Mallory Blair and the Business of Being In on the Joke

Mallory Blair and Bianca Caampued wanted a company retreat. Other businesses in their shared office were taking them, and the two founders liked the idea. There was one administrative difficulty: they could barely afford dinner. So they brought a tent to the office and stayed overnight after everyone else had gone home. The destination was familiar. The accommodation was an upgrade, depending on your feelings about office carpeting.

Blair would return to that memory around the first anniversary of Small Girls PR’s sale to Orchestra. By then, there had been real retreats, including trips overseas, and a staff of 75. The tent remained a useful picture of the beginning: two people making something happen with whatever was within reach. It also puts a welcome dent in the usual entrepreneurial portrait. Here was the founder, camping at work, without even the consolation of a scenic commute.

The company she helped build makes its living finding ideas people will carry into conversation. Its early materials involved bloggers, parties, and a willingness to become the entertainment. Its later work reached large consumer brands. Through the changes, Blair kept a particular appetite: for an odd connection, a new platform, a joke with enough substance underneath it to become useful.

An introduction that survived the internet

Blair and Caampued met on Blair’s twenty-first birthday. There was a high five. Later, Caampued spotted Blair in a photograph on her boyfriend’s Tumblr dashboard, found her on Facebook, and proposed a video collaboration for the thrift shop where she worked. A small sequence of social encounters became a working relationship. Before the platforms could sell them an elaborate networking solution, the platforms had already done the job.

Blair was studying creativity and commerce at NYU’s Gallatin School, graduating in 2010. She had been music chair of the university’s Program Board and appeared on MTVu and Paper TV. Those experiences placed her around performance, audiences, and people making things. The degree’s two halves sound unusually apt in retrospect: how to have an idea, and how to arrange for someone to pay for it.

She also worked at a small brand consultancy serving technology clients. Caampued brought experience turning a shop into a place bloggers wanted to visit and write about. Their skills overlapped without being identical. Blair saw a way to combine trends and positioning with Caampued’s events and online communities. The partnership had something practical to offer before either founder needed a grand explanation of it.

The proposal arrived in a late-night email. In her early account, Blair’s opening was “We are so dumb.” The reason for this affectionate insult was that they should be running a PR company together. The hour varies in her retellings; the impulse holds. This was a friend suggesting that the things they already liked doing might support an actual business.

“We are so dumb.”

Mallory Blair’s opening to the email that proposed starting an agency

The first clients were already nearby

Katherine Kwei handbags became their first official client in 2010. Caampued had interviewed the designer for an accessories blog; Kwei wanted more of that kind of content. Blair had a college connection to Anamanaguchi, the band, and an early project involved a show at Brooklyn Bowl. Their first business opportunities emerged from work and relationships they already had, rather than a pristine list of strangers.

Pricing was another matter. Neither founder had a dependable model for what these services should cost. They charged very little while learning. That is an unglamorous part of the origin, and one of the most revealing. Knowing how to create interest and knowing how to run a solvent company are separate skills. The early business required them to acquire the second while selling the first.

Blair’s path into the profession had also included a rejection. Near graduation she applied for a community role at Kickstarter and was told she lacked experience. Starting Small Girls supplied her with plenty. There is a dry economy to the response: the prospective employee who needed a longer résumé became responsible for creating other people’s jobs.

At college, she had helped friends with their projects and companies while juggling several jobs. Those favors later produced referrals from people who had seen her work. In 2018, she described the agency’s business to that point as entirely referral driven. Her version of networking involved useful labor. Someone could recommend her because she had already done something for them, with the evidence conveniently attached.

Thirty days dressed for an occasion

For a prom-dress retailer, Blair and Caampued wore prom dresses every day for thirty days and documented the experience online. A clothing pitch became a recurring situation. The audience had a reason to check back: how far could two adults take an outfit intended for one very specific evening? Publicity acquired the rhythm of a serial, with the founders doing the fieldwork in formalwear.

For the dating site HowAboutWe, Caampued went on a live-streamed blind date while Blair supplied commentary. For GE, the agency helped with an innovators’ brunch featuring a machine that rendered a visitor’s face in latte foam. The projects had different clients and purposes, but each gave people something easily pictured and retold. A cup of coffee had become an unusually flattering business card.

That willingness to put herself inside a campaign can make Blair look like a performer first. Her experience on camera helps explain the comfort. But the practical question behind the performance is about the audience: what will someone choose to watch, share, or discuss when nobody has compelled them to? A press release has to compete with everything else happening on a phone. A small unfolding absurdity at least offers a fighting chance.

Her humor has a limit, too. Asked in 2016 about the claim that all publicity is good publicity, she replied, “The wrong messaging can be damaging.” A joke still has to communicate the right thing. The same founder who enjoyed the strange spectacle of brands adopting internet slang could identify the point where attention stopped serving the client.

A company needs rooms as well as ideas

In 2016, Small Girls PR acquired No Subject, Jaclyn Johnson’s Los Angeles agency. Johnson later described the arrangement in straightforward terms: Small Girls wanted to expand west, and the existing team and business made that transition possible. Friendship helped the conversation along. The founders’ network was now supporting an acquisition, with considerably more paperwork than a Tumblr introduction.

A year later, the New York business signed for 6,900 square feet in Manhattan, nearly twice its Brooklyn office space. There would be eight conference rooms instead of three. The agency had more than forty employees, and Blair described leaving Williamsburg as bittersweet. Success can look rather ordinary when measured in places to hold a meeting. Eventually even the most online company needs somewhere to put everyone.

Her public celebrations suggest she did not become solemn along the way. A friend’s account of her 2016 listed the Los Angeles expansion alongside surfing, changing her hair color, and an Olive Garden birthday with awards for breadstick consumption. These are different kinds of achievement. Only one requires an appetite that the restaurant has explicitly agreed to subsidize.

The personal touches fit the early business’s ease with play. They also give the portrait some scale: an ambitious executive can care about opening an office and still find a chain restaurant competition worth organizing. A company’s culture is partly what people remember after the agenda has ended. Blair’s early adventures supplied ample material for that memory.

Fourteen years later, a bigger ensemble

Orchestra announced its acquisition of Small Girls PR on October 17, 2024. The agency had 75 employees and offices in New York and Los Angeles. Blair continued as CEO and became a partner at Orchestra. The move connected her firm to a wider group of communications businesses, while Small Girls retained its identity.

Blair’s explanation concerned the work clients increasingly needed: physical experiences alongside digital campaigns, with paid media, content, search, and analytics in the mix. The creative idea still mattered, but getting it to the right people required more kinds of expertise. Joining the network offered a way to expand those capabilities without pretending every answer could be improvised in a brainstorm.

When she marked the deal publicly, she thanked the people who had made the company operable. That included leaders in client work and operations, and its first hire, Annie, whose early title had been Angel Princess. The title belongs to the exuberant startup years; the appreciation belongs to a chief executive who knows how much structure other people helped her build.

The professional recognition continued. Inc. included Blair in its 2025 Female Founders 500. Earlier honors included Forbes 30 Under 30 and PRWeek’s 40 Under 40. These milestones give the career dates and punctuation. The more interesting continuity is her attention to the people around her: a business started with a friend had become a business whose founder could name the colleagues responsible for its staying power.

Curiosity before the assignment

Blair has described interdisciplinary thinking as central to her work. It means noticing something in culture or the news and seeing how a brand might belong in that conversation. Her interests can precede the assignment: she once attended a talk about seasteading, the idea of establishing communities on the ocean, with no obvious client reason to be there. She expected the knowledge to find a use later.

There is something pleasingly inefficient about that kind of curiosity. An executive could demand a business case before reading the book or attending the talk. Blair leaves room for interests whose value has yet to arrive. It is an approach that makes sense for someone whose earliest collaborators and clients came from activities that were not originally a sales pipeline.

Now based in Los Angeles, she remains CEO of the agency she cofounded. The scale has changed, and the tent has been replaced by actual offices. The founding habit is still legible: notice people, help with their projects, take their interests seriously, and allow a little silliness into the room. The high five was easy. Building a company around what followed took the next fifteen years.