The first Magrino office ran on a technology stack that now belongs in a museum: paper Rolodexes, skyline letterhead and an early computer borrowed from Martha Stewart. Susan Magrino had decided, near the end of 1991, that the following year would be hers. She planned the business after work, met prospective backers and tried to arrange the neatest possible leap - out of Crown Publishing on one day, into her own agency on the next.
Her father supplied the startup loan. Magrino has never disclosed the amount, only the part that matters to an entrepreneur: it was paid back within six months. Stewart, whom she had represented on book tours, supplied encouragement and the computer for drafting contracts. On May 1, 1992, Susan Magrino Agency opened. The firm had little capital and one extravagant asset - trust that had already survived years of deadlines, travel and publicity.
The client who came before the company
Magrino had spent nine years at Crown, publicizing authors including Stewart, Dominick Dunne and Tama Janowitz. The usual assignment was to obtain book reviews. Her more consequential move was to treat authors as personalities - people who could travel beyond the book page into television, events and consumer culture. It was lifestyle marketing before “lifestyle” became a section in every pitch deck.
The Stewart relationship began in 1983 and followed Magrino out of publishing. Over four decades it stretched across television, publishing, retail, digital, events and endorsements. That continuity is not a footnote. It is the agency's proof of concept. Public relations is nominally about reaching strangers, but its economics often begin with the opposite skill: making sure people who already know you continue to choose you.
“Keeping people happy is the number one function in public relations - whether it's your client, the media or a colleague.”Susan Magrino, on the work beneath the work
What the agency actually sells
Magrino calls itself a multi-channel communications agency. In practice, it helps premium consumer businesses become easier to notice, understand and recommend. Its clients include hotels, resorts, spirits, restaurants, kitchenware, real estate, wellness businesses, design brands and financial services. The categories look assorted until you notice their shared machinery. All depend on taste. All benefit when a trusted editor, creator, chef, traveler or designer says, in effect, this is worth your attention.
The services follow that journey: brand positioning and narrative development; earned-media pitching; social strategy and paid support; creator and influencer programs; content production; partnerships; events; executive visibility; and crisis counsel. Clients buy retainers or narrower projects, although prices are not public. In 2020, the agency advertised focused packages - 90-day communications programs, social and media audits, influencer campaigns, virtual-event plans and crisis positioning - explicitly shaped around different scopes, timelines and budgets.
The Magrino loop
Make the hotel become the story
The Ritz-Carlton New York, NoMad case shows the difference between announcing a place and turning the place into media. During New York Fashion Week, Magrino helped bring runway shows, presentations, dinners and after-parties into the hotel. SUKEINA and Bronx and Banco appeared in event spaces; MONSE held a dinner at The Bazaar; AKNVAS and Bishme Cromartie used the ballroom; other designers occupied a suite and gallery.
Each participant arrived with an audience, an aesthetic and a reason to publish. The hotel was not merely the backdrop to a campaign. It became the connective tissue among fashion, food, hospitality, press and social content. That is the more interesting Magrino product: orchestration. Media relations creates an invitation. A well-designed activation creates something worth accepting.
The first thing that stopped working
There is no public Magrino postmortem naming a disastrous campaign or near-death moment. The documented break is quieter: traditional news delivery stopped being sufficient. By 2021, the agency was saying plainly that digital platforms had overtaken older channels for younger consumers and that every campaign needed PR and digital plans to reinforce each other. The Rolodex had to learn to scroll.
The firm did not respond by pretending media relationships were obsolete. It added channel strategy, paid advertising, creator relations and content development around them. It also entered categories it had not traditionally served, including CBD, NFTs and sexual wellness. The operating belief came from Stewart: “When you're through changing, you're through.” For an agency built on longevity, the important word is not changing. It is through.
The copyable part is not the contact list
A competitor can hire a database. It cannot download the memory of which editor dislikes staged breakfasts, which executive becomes vivid only after the talking points are put away, or which two clients might make a partnership neither would have imagined alone. Magrino's edge sits in that accumulated, slightly messy human context - then in having enough modern distribution skill to make the context useful.
Founders can still borrow the sequence. Begin narrower than your ambition. Win trust in a category where judgment matters. Treat the first strong relationship as a reputation to maintain, not a logo to display. Expand into adjacent problems your clients already ask you to solve. Add channels when they make the central story travel farther, not because a new platform has made everyone nervous.
Where this approach earns its keep
- The product benefits from taste, endorsement, experience or third-party credibility.
- The client can supply access, expertise, a real point of view and enough time for relationships to compound.
- Events and partnerships reveal something true about the brand instead of disguising an undifferentiated offer.
- It is a poor fit when the underlying product disappoints, leadership wants guaranteed editorial coverage, or success must be proven by immediate last-click sales alone.
This is where Magrino fits in the market: more specialized and founder-shaped than a global network, broader than a travel-only or food-only boutique, and old enough to remember when coverage meant a clipping service. Its alternatives include luxury and hospitality specialists such as Quinn, J/PR, MMGY, Hawkins International, The Brandman Agency, Nike Communications, BPCM and Purple. Magrino's answer to that crowd is a cross-category roster and an insistence that old access and new distribution belong in the same room.
The original computer is obsolete. The skyline stationery probably is too. But the founding scene still offers the best description of the company: a trusted client lending a useful tool to a publicist brave enough to leave, and a family loan repaid before the year was out. Relationships opened the door. Discipline kept it open. The rest was learning where attention went next.