The standard restaurant press release contains all the familiar ingredients: chef, concept, opening date, number of seats. It is a perfectly serviceable document and a rather small world. Foxglove Communications has grown by making that world larger. A Haitian restaurant can also be a story about identity and American culture. A chef can belong in a wellness column or a fashion spread. A reservation platform can be discussed as technology, executive leadership, and the business of how people gather. The food is still on the table. Foxglove simply notices everything else in the room.
That distinction explains what the Philadelphia-founded firm actually sells. Media relations sits at the center, but the menu is broader: brand positioning, copywriting, crisis communications, influencer relations, events, partnerships, social strategy, hospitality consulting, thought leadership, and talent management. Clients range from independent bars and boutique hotels to OpenTable and Wynn Las Vegas. The common problem is not merely getting noticed. It is deciding what a business should be known for, then building enough proof that editors, partners, customers, and future employees believe it.
The useful kind of contradiction
Foxglove's house line is “old-fashioned relationships; new-school PR.” It works because each half corrects the other. Relationships without fresh thinking become a contacts database. Novelty without trust becomes a stunt. Vecchio arrived at the formula after more than a decade at hospitality agency Baltz & Company, creative agency The Door, and branding firm 160over90. When she opened Foxglove in 2018, it was a solo, self-funded practice. She was not inventing expertise on launch day. She was changing the container around it.
The agency's public case studies reveal the method. For chef Gregory Gourdet and Kann, Foxglove did not stop at the predictable restaurant outlets. It pursued a Men's Health contributor role around nutrition and wellness and an Esquire fashion feature, while keeping Gourdet's Haitian heritage and his own voice at the center. Kann became one of the country's most discussed openings, and Gourdet won three consecutive James Beard Foundation awards. Publicity cannot honestly claim sole credit for a great restaurant or a chef's talent. It can, however, make sure the public sees the full shape of both.
“PR should drive more than reputation. When done right, it should open the doors to new partnerships, revenue generating opportunities, and drive business expansion.”Foxglove Communications, describing its operating belief
Three numbers and a caveat
By 2026, the practice was no longer small in the literal sense. Foxglove had a team across Austin, Chicago, Nashville, New Orleans, New York, and Philadelphia, plus work touching Asia and Europe. It had formalized hotel and talent-management divisions. Observer's annual assessment reported 35% year-over-year revenue growth, an 83% new-business conversion rate, and client retention above 90%. The Inc. 5000 later ranked the company No. 1371 after 257% revenue growth from 2022 through 2025.
Different reporting periods; figures published in Observer's 2026 PR Power List.
PR measurement needs that caveat. Foxglove's campaigns reportedly generated more than 100 billion impressions in the assessed year, including more than 3 billion for OpenTable. Impressions describe possible exposure, not persuasion. Retention and revenue growth are less theatrical numbers, but more revealing: clients kept buying, and new prospects often said yes. In a consulting business, that combination is the closest thing to product-market fit.
Start with the venue. End with the larger human subject.
A client roster built like a city
The roster makes more sense as an ecosystem than a list. There are destination restaurants such as Kann, established institutions such as Cure, hotel properties including Hotel Bardo and The Tampa EDITION, technology through OpenTable, and industry nonprofits such as Southern Smoke Foundation. One assignment produces knowledge useful to another. A festival teaches programming. A hotel teaches travel media. A chef teaches talent development. A nonprofit teaches which issues are not marketing decorations.
For Cure, the New Orleans cocktail bar, Foxglove combined awards, press, partnerships, and events over an eight-year relationship. A six-week Mardi Gras residency at the Ritz-Carlton Laguna Niguel put the bar in front of a different coast. Pop-ups and classes carried it to New York, Vancouver, Philadelphia, Tampa, and Texas. The work was not simply to announce that Cure remained open. It was to keep finding new evidence for why an established bar still mattered.
OpenTable required another register. Foxglove supported the Visa Dining Collection and Visa Icons programs, raised the profiles of executives, and inserted the company into moments around Michelin, the James Beard Foundation Awards, and The Welcome Conference. The campaign treated reservations as more than utility. It connected them to access, status, restaurant economics, and how dining culture gets organized.
The books that fell into the sea
The cleanest example of Foxglove's reflex began with an actual failure. Before the launch of Mason Hereford's first cookbook, Turkey and the Wolf: Flavor Trippin' in New Orleans, copies were lost at sea after the cargo ship Madrid Bridge suffered a container collapse. The book had to be reprinted. Publication moved back by months. The conventional response would have been to apologize, preserve whatever coverage could be rescheduled, and wait.
Foxglove and the client changed the premise instead. “Lost at Sea” became the campaign: limited merchandise, jokes and memes, viral posts, and a faux launch party sponsored by TABASCO on the book's original publication date. A logistics calamity became a story readers could join. CBS This Morning and The New York Times covered the debacle; Hereford later appeared on TODAY and Late Night with Seth Meyers. When the cookbook finally arrived, it entered The New York Times bestseller list in its first week.
The move is funny, but its mechanics are serious. The team did not pretend the problem was good news. It found a response true to the client's mischievous brand, gave disappointed fans something to do, and turned dead time into participation. This would have failed for a solemn brand or a consequential crisis. For Turkey and the Wolf, absurdity was already native territory. Tone, not spin, changed the outcome.
A five-step brief for making a narrow story travel
- Write down the obvious category story, then forbid yourself from stopping there.
- List the client's credible connections to culture, business, identity, design, and public life.
- Choose one connection the client has actually earned through work or experience.
- Build proof with programming, partnerships, useful expertise, and consistent action.
- Pitch the audience that cares about that larger subject, not merely the trade audience already watching.
This is copyable, but not universally portable. It depends on clients with substance beyond a launch date, communicators with real category knowledge, and enough time to build trust. A thin concept does not become meaningful because a clever publicist attaches a cultural keyword to it. Nor does relationship-led PR scale like software. Senior attention, judgment, and goodwill are finite. Foxglove's challenge is the classic agency challenge: preserving the care that won the work while adding people, cities, and service lines.
The agency becomes its own case study
Growth has changed Foxglove's shape without changing its stated premise. The leadership team is entirely female. The company has described a promote-from-within culture and introduced fully paid parental leave for full-time employees. Its pro bono work has included Southern Smoke Foundation and more than 80 women-owned businesses in the Sisterly Love Collective. Vecchio also launched the PR Futures Collective, a founder group focused on ethical innovation and mentorship as artificial intelligence enters agency work.
There is a neat recursion here. Foxglove tells clients to become more than the category printed beside their name, then did the same itself. It began as hospitality publicity. It now operates across strategy, programming, partnerships, consulting, and management. Yet the center has held because the expansion follows the client's life rather than an agency trend chart.
A table can be furniture. It can also be where status is negotiated, traditions are preserved, deals are made, workers build careers, and strangers decide to stay for dessert. Foxglove's business is recognizing the second table hiding inside the first. That is a modest observation with surprisingly large commercial consequences.