension a customer immediately understands. Make the positioning specific enough to exclude something. Then carry it without contradiction through product, design, customer experience, content, and earned media. A small company can copy that sequence without copying Warby Parker's voice, Glossier's palette, or anyone else's tote bag.
There is a condition. This works when the underlying product creates a real difference that can be experienced. It works poorly when “story” is camouflage for a commodity, when the founder treats strategy as wordsmithing, or when every channel belongs to a different internal owner. Attention magnifies inconsistency as efficiently as it magnifies charm.
BerlinRosen acquired a majority stake in Derris in August 2022. The price, valuation, and other financial terms were not disclosed. At the time, Derris employed 65 people in New York and 10 in London.
The boutique joined an Orchestra
The 2022 deal changed the available instrument panel. BerlinRosen, backed by O2 Investment Partners, could offer a broader network; Derris brought fluency in consumer brands and founders. The agency kept its name and leaders. In 2024 the parent group became Orchestra, an increasingly literal description as acquisitions added specialties across public affairs, social impact, technology, culture, and earned media.
The same year brought a second change. Lisa Frank became Derris's CEO, while Jesse moved to a strategy role at Orchestra and later became its president. Succession announcements are often written as polite mysteries. This one had a plain explanation: Frank had co-built the firm from its first room, and the leadership team beneath her had grown up inside it. Jesse did not vanish; his vantage point widened.
What changed their minds about independence is not available as a single dramatic confession. The public rationale was practical: more capabilities, more talent, more room to grow. That choice also captures the central tension in modern agency life. Clients want intimate senior counsel and a specialist's taste, but their problems spill across borders, platforms, politics, creators, employees, and crises. A boutique must either coordinate a crowd of partners or join one.
Derris now occupies the interesting middle: a named consultancy with offices in New York and London, more than 75 people by its own count, and access to a group numbering in the hundreds. Its customers range from companies in the idea phase to established businesses entering markets, preparing for public scrutiny, or rediscovering their voice. In a fragmented marketing market, Derris sells fewer seams.
The useful thing to steal
Most companies do not need a mythology. They need a sentence that survives contact with reality. The Derris lesson is to write that sentence before the launch calendar hardens, then use it as a test. Does the product demonstrate it? Does the customer experience repeat it? Can an employee say it without checking a document? Would a stranger tell it to another stranger?
If the answers are yes, publicity becomes less like amplification and more like transmission. The story travels because the company has arranged itself to make the story observable. That is the clever inversion at the center of Derris: the publicist earns a seat before the table is built, and then helps make a table worth talking about.