For thirty seconds in Paris, Stephen Nedoroscik sat at the end of the American men’s gymnastics bench with his eyes closed. The television cameras found him. The memes arrived before his routine did. Then he mounted the pommel horse, helped end a sixteen-year American team-medal drought, won another bronze for himself, and became the bespectacled face of an Olympics that produces new celebrities with industrial efficiency.
A normal audience saw a charming specialist with a Rubik’s Cube habit. SMITH&SAINT saw the dangerous part: Tuesday morning. Fame had appeared without an operating manual. Brands wanted in. Television wanted a character. Millions of strangers had formed an opinion from a few minutes of footage. Nedoroscik called the Boston agency after the Games. According to CEO Britt St. George, his request was wonderfully plain: “I need help.”
This is the peculiar market SMITH&SAINT has chosen. It represents athletes, digital creators, and culinary personalities, people for whom attention is abundant at exactly the wrong intervals. An Olympian may have one globally televised week every four years. A creator may wake up to a million-view clip that makes yesterday’s plan obsolete. A recipe developer can build tremendous trust without having a sensible way to turn it into a company. The agency’s job is to slow down the fastest moment in a client’s life.
The originTwo lawyers and one useful wrong turn
Britt St. George decided she wanted to be an agent at about ten, after watching Jerry Maguire. The movie offered the glamorous version: righteous speeches, a single loyal client, Tom Cruise sprinting through airports. Her actual route involved law school, an in-house counsel job at an advertising-technology company, and all-nighters spent building an influencer-marketing consultancy with her sister, Madison Smith, who was finishing a JD/MBA.
They began on the brand side, creating social strategy and influencer programs for small businesses. Then they were introduced to Olympic gymnast Nastia Liukin. She became their first talent client, and the assignment exposed a larger problem. An athlete’s business did not fit neatly inside a campaign. It included contracts, identity, audience, future work, owned ideas, and the emotional business of leaving the thing at which she had once been best in the world.
SMITH&SAINT formally launched in 2018 and, by 2020, stopped serving brands directly to focus on talent management. The brand work had not failed. It had taught the sisters where the leverage sat. The person with the audience needed more than a campaign planner; she needed someone willing to think in years.
“We spend a lot of time listening to the athletes and talking to them about what they really want to do.”Britt St. George, co-founder and CEO
The productA talent agency that behaves like a career studio
The company calls its approach 360-degree representation. Beneath the round number is a practical menu: endorsement and NIL negotiation, licensing, speaking, television and commentary, brand strategy, content production, public relations, affiliate marketing, and the incubation of talent-owned products or companies. A 2026 expansion added a formal S&S Ventures arm alongside sports, digital, and culinary divisions.
Its customers come from both sides of the table. Talent hires the agency to manage and enlarge a career. Brands and their agencies come looking for credible partners. SMITH&SAINT makes money through the private economics of representation and partnership work; its commission rates and revenue are not public. The more interesting economic idea is diversification. An endorsement pays once. A licensing arrangement pays with use. Equity may compound. An owned product, podcast, book, or company gives the client an asset that remains when an algorithm wanders away.
The conversion funnel they actually manage
The method begins with unusually basic questions. What does the person care about beyond the sport or feed? What would they like to be doing in five years? Which subjects can they discuss without sounding rented? New clients go through strategy sessions to establish messaging pillars. Every prospective partnership can then be judged against something firmer than the fee.
That last step is the differentiator. Large agencies can offer a larger machine. A lawyer can protect a contract. A publicist can shape a news cycle. A creator can answer their own email. SMITH&SAINT’s pitch is consolidation with intimacy: keep the roster selective, put several disciplines around each client, and give one team permission to ask whether today’s attractive deal makes tomorrow’s career easier or stranger.
The proofThe four years nobody televises
Suni Lee shows the model at full scale. She signed after winning the all-around gold medal in Tokyo, just as endorsement inquiries collided with a move to Auburn and the new world of college NIL. Since then, her public partnerships have ranged across beauty, fashion, food, toys, and athletic apparel. SMITH&SAINT’s own portfolio highlights SKIMS and Lululemon, campaigns that position Lee not merely as a gymnast wearing a product but as a cultural figure who happens to perform impossible things on a balance beam.
Nedoroscik offered a different puzzle. His glasses were already part of the public story, linked both to his Clark Kent resemblance and his experience with eye conditions. An eyewear partnership with Eyemart Express did not require a new persona. It converted the most recognizable object in the meme into a credible message about self-expression. He also moved into Dancing with the Stars, speaking, and advocacy. The line from pommel horse to eyewear to television is not obvious in advance. It feels obvious afterward, which is usually the sign of competent positioning.
The same logic travels beyond sport. Culinary creator Nicolle LaViolette’s long-term Bread & Butter Wines partnership used hosting, cheese pairings, and DIY projects across repeated touchpoints. The purpose was familiarity, not a single spike. Digital creators in the agency’s portfolio have moved through beauty collaborations, apparel, affiliate commerce, and owned brands. Different talent, same mechanism: turn audience trust into a set of adjacent businesses without spending the trust faster than it replenishes.
The constraintSmall is a strategy until growth tests it
The company describes itself as intentionally small. That is appealing because attention-heavy businesses have a predictable failure mode: the agent signs too many names, the junior staff inherits the relationship, and the client becomes inventory. SMITH&SAINT says its compact roster allows empathy and hands-on work. In 2025, public reporting still put the team below twenty employees.
Then came the test. By March 2026, the agency said its roster had grown 170 percent in two years. Its sports division reported more than $48 million in deals negotiated through 2028, many structured as multi-year ambassador relationships with licensing or equity components. A companywide rebrand, developed with Studio Kiln over more than a year, arrived with added services and leadership promotions. The new identity did not announce a different idea. It acknowledged that the old idea had become a bigger operation.
This model is not magic. High-touch economics work when each client has enough opportunity to support a deep team, and when the agency remains selective enough to deliver what “boutique” promises. It is also a poor fit for talent chasing maximum short-term deal volume, or for early creators who do not yet have a defensible audience, point of view, or revenue base. Intimacy cannot manufacture market demand. It can only direct it.
The copyable partMake the next deal answer to the next decade
The useful lesson is not “hire an agent.” It is to separate a moment from a career. Write down three or four ideas your audience trusts you to represent. List what you want to own five years from now. Score each opportunity twice: once for immediate cash, once for the future it makes more likely. Prefer repeat partnerships when repetition builds useful association. Decline the deal that pays well but teaches the audience the wrong thing.
That discipline sounds conservative, but SMITH&SAINT uses it to make larger bets. A creator with clear messaging pillars can launch a product without confusing followers. An athlete known for more than results can survive retirement. A culinary personality with owned distribution can outlast a platform change. Restraint at the campaign level creates freedom at the career level.
A medal is proof of what happened. A durable career is an argument about what happens next.
In the old sports-agent story, the climax was the contract. In the creator economy, a contract is closer to punctuation. SMITH&SAINT fits between the large agency and the personal manager, borrowing the legal and commercial range of the former and the attention of the latter. Its three lanes may look eclectic, but an Olympic gymnast, a lifestyle creator, and a cookbook author share the same exposure: each can be famous without being durable.
The agency’s best trick is making the quiet years feel like the main event. The cameras leave. The feed refreshes. The medal goes into a safe. Then the actual work begins.