Greta Kovacs Schmid and the Problem of the First Two Clients

The awkward question was perfectly reasonable: who else do you represent? Greta Kovacs Schmid was starting a public relations agency. Prospective clients wanted evidence that they were choosing someone other clients had already chosen. A new agency, inconveniently, has to begin before it can possess a past. Schmid concentrated on her first two accounts, building the results that would help her win the next ones.

There is a small comedy in a publicist having to solve her own credibility problem. For an agency, a question about past work is also a question about risk. The buyer is being asked to commit money before seeing results. The way through is patient and rather untheatrical: do work that another person can point to. For Schmid, that early constraint provides a useful entrance to RAGDOLL PR, the agency she founded in 2017 and still leads as CEO.

A career with a Pacific detour

Schmid grew up in Manhattan Beach, California, with two business-owning parents. She studied communication and media at the University of San Diego, then strategic public relations at the University of Southern California. A fashion PR internship made the career feel right on its first day. The route after graduation proved less obliging: she moved to Hawaii with her military fiancé, now her husband, working in styling and marketing before returning to Los Angeles.

Back in California, she worked in-house for a fashion designer and later returned to agency work, eventually becoming a media director. Those jobs put her on different sides of the same relationship: the brand wanting attention and the agency trying to earn it. She had experienced what each side asked of the other before she set the terms of a firm of her own.

Her professional record gives that progression some useful detail. Her undergraduate studies ran from 2007 to 2011; the USC master's followed in 2011 and 2012. She previously served as media director at CLD PR. There is formal communications training here, alongside the experience of dealing with clothes, clients, and the people who decide what deserves space on a page.

The colleague before the CEO

Some of the most revealing descriptions of Schmid concern how she behaved before her name was attached to an agency. Deepika Rao, a former colleague at Sue Wong, remembered someone personable who made an effort to help people feel cared for. Their work crossed at fashion shows and other events, where PR and the rest of the business had to meet.

Rao praised Schmid's effort to bring industry guests and media attention to those occasions, and described her continuing to smile under pressure. Deborah Mellman, another professional contact, singled out her responsiveness and the way she treated clients. These are recollections by people who worked with her, rather than a personality test administered after she became a founder.

They also offer a different view of fashion publicity. An invitation can look effortless once it arrives. Getting the right people into the room is someone's job. So is answering the person whose question appeared just as several other things needed doing. The visible occasion depends on many exchanges that will never make a photograph. A reputation for being accommodating has practical value in that setting.

This helps explain the appeal of Schmid's later emphasis on an agency that feels close to its clients. It is a recognizable continuation of how colleagues described working with her. The test becomes harder when that working style has to survive beyond the founder's own conversations.

The savings behind the stationery

Schmid financed RAGDOLL with her savings rather than loans. When she spoke with People Principles founder Jackie Koch on the podcast World's Greatest Boss in October 2023, the conversation covered her first hire, her ambitions for a global agency, and her attention to culture from the beginning. Childhood plans to become an attorney had given way to a career in publicity.

That combination of subjects is telling. A business can begin with the founder's taste and energy. Hiring introduces a new requirement: other people need to understand how the place should work. Schmid discussed looking for cultural fit, screening candidates for desired traits, and handing specialist responsibilities to people better equipped to handle them.

Consider what changes when the first person joins. Decisions previously made in one person's head need to become clear enough for another person to act on. Expectations have to travel. An instinct about being responsive must become something colleagues can recognize in an ordinary working day. The founder who enjoys doing the work also acquires the work of explaining it.

In that sense, the hiring conversation is another chapter in the first-client story. Both involve someone agreeing to trust a young institution. A client wants evidence that the agency can deliver. A prospective colleague needs some understanding of what joining it will mean. The questions differ, but the demand for substance is familiar.

Even fashion needs a handbook

Schmid's description of working with Koch becomes particularly concrete when she talks about the help she received. Onboarding and departures. A company handbook. Offer letters. Time tracking that makes payroll easier for the team. These are the items she chose to mention in her public testimonial for People Principles.

The list is delightfully short on glamour. Nobody arrives at a fashion internship dreaming of a more convenient time-tracking system. Yet Schmid's appreciation for that help reveals a practical willingness to obtain expertise rather than treat every administrative problem as a personal examination. She described a boutique agency with many moving parts and valued having someone available when needed.

A handbook gives decisions a home outside the founder's memory. Onboarding lets a new employee learn how the company operates without having to discover every expectation by accident. Better time tracking makes a recurring task less cumbersome. Each item addresses something mundane enough to be overlooked and frequent enough to matter.

Read beside her discussion of culture, the testimonial suggests a useful interpretation of her leadership: warmth needs arrangements that support it. A pleasant intention cannot explain an offer letter. Someone has to write one. Schmid's willingness to name the paperwork makes her account of agency ownership more tangible than an abstract declaration that people come first.

What the client actually experiences

RAGDOLL's current public identity includes a “No-BS Policy.” The wording is cheeky; the underlying commitment is fairly sober. The agency says it avoids promises it cannot keep. In a business selling access to attention, the boundary between a persuasive proposal and an assurance of somebody else's decision deserves care.

For Schmid, the interesting question is how that position reaches the person paying the invoice. The agency's description of its work stresses communication. Its services include pitching editors, coordinating influencer collaborations, sending products to celebrity contacts, managing social accounts, and arranging event publicity. Each service requires decisions about audiences and follow-through as well as the initial introduction.

There is a sequence beneath the attractive final image. A product has to reach someone. A collaboration needs agreed deliverables. An event needs invitations and replies. A pitch needs a reason for its recipient to care. RAGDOLL describes these tasks in its service offering, which gives the promise of attention a more practical shape.

“As a boutique agency, there are lots of moving parts”

Greta Schmid, on running RAGDOLL PR

Client accounts add another perspective. In testimonials published by RAGDOLL, MLE highlights documented efforts and regular reports of wins. Hayden LA describes a responsive team willing to push back kindly. Stylist Beverly O of Project Bee NYC credits Greta and her colleagues with learning her business and its publicity goals. These are clients' descriptions of their experience, and their emphasis on contact is striking.

The recurring attraction is being able to understand what is happening. A placement may be public, but much of the work around it takes place privately. Reporting makes that effort legible. Advice sometimes requires a disagreement. A founder who wants the agency to feel like part of a client's team has to make room for both progress and the occasional awkward answer.

Building something other people can trust

Schmid's story moves between two kinds of competence. One concerns the work she chose: fashion, publicity, relationships, and representing a brand to an outside audience. The other concerns keeping an organization able to do that work. The second brings employees, processes, specialists, and a new set of responsibilities into the picture.

The first two clients remain a useful measure of the whole undertaking. Their importance came from the evidence they allowed her to build. Years later, the handbook and the hiring conversation pose a related challenge: make the company dependable enough that another person can choose it with some understanding of what comes next.

Schmid has described wanting a global presence and a thriving team. Those ambitions give the small beginning a direction without making it disappear. The publicist who once had to answer who else she represented now runs a business whose everyday conduct helps answer why someone should stay. There is plenty of work in that answer. Some of it even involves fashion.