Nicole Vecchiarelli and the Art of Choosing Who Comes Next

Nicole Vecchiarelli had a decision to make in 2012. She had been offered the job of running a new magazine, DuJour, with someone else. An editor in chief ordinarily gets one chair, one title and a reasonably clear place to direct the blame. Here there would be two names at the top. Before accepting, she and her prospective counterpart, Keith Pollock, arranged to meet without the founder who had brought them together. They wanted to see whether the arrangement could work between the people who would actually have to do it.

The pairing turned out to have a useful asymmetry. Pollock came from digital publishing and was excited by print. Vecchiarelli came from magazines and wanted to explore the website. Each was attracted to the territory the other knew. Their conversations opened possibilities rather than establishing a border. They went on to choose stories, make lineups and edit together. The shared title had a practical answer: shared work.

That early partnership offers a way into Vecchiarelli’s later career. Today, she is the co-founder and co-CEO of Special Projects alongside Andrea Oliveri. The familiar prefix has followed her from publishing into entrepreneurship. A career spent choosing people for covers and features became a business choosing people for a much wider range of occasions. Collaboration, already tested on a masthead, became part of the company’s structure.

An editor’s eye, before the agency

Long before Special Projects, there was the byline. In October 2002, Vecchiarelli wrote about Alexis Bledel for Interview, at the point when the Gilmore Girls actor was moving into films with Tuck Everlasting. The piece caught a performer between a familiar television role and an unfamiliar next step. Bledel’s screen career was expanding; the profile made that transition its subject.

Read now, the assignment has an ordinary but revealing quality. Entertainment coverage depends on recognizing a moment while it is still happening. A young actor’s first film can be a release on a schedule, or it can be the beginning of a story about where that actor wants to go. Choosing the second approach gives readers a reason to care beyond the date on a poster.

Vecchiarelli subsequently held a senior editorial role at InStyle, reporting to editor in chief Ariel Foxman. Her work included developing the magazine’s ties with the entertainment community and bringing print material online. When she joined DuJour’s founding editorial team in 2012, she therefore brought experience on both sides of a changing publishing business: the relationships behind a celebrity feature and the decisions involved in giving that feature another life on a screen.

The new publication launched print and digital together. Its art director Stephanie Jones’s portfolio of the work records Vecchiarelli as editor in chief and documents a project built across photography, design, layout and typography. Those are useful details in a career often described through the famous people around it. There was a publication to make, and making it required many kinds of judgment.

Luxury, with permission to smile

DuJour’s first issue put Christy Turlington on the cover. Vecchiarelli wanted the luxury publication to have a voice, with irony and room for younger readers. Expensive surroundings did not require the prose to arrive wearing white gloves. The magazine could take its subjects seriously while retaining a sense of humor about the world they occupied.

The early collaboration with Pollock also put her interest in digital work on display. A magazine’s identity had to hold across a physical issue and an ongoing website. There was no leisurely pause simply because the next printed edition had yet to appear. Editors still needed to decide which subjects belonged to the publication and how to present them.

In January 2014, Pollock left to become editor in chief of Interview, and Vecchiarelli remained in charge of DuJour’s editorial operation. The co-editorship had been a beginning rather than a permanent condition. The experience also complicates any tidy account of her eventual move out of publishing: she had already been working through changes in format, leadership and the relationship between a publication and its audience.

A friendship becomes a company

Vecchiarelli and Oliveri met while working at Details. In 2016, they founded Special Projects, drawing on years in the magazine business and relationships with agents, managers and publicists. Their agency combined talent booking, creative content and event production. It gave the editorial instincts they had developed a new set of briefs.

The decision had an unsentimental premise. Their confidence in each other and in the proposed business outweighed their confidence in the future of print. Familiar employment can feel reassuring even when the industry around it is changing. Starting a company makes uncertainty explicit: it acquires a name, clients and bills.

Asked in a 2019 conversation about entrepreneurship what she wished she had known earlier, Vecchiarelli offered a refreshingly specific answer: “How to properly read contracts.” Asked who inspired her, she named Dolly Parton. Asked about taking a business forward, she said, “Trust your gut.” The combination is rather appealing: judgment, paperwork and Dolly. An enterprise needs more than an attractive idea.

The guest list gets an editorial desk

Special Projects’ work makes the change in medium visible. The agency handled guest-list work for Kanye West’s Wyoming listening party and a screening of Jonah Hill’s Mid90s. A listening party and a film screening have different purposes, different audiences and different ideas of a good evening. The selection of guests becomes part of how the occasion reads.

The projects reported in 2019 show how far magazine skills can travel. An editor has to make choices within a limited space. An event also has limits, though they are measured in seats, schedules and people’s availability. The common task is deciding which combination gives the occasion a recognizable character.

The agency’s current description includes talent strategy, content creation, cultural forecasting and event production, with offices in New York and Los Angeles. That range leaves room for work before, during and around an event. A person can be selected for a cover, a campaign or a conversation onstage. Each setting asks for a different reason to include them.

It is tempting to reduce this work to an address book. An address book can tell you where to start. It cannot, by itself, settle why an invitation makes sense. The editorial inheritance is visible in that second question. Selecting a recognizable name is one decision; selecting the person who serves the particular story is another decision that still has to be made.

A conference room, and a former colleague

One scene from 2020 puts the work at human scale. Actor Lexi Underwood visited the Special Projects offices ahead of Little Fires Everywhere. Vecchiarelli and Oliveri met with her in the agency’s conference room, part of a SoHo office designed by Hilary Koyfman. The meeting places an emerging performer across a table from two former editors, before the broader audience catches up.

A different view comes from Lindsay Silberman, who worked at DuJour for four years. Silberman has credited Vecchiarelli with hiring her, believing in her and offering opportunities that helped shape her career. She also identified lessons in decisiveness, knowing what she wanted and being willing to ask for it. Her account gives the profile something a client list cannot supply: a colleague’s memory of how Vecchiarelli worked with someone whose own career was developing.

That distinction matters. A talent booking is visible when the talent appears. An editor’s influence on a colleague may become visible years later, in the colleague’s choices. Silberman went on to build her own business, Hotel Lobby Candle. Her recollection connects Vecchiarelli’s editorial leadership to another person’s willingness to take a step into entrepreneurship.

The details also keep the story grounded. The work happens through meetings, assignments and opportunities given to particular people. A title can describe authority. A former colleague can describe what that authority made possible. In Silberman’s telling, being decisive was something she could observe, learn and carry into her own work.

Who belongs in this story, and why now?

The editorial question behind the second act

Seven years later, a larger company

On October 2, 2023, Dolphin Entertainment acquired Special Projects. The announcement followed the next day. The agency retained its name, and Vecchiarelli and Oliveri remained co-CEOs. Its work joined a group that included entertainment publicity firm 42West, music PR agency Shore Fire Media and content studio Viewpoint Creative.

The acquisition announcement listed engagements including the Academy Museum Gala, the Chanel Tribeca Artists Dinner, the Ted Lasso season-three premiere and WSJ. Innovators. The range shows the business the founders had built over seven years. A film institution, a fashion house, a television series and a publication each had a different occasion to produce.

Dolphin’s 2024 annual report recorded approximately $10.41 million in consideration for the agency, including a working-capital adjustment. The figure gives the transition a measurable endpoint: an editorially conceived business had become an acquisition. Vecchiarelli and Oliveri also entered four-year employment agreements when the transaction closed. Their continued involvement formed part of the deal.

Vecchiarelli’s writing did not disappear when she became a founder. A 2019 Town & Country travel article carried her byline on a piece about bespoke travel in Italy. The subject was access, local knowledge and experiences arranged for particular travelers. It sits comfortably beside a career attentive to the people who can make an introduction useful.

There is a pleasing continuity in all this movement. The young actor facing a first film, the new magazine finding its voice, the colleague learning to ask, the agency moving into a larger group: each involves deciding what should happen next. Vecchiarelli has occupied several positions around that decision. The setting changes. Somebody still has to choose.