The assignment contained the three words that make a marketing meeting go quiet: no new product. It was 2022, Black Friday was coming, and nutribullet would be sharing the shopping weekend with appliance makers willing to spend millions. Spool had less than $20,000. The Chicago agency responded by asking dietitians and recipe developers to turn eight Thanksgiving side dishes into smoothies. Stuffing went in. Green bean casserole went in. Mashed potatoes, inevitably, went in.
The result looked like a dare and behaved like a piece of distribution. Lifestyle and food editors could explain it in a sentence. Readers could feel fascinated and mildly appalled at once. According to Spool's case study, the campaign secured 326 earned placements, 418.6 million impressions and $2.1 million in media value without paid support. More important, nutribullet's sales rose 65 percent year over year during the period.
This is the useful way to understand Spool. It is not an eccentric recipe shop with a PR department attached. It is an independent communications business that likes ideas with handles: a quiet pickleball paddle demonstrated in a noise-sensitive seminary; jeans with 30 tiny pockets for Werther's candies; cheese fashioned into Kentucky Derby headwear. The whimsy gets the screenshot. The commercial problem chooses the whimsy.
The first thing to fail was the old bargain
Catherine Merritt had reached the sort of job people are supposed to want. By 2016 she was an SVP at a large global PR agency, leading its consumer practice. She had the title and hated the mechanism around it. Too much time went into producing too little movement. The organization felt top-heavy, and motherhood had made the cost of that inefficiency harder to romanticize.
A line from Boston Beer founder Jim Koch, heard on a train-ride podcast, changed her calculation: scary and dangerous are not the same. Quitting was scary. Remaining inside a system she no longer believed in looked more dangerous. Merritt left, began consulting and kept saying yes to clients. For each assignment she assembled experienced independent specialists. She found talented people everywhere, but each was working on an island. Spool, founded in 2018, was the bridge between those islands.
“I put the IKEA filing cabinets together and I build strategic mission and vision.”Catherine Merritt, describing the founder's job in 2019
The early company was self-funded, with no outside investment or debt. It sold bespoke teams and senior attention rather than a thick hierarchy. In 2019 the core team numbered three. By 2022 there were 25 full-time employees, fee income had reached roughly $3.7 million, and Spool had entered the Inc. 5000 at No. 940 after reporting 684 percent revenue growth over three years. Growth was not a clean victory. Merritt later wrote that the firm's finance, staffing and operations all had to be rebuilt for a company that no longer resembled its younger self.
Culture, translated into verbs
“People-first” is a phrase with the structural strength of meringue. Spool's more interesting choice was to make it expensive. The agency made a four-and-a-half-day week permanent, offered paid sabbaticals after three years and created a phantom-stock plan. PRovoke Media reported three months of paid family leave for freelancers as well as staff, plus travel reimbursement for employees and freelancers seeking abortion or gender-affirming care. The company has also walked away from one of its biggest clients over conflicting values.
Those policies narrow the client list and raise the cost of a bad staffing decision. That is the point. Merritt's wager is that boundaries attract experienced people, and experienced people need less hierarchy. The model works only if clients accept counsel instead of ordering hands, and if employees can handle autonomy without converting flexibility into ambiguity.
The earned-first thread
A stunt with a spreadsheet behind it
The campaign portfolio repeats a four-part pattern. Start with a commercial obstruction. Make it tangible. Arrange distribution. Then look past the impression count. PRESS needed to hold national shelf space at Target, so Spool paired its hard seltzer with tastemaker Emily Henderson and Target's seasonal home collection. The resulting “Seltzer Gardens” helped the brand retain distribution and recorded its highest website traffic on launch day.
Home Chef's Dolly and Rachel Parton collaboration was sequenced so earned media ran before paid promotion. That created a clean measurement window: Spool reports more than 4,000 customers arrived through PR, and 60 percent added a second subscription. Egglife began in 15 Chicago-area stores and used always-on local and trade coverage to help build consumer pull and retailer confidence; within three years, the egg-based wraps were in more than 15,000 stores. OWL Sport turned pickleball's neighborhood noise complaint into its launch premise and reported a 112 percent first-week sales increase.
These numbers are company case-study figures, not controlled experiments. Still, the selection of outcomes tells you how Spool wants to compete. It talks about subscriptions, distribution, search interest and sales lifts because those are the numbers a marketing chief can take to a finance meeting.
The business earns fees from retained and project work across PR, brand positioning, creative, creator marketing, corporate communications, measurement and C-suite advice. Public prices are not listed. The nutribullet budget is a campaign example, not a rate card. Spool sits between a senior-led consumer boutique and an integrated creative agency, competing with in-house teams, independents and global networks while concentrating on food, CPG, retail, wellness, finance, technology and real estate.
The agency became an investor
In 2022 Spool added two unusual extensions. Spool Ventures invests across food, farming, retail, artificial intelligence, water technology and sustainability. The portfolio now exceeds 70 startups and funds, more than half led by underrepresented founders, according to the agency. Spindle contributes time and reduced-rate services to emerging brands led by founders who receive a sliver of conventional venture capital.
There is altruism in the design, but also a sharp business loop. Startup founders receive communications expertise before they could normally afford it. Employees see entrepreneurial problems up close and share exposure to portfolio value. Established clients gain a window into new categories and technologies. Spool learns where consumer culture may move next. An agency usually rents proximity to a client's future. This one has begun buying small pieces of it.
The part worth copying
It would be easy to copy the visible layer and commission a novelty object. That is how the world gets another branded sandwich no one asked for. Spool's more portable lesson is constraint discipline: name the commercial problem first, create an object that makes the tension obvious, design the measurement before launch, and let earned attention do a job paid media would struggle to do cheaply.
A four-question brief
- What changed in the customer's business, not merely in the communications calendar?
- Can the idea be understood from one photograph or one sentence?
- Why would an editor, creator or customer pass it along without being paid?
- Which result can be isolated: a sale, signup, search, store door or retained account?
The approach loses force when the product claim is weak, the cultural hook is unrelated to the business problem, or the organization cannot move quickly enough to meet the moment. It also depends on access to credible spokespeople, useful data and a client willing to tolerate an idea that may look strange before it looks inevitable. Earned media cannot rescue poor distribution, a broken product or a crisis that requires operational change.
Spool's ambition has grown beyond its original archipelago of consultants. It has said it is preparing for an acquisition and aims to become a $100 million agency within a decade. In 2025, Katie Kierna and Jody Moore became its first partners. Bragg Live Foods selected the firm as PR agency of record for work continuing through 2026. Scale will test the original bargain: can a company keep senior attention, flexible work and sharp judgment after there are too many filing cabinets for the founder to assemble?
The answer will matter beyond Spool. Every service business eventually discovers that its culture is not the list of benefits it wrote when times were good. It is the set of decisions it still makes when a large client is unhappy, a deadline is close, and someone has just suggested putting mashed potatoes in the blender.