The first important fact about Stanton & Company is that it began with a defeat. Before Amy Stanton had an agency, she ran marketing and communications for NYC2012, New York’s attempt to win the Olympic Games. The bid lost to London. In most résumés, that would be the awkward line one hurries past. In Stanton’s story, it is the hinge.
The job had placed an advertising executive inside a campaign with an unusually public purpose. Stanton had started in New York agencies including BBDO and J. Walter Thompson. The Olympic bid showed her a different source of motivation: work attached to something she cared about. She next became the first chief marketing officer of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, stayed less than a year, and in 2006 opened her own shop in Los Angeles.
Her original idea was specific enough to sound risky: build brands around women’s sports and female athletes. At the time, women’s leagues, sponsorship inventory and broadcast attention occupied a smaller commercial universe. Stanton saw the missing attention as the opportunity. The agency would not merely book an endorsement. It would help an athlete build a durable identity, develop content, find licensing and marketing partners, and plan for the life that comes after competition.
The market eventually walked toward her
The female-athlete thesis widened without disappearing. Stanton & Company now describes itself as a full-service sports and lifestyle marketing and public relations agency focused on healthy, active living. Its roster has included Olympic hockey player Hilary Knight, wrestler Adeline Gray and Paralympian Beatriz Hatz, alongside physicians, authors, nutrition companies, fitness products, beauty brands and wellness startups. The common unit is not a demographic box. It is a person or company with a point of view about how people should live.
That positioning sits between several familiar businesses. A conventional consumer PR firm sells strategy and earned media. A talent agency sells access and negotiates opportunities. An events shop manufactures moments. An influencer agency finds distribution through personalities. Stanton & Company keeps all four instruments nearby. The advantage is continuity: a media story can lead to a partnership, a partnership can become an event, and an athlete’s competitive story can become a brand that outlasts the podium.
- Brand marketing
- Public relations
- Social + influencers
- Representation
- Events + sponsorships
- Olympic activation
The partnership list illustrates the range: Adidas, AT&T, Barbie, Toyota, Under Armour, the U.S. Olympic Committee and the Women’s Sports Foundation appear beside entrepreneurial brands. This is a boutique agency using large-brand experience on smaller, socially minded businesses. LinkedIn places the company in the 11-to-50 employee band; supplied company data estimates 34 people. It is also a WBENC-certified Women’s Business Enterprise, making the agency part of corporate supplier-diversity programs as well as a vendor of communications work.
“Relevance beats reach.”Stanton & Company, on choosing partnerships
The publicity paradox
The most revealing Stanton & Company sales pitch is an argument for not buying PR yet. Amy Stanton gives prospective clients three tests. Is the product genuinely good? Is distribution ready if a story creates demand? Is the message clear enough for somebody else to repeat? Fail one, and attention becomes an accelerant poured on the wrong thing.
Product
It works, tastes good or delivers the promised result.
Distribution
Stock and channels can absorb the demand a hit might create.
Story
The reason to care is clear, credible and easy to carry.
This sounds like common sense because good operating advice usually does after someone says it. Yet it runs against the fantasy that publicity is a repair service. If the product disappoints, coverage enlarges the disappointment. If inventory vanishes, a feature sends customers to an empty shelf. If the founders cannot explain why the company exists, reporters will not invent the useful version for them.
The same realism appears in the agency’s response to a line it hears on new-business calls: “We’ve had bad experiences with PR agencies before.” Stanton argues that the industry has earned a trust problem through overpromising and under-delivering. Her proposed repair is less theatrical than a guaranteed headline: education, give-and-take and agreement about what success means. A coverage report records activity. Alignment can change the work.
There is a practical playbook here for founders with or without an agency. Put the product in unsympathetic hands. Trace what happens if ten thousand interested people arrive tomorrow. Reduce the company’s reason for existing to one sentence a customer could repeat. Then choose the audience with the strongest fit, not the biggest follower count. The method is useful when the business has something defensible to amplify. It is much less useful when publicity is being asked to substitute for product-market fit, supply or a point of view.
Growth without a costume change
For a firm built around a then-underfunded category, the recent scorecard is tidy. Stanton & Company appeared on the Inc. 5000 in 2023, returned in 2024, ranked No. 4,317 in 2025 after 78 percent growth over three years, and announced a fourth consecutive appearance in 2026. The agency does not publish revenue, valuation or a rate card. Its model is the familiar private-agency exchange: customized strategy and execution for client fees, with scope stretching from a focused media campaign to ongoing representation and partnerships.
The numbers matter because they complicate the usual story about specialization. A niche can be mistaken for a ceiling. Here it acted more like a filter. “Healthy, active living” is broad enough to include a mobility expert, a food startup, an Olympic athlete and a physician. The agency’s stated preference for philosophy-driven clients keeps the collection from becoming a random wellness shelf.
Stanton’s own public work reinforces that filter. In 2018 she co-authored The Feminine Revolution with Catherine Connors, arguing that qualities often dismissed as feminine weaknesses can be sources of power. “Sensitivity is a superpower,” she has said. Inside an agency, that idea is not wall copy. Sensitivity can mean hearing the client’s actual concern, noticing the journalist’s actual interest, or understanding why a partnership that looks impressive on a spreadsheet feels false in public.
The niche appears
Stanton opens an agency focused on women’s sports and female athletes.
The work becomes mentorship
She mentors Dina Louis through the first State Department and espnW Global Sports Mentoring Program cohort.
The philosophy becomes a book
The Feminine Revolution turns a leadership argument into a public conversation.
The growth streak
Four consecutive Inc. 5000 appearances give the long-running thesis a measurable coda.
The thing worth copying
Today, women’s sports attracts new leagues, media packages, sponsors and specialist agencies. It is tempting to describe Stanton & Company as prescient. That is true but incomplete. Predictions are cheap; staying in a category long enough for the market to agree is expensive. The agency’s more durable choice was to keep its original lens while allowing the subject to expand - from athletes to experts, from performance to longevity, from representation to every communications lever around it.
The most transferable lesson is smaller. Before seeking attention, make the business capable of keeping the promise that attention broadcasts. Then find the audience for whom the promise matters. This is not glamorous advice from a company that sells visibility. It is useful precisely because it refuses to confuse being seen with being ready.