In 1996, Christine Abbate walked into a Barnes & Noble and bought a book about writing press releases. This was not a charming piece of founder theater performed for investors. There were no investors. Abbate had left what she called her dream job at the Italian Trade Commission after having her second child in two years. She missed the work, disliked the prospect of commuting into Manhattan and proposed a compact solution to her former colleagues: let her handle the public relations.
The proposal worked. The Italian ceramic tile industry became Novità Communications’ first account. Three decades later, it remained a client. In a business where the visible currency is a splashy placement and the invisible anxiety is next quarter’s retainer, that continuity says more than a wall of trophies could.
The advantage hidden inside a tile
Novità means “news” in Italian, but news is not quite what the firm sells. It sells translation. A bathroom manufacturer knows why a new glaze, drain or shower toilet matters. An architect understands the choreography of a pavilion. A trade-show organizer sees an ecosystem where everyone else sees a hall full of chairs. The agency’s job is to carry that private understanding into public language without sanding away the interesting edges.
Its clients are manufacturers, architecture practices, fairs, associations, museums and festivals. Public rosters have included Ceramics of Italy, Duravit, LIXIL, HON and Allsteel, Poltrona Frau, TURF, NeoCon, NYCxDESIGN, the Architecture & Design Film Festival, Salone del Mobile.Milano and American Friends of Zeitz MOCAA. One week may involve a product editor, the next a delegation to Bologna, and the next a museum patron experience in Venice.
That antenna is the differentiator. A generalist agency can rent attention. Novità knows which editor cares about a material’s recycled content, which designer belongs on a panel, which fair can put a young studio in front of a distributor, and why a press tour should include lunch. The relationships are not a database sitting beside the service. They are the service.
A service menu built like a design week
Traditional media relations is still the ground floor: strategy, press materials, pitching, press-office management and crisis support. Around it Novità has built social strategy, content, paid media, branding, websites, newsletters, competitions and thought-leadership programs. Then there is the physical work: trade shows, showrooms, press tours, pavilions, dinners, seminars and panels. The company charges for retained or project agency work; it publishes no menu of fees, so every engagement begins with a scope rather than a checkout button.
The founding expense nobody forgot was a press-release manual. The actual startup cost and current retainers are private. For a buyer, the meaningful budget question is scope: a launch, an ongoing press office and an international event are different products.
The model suits a category in which credibility is slow and purchasing is indirect. A homeowner may admire the sink, but an architect specifies it, a dealer carries it, a journalist explains it and a fair gives it a stage. Novità works across that chain. For an international design company entering North America, the agency can provide the context that a translation of the press release cannot.
The first thing to fail was the room
The weakness in an event-rich business became obvious in 2020. The rooms disappeared. Trade shows stopped, launches lost their stages and the design industry’s ritual migration calendar collapsed. A Novità client, Marrimor Objects, had planned to debut through shows. The agency replaced the missing reception with a digital plan that, according to the client, generated as much attention as the show route might have - perhaps more.
Novità also created DesignStandsTogether, initially as a show of support for colleagues in Italy and then as a broader platform for wellness videos, virtual happy hours, equity conversations and community projects. Following the murder of George Floyd, it convened a pledge signed by 35 PR agencies to improve anti-racist practice, hiring, mentorship and representation. Crisis did not persuade the firm that physical events were obsolete. It clarified that gathering was a function, not a format.
Italian ceramics supplied a technical niche, a trusted client and a bridge between Europe and North America.
Launches, community programming and advocacy moved online; virtual activation became part of the toolkit.
Experiential work expands while new specialists tackle answer-engine and generative-engine visibility.
By 2026 the pendulum had made an interesting swing. Novità’s fourth North America Night filled Teatro Litta, Milan’s oldest active theater, with more than 700 guests, installations, dance, drinks and design-world conversation. At the same time, the firm was adding specialists in AEO and GEO - the work of making clients legible to answer engines and generative systems. One strategy is intensely physical; the other prepares words for machines. Both are responses to the same problem: discovery has changed.
What a smaller company can steal
The copyable part is not Abbate’s contact list. It is the sequence. Start narrower than feels comfortable. Learn the category’s language until practitioners stop translating for you. Choose clients with stories your team genuinely wants to tell. Abbate has said Novità grew slowly so it did not have to accept work it could not care about. Then make occasions for the network to become useful to itself.
There is an internal version of the same idea. Novità describes a low-hierarchy culture built around flexibility and voice. Abbate designed the original job around parenting long before flexible work acquired its own software category. Danielle McWilliams first met the firm as a Lafayette College extern in 2002; in 2026 she became principal. Inc. named the company a Best Workplace in 2021 and 2023, citing policies including flexible hours, remote work, working-parent programs, mental-health support and expanded leave.
That patience creates a quiet constraint. Specialist firms do not fit every brief. The model is strongest when a client has a real design story, needs access to a layered professional market and values reputation over instant volume. It is weaker for a commodity product demanding cheap acquisition at scale, a company unwilling to give the agency technical access, or a campaign judged only by tomorrow’s clicks. Relationships compound, but they do not obey a vending machine.
The useful boundary
Copy the focus, fluency and habit of convening. Do not copy the tactic if your audience is purely transactional, your story cannot survive expert scrutiny, or your timeline leaves no room for trust to accumulate.
Novità is now large enough to appear as a 51-person organization on LinkedIn, yet small enough for its founder story to remain legible. There was no grand thesis at the start, only a practical wish: meaningful work, nearby. The remarkable part is not that a how-to book helped launch an agency. It is that Abbate eventually built the thing the book could not provide - a living map of a complicated world.
Open doors
See the agency’s current work, people and design-world dispatches directly.