The Publicist Who Went Back to Design School

There is a familiar problem in beautiful businesses. The work is immediately visible and strangely hard to explain. A chair has a curve. A room has a mood. A building rearranges the way a person moves through a day. Then someone asks the designer for a press release, a point of view, or a reason an editor should care now, and the object must become an argument.

Mary Jo Fasan noticed this while studying interior architecture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She had already worked at large agencies, independent firms, and Marriott International, where she served as a brand marketing director. She understood communications. Her classmates and the manufacturers around them understood design. What many lacked was a translator.

That observation became Jo Chicago in 2004. Fasan was the whole shop at first: writing proposals, meeting journalists, pitching stories, and producing website copy. The monetary cost of starting the firm is not public. The cost she does describe was time - “a ton of networking” to make an unfamiliar specialist agency known. The first problem was visibility, the same problem her clients hired her to solve.

The cover that proved the point

In fall 2005, Chicago magazine’s Home put Mary Jeanne Kneen - now of Kneen & Co. - on its cover. Fasan still names it as an anchoring memory. A cover is glamorous after the fact. Before it exists, it is an exercise in assembling parts: a client with something worth saying, photography that can carry a page, an editorial angle, timing, access, and a relationship sturdy enough to earn a reply.

Jo’s durable insight was that these parts should not live in separate drawers. A keynote, press pitch, award entry, product launch, social post, partnership, and bylined article can all express the same underlying idea. In 2018, Fasan called this the “communications mix.” Today the firm packages that logic across discovery, brand strategy, visual identity, media relations, partnerships, social content, email, events, and thought leadership.

“The heart of our strategy is your story.”Jo Communications’ operating premise

That line can sound soft until you see the machinery beneath it. Jo begins with Wayfinder, its proprietary deep-dive process. The output is a communications roadmap: what the brand stands for, whom it needs to reach, and which story should lead. Only then does the channel plan begin. It is an old lesson with a nicely practical name - direction before speed.

A narrow market, a wide toolkit

The client list explains the positioning better than any slogan. Park & Oak, En Masse Architecture + Design, Kuchar, Kipnis Architecture + Planning, House of Hunt, 210 Design House, IIDA, and Designs for Dignity sit alongside furniture businesses, developers, artists, and retailers. They are different organizations with a common problem: their value is visual, technical, and cultural at once.

A generalist can publicize a project. A specialist knows that the photographer’s credit matters, that licensing affects where the work can travel, that an award deadline can become a business-development deadline, and that a designer’s explanation of a tiny material choice may contain the best story. Jo’s product is partly that accumulated pattern recognition.

The model is straightforward: custom projects and ongoing agency partnerships, sold to organizations rather than consumers. Jo does not publish its fees. That matters because specialist service businesses rarely price like menus; scope changes with the number of launches, markets, executives, assets, and relationships involved. A prospective client is buying attention and judgment as much as output.

The day Chicago became too small

In 2021, after 17 years, Jo Chicago became Jo Communications. The change was less a rejection of place than an acknowledgment that the work had outrun the old label. Fasan wrote that the agency’s “love of design has no bounds.” The new name widened the aperture while leaving the subject intact.

That is an important distinction. Many service firms grow by adding sectors until their expertise becomes a long row of menu items. Jo expanded geographically while staying concentrated intellectually. Its public roster and stated focus remain architecture, interiors, design, and neighboring lifestyle fields. The address is still on Kinzie Street. The references still sound unmistakably Chicago: THE MART, Design Chicago, NeoCon, and the city’s dense network of showrooms and practices.

From earning coverage to making the room

The Quarterly Edit, launched with THE MART in 2026, is the clearest sign of how the business has evolved. Instead of waiting for a publication to convene a conversation, Jo created one. The first edition brought designers together inside The Showhouse, added a Wine Spectator tasting, and directed half of proceeds to Designs for Dignity. A September edition at Design Chicago assembled editors from Traditional Home, aspire design and home, The Wall Street Journal’s Off Duty section, Dwell, and Frederic.

It is PR behaving like editorial programming: useful to the audience, useful to the partners, and naturally useful to the agency. The format turns Jo’s network into a product without pretending the network belongs to Jo alone.

“Public relations is, at its core, relational.”Mary Jo Fasan, on communications in an AI-shaped market

Fasan’s position on AI follows the same logic. She has said Jo uses it for research, organization, idea exploration, and efficiency. But she draws the line at the human details that make creative work recognizable: taste, lived experience, the imperfect image, coffee with an editor. Automation is allowed to clear the desk. It does not get to decide what is worth noticing.

What another firm can borrow

The copyable part is not “become a design PR agency.” It is the sequence. First, find a professional community whose work you genuinely understand. Second, develop a discovery process that forces clarity before production. Third, build one narrative sturdy enough to travel through press, social, awards, speaking, email, events, and partnerships. Finally, create occasions where your market can meet without making every conversation a sales pitch.

The sequence has conditions. It works when the niche produces genuinely distinct work, when clients can provide access and good visual assets, and when the agency has the patience to earn subject credibility. It weakens when specialization is merely cosmetic, when clients want immediate coverage without a point of view, or when the audience is too small to support sustained relationships. A narrow market is powerful only if it is also deep.

Jo Communications has spent two decades proving that depth can be a business model. Designers make spaces and objects. The agency makes those spaces and objects legible to the people who might publish, specify, commission, visit, or remember them. The gap Fasan found at design school never disappeared. She simply built a firm that knows its dimensions.