Susan Magrino once thought she might become a writer. The English major from Skidmore College went into book publishing instead, joining the publicity department at Crown in 1983. It was close enough to the written word to feel natural and far enough from the solitary life of a novelist to reveal her actual gift: Susan could see the story around the story. She liked the authors, the rooms, the timing, the small human detail that made somebody lean forward. Nine years later, she took that instinct out on its own.
In 1992, Susan and her sister Allyn started the agency that still bears their family name. Susan was frightened to tell one Crown author in particular. Martha Stewart had already become an important client and mentor, and Susan worried that leaving the publisher might feel like desertion. Stewart's reply was briskly generous: go do it; how can I help? Within a year, Stewart's magazine launched and she became one of the young firm's first clients.
That exchange contains a useful miniature of Magrino's career. There is the anxious jump, the relationship sturdy enough to survive it, and the senior figure who recognizes that confidence is best repaid by lending some to the next person. Susan later condensed the idea into advice with two-way traffic: “Take the opportunity. Give the opportunity. Take the risk. Give the risk.”
A career built in chapters
The Stewart relationship is now older than the agency. It has moved through cookbooks, magazines, television, radio, merchandise, retail, events, streaming, social platforms and endorsements. Every few years, somebody declares one of those formats finished. The partnership keeps changing shape. Its durability makes a persuasive case for the unfashionable virtues in public relations: memory, discretion, follow-through and the ability to remain useful after the launch party has ended.
Magrino learned those virtues during what she calls her training at Crown. Her first boss, Nancy Kahan, is among the early mentors she still names. Publishing taught her how to present a person to the world without sanding away the personality that made the person interesting. It also placed her near Stewart just as a cookbook author was becoming a category of her own.
“Recognize when someone gives you an opportunity and know what to do with it.”Susan Magrino
The new firm soon widened beyond books. A meeting with Chris Blackwell at a Miami book fair led into hospitality. Frédéric Fekkai opened a route into beauty. Restaurants, wines, hotels, real estate and consumer goods followed. The client list became a tour of places and products with an opinion about taste: The Plaza Hotel, Fontainebleau Miami Beach, The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, Dom Pérignon, Veuve Clicquot, Baccarat, Virgin Atlantic and chefs including Alain Ducasse, Daniel Boulud and Gordon Ramsay.
A long conversation, in five beats
The ironed-napkin school of strategy
Susan's professional curiosity is unusually concrete. On a European trip, she found herself taking inventory of hotel turndown service, digital systems and whether the linen napkins had been ironed. A publicist can call that market research; a guest might call it paying attention. Either way, the habit explains why hospitality became such a natural home for the agency.
Hospitality brands sell rooms, but the guest remembers a hundred smaller decisions. Communications works the same way. A sharp headline can earn attention. The quality of the welcome, the readiness of the spokesperson, the grace of the follow-up and the usefulness of the story decide whether attention becomes affection. Magrino's stated house style has long been “buttoned up.” After an evening event, the office still expected people at nine the next morning. Glamour, in this telling, requires an alarm clock.
Her eye is not confined to work. Early on Saturdays, she likes to drive to estate sales and hunt for something fabulous. She has joked that the habit may have come from Stewart. The collector and the publicist share a method: look closely, know quality when it is sitting in an unpromising corner, and understand that context can return luster to an overlooked object.
Two sisters and one name on the door
Susan persuaded Allyn to leave work with the French West Indies and join her in the new venture. Their roles developed along complementary lines: Susan as chairman and chief executive, Allyn leading the agency's operations and growth. Working with a sibling invites obvious questions about arguments. Asked whether the sisters bickered, Susan offered a publicist's perfectly economical answer: “You'd have to ask everybody else.”
The joke also protects something serious. Family firms survive when private knowledge becomes division of labor rather than theater. The sisters knew each other's strengths and weaknesses from the beginning. By the agency's 25th anniversary, they could fill a room high above Rockefeller Center with more than 300 clients, journalists and business figures. Stewart attended as both client and friend. Susan's family and the agency team were there too. The guest list read like a map of relationships accumulated one assignment at a time.
Longevity did not spare the firm from reinvention. Magrino broadened traditional media relations into brand narrative, social strategy, creator partnerships, digital content and experiential events. Susan has argued that public relations is misunderstood partly because its definition must keep expanding. The question is no longer only which publication will carry a story. It is whether the value of a brand is best translated through an experience, a partnership, an Instagram post or some combination that did not exist when she left Crown.
“How you handle a challenge is as important as how you handle a success.”Susan Magrino
Staying useful when the room disappears
In 2020, the rooms disappeared. Hospitality paused, events moved behind laptop screens and familiar publicity machinery seized up. Magrino held more than 50 virtual events in the first three quarters, drew more than 200 media attendees to an online client preview, and offered flexible services to clients unable to maintain conventional retainers. The firm added dozens of clients during that unsettled year.
The response was operational, but it drew on Susan's deeper rule about leaving the door open. A difficult moment is still part of the relationship that comes after it. She has said that challenge brings perspective and that risk can produce good things. Her own founding decision, made with the explicit wish never to look back with regret, remains the durable example.
Recognition arrived along the way. In 2019, New York Women in Communications gave Susan a Matrix Award, with Stewart presenting it. The occasion honored a communications career, but Susan used her remarks to return attention to opportunity and risk. In 2026, Magrino appeared on the Observer PR Power List for an eleventh consecutive year. The firm was ranked No. 21, with its work on Stewart's renewed run of products, partnerships and media appearances among the campaigns singled out.
Outside the office, Susan established a scholarship at Skidmore and remains active with the college. She serves on the advisory board of The Glass House and has held board roles with Literacy Partners and Manitoga, the Russel Wright Design Center. The choices align neatly with her life: books, design, preservation and the chance to hand somebody else an opening.
The next thing on the list
A 2025 video tour of Susan's Florida home offers a warmer inventory of the same sensibility. There are collected objects, bright rooms, kaftans, vintage handbags, jewelry and affectionate evidence of poodles. The home has polish without looking afraid of a human presence. It is also a second operating base. Susan divides her time between New York and South Florida, where she leads the agency's additional office.
Years ago, asked what she might do outside PR, Susan answered art dealer or real estate. She admitted to keeping a list of alternate careers in the memo section of her BlackBerry. It is easy to imagine all those versions of her. Each relies on judgment, narrative, negotiation and the ability to recognize why one thing belongs beside another.
She has described “keeping people happy” as the central function of public relations, whether the person is a client, journalist or colleague. The phrase sounds light until one considers the discipline involved. Happiness cannot be commanded, and it rarely survives neglect. It has to be tended through clear expectations, good work, timely calls and the occasional willingness to tell a client to lie low.
Susan's own mantra is blunter: determination and hard work equal achievement. Failure, she once said, never entered her mind. What does enter her mind, sometimes at night, is tomorrow's list. What does the team need to solve this week? What more can it do? In public relations, the work is never entirely finished. For somebody who built a firm around the long conversation, that may be less a complaint than the point.