santa-monica
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RPA and the Forty-Year Handshake
RPA was born to keep one car account. Four decades, one painful breakup and several improbable comebacks later, the Santa Monica independent has turned client continuity into its sharpest competitive weapon.
RazPR Learned to Speak Robot Before Hollywood Needed a Translator
Karen Raz built a boutique agency around a stubbornly useful skill: translating technical breakthroughs into stories that creative people actually want to hear. Nearly three decades later, the niche has become the center of media and entertainment.
The PR Agency That Shops the Shelf Before It Pitches the Story
BLAZE PR built a national consumer agency around a surprisingly physical habit: go to the store, eat at the restaurant, fix the shelf - then decide what story deserves attention.
Farmacy Agency sold a small business something big: senior judgment
Susan Emmer’s boutique agency offered smaller businesses vice president level marketing talent. Its niche in conscious brands reveals a useful question: who makes a good product believable?
JCI Worldwide knows who people listen to
A California communications firm built its practice around community groups, contested policy, and the people who can make a message travel. Its energy campaigns show what that looks like on the ground.
Harmonica gives a good story more than one job
A countertop garden, a cauliflower pizza and a jar of honey reveal how this agency works: find a reason to believe, then put it to work across the buying journey.
Bricolage wants to give togetherness a floor plan
A Santa Monica design workshop moves between apartment buildings, rain barrels, and homes for living alone together. The common question: what should we share, and what should we keep to ourselves?
Sailing Marketing wants your brand promise to survive the unboxing
For Chinese companies going abroad, Sailing Marketing treats branding as a company-wide job. The revealing part of its pitch is what happens between the advertising and the delivery.
Below The Radar made the crowd bigger. The studio stayed small.
A Santa Monica effects boutique filled digital stadiums, built a car commercial inside a computer, and repaired a location after demolition. Its most interesting production decision was how little company it wanted to become.
JSA+Partners sells the story beyond the product
A card game becomes an entertainment story. An esports tournament becomes a business story. Inside the communications agency that helps brands give outsiders a reason to care.
Victoria King PR Knows a Beautiful Hotel Needs a Better Story
From revived California motels to Swiss village hideaways, Victoria King Public Relations finds the details that give travel editors a reason to care. Its business is built on a selective roster and close attention to the property behind the pitch.
BLACK + GOLD knows a photograph needs somewhere to go
Elizabeth Waterman’s creative studio connects the shoot to the social feed, the book launch and the gallery wall. Its most revealing work starts with people, then gives their pictures a job.
B.D. Fox & Friends Sold Hollywood One Image at a Time
A knife became a pumpkin. A bat became a promise. Inside the Santa Monica agency whose movie posters made a business out of leaving something to the imagination.
Daniel Kirschner Built the Plumbing Behind the Highlight Reel
A policy lawyer and a retired All-Star began with a clunky video request. Twelve years later, their software sits behind the fast, intimate sports clips that make a distant stadium feel close.
The Startup Betting It Can Turn Locked-Up Venture Bets Into Cash - Without a Fire Sale
Venture investors are sitting on trillions in gains they cannot spend. Turbine's pitch: borrow against the position instead of dumping it at a discount.
The Quiz App That Ate 90% of American Schools Just Changed Its Name
Two Indian engineers built a math game nobody could keep fed with content. So they handed the tools to teachers instead - and accidentally built one of the most-used classroom platforms on Earth.
The Firm That Buys Companies Nobody Wants - and a Football Club Everybody Watches
Clearlake turned a distressed-debt strategy into a $90 billion machine by fixing unglamorous companies - then bought a Premier League club to prove the point.
The Firm That Turned $26 Million Into a Billion, One Concentrated Bet at a Time
It runs a small firm out of Santa Monica, writes a handful of checks a year, and once turned a $26.5 million CrowdStrike stake into a billion-dollar return. Here is how March Capital plays venture capital like a concentration bet.
The Santa Monica Lab That Builds Companies Like an Assembly Line
Most venture firms wait for founders to knock. Science builds the company first, then writes the check - and the method has turned razors, canned water and robo-advising into billion-dollar exits.
Finality Capital
A Santa Monica firm that has been quietly backing blockchain builders since 2018 - before it had a fund - now runs venture, liquid, and credit strategies on a single conviction: the next internet gets settled onchain.
ProProfs
The bootstrapped software company that turned a free online quiz into a 15-million-user suite for training employees and keeping customers happy.
Stipop
Stipop is a sticker infrastructure company that lets any app add a searchable library of 150,000+ stickers with a single line of code, through its API and SDK. Founded in Seoul by roommates-turned-cofounders Tony Park and Daniel Cho, it grew a marketplace of thousands of global artists, powered sticker features for Google, Microsoft Teams, Canva and Adobe, and joined Snap's Yellow accelerator and Y Combinator (S21). It has since expanded toward monetization tools for character-IP creators and AI chat products.
Iris Yen
Iris Yen is the Chief Marketing Officer of Cupshe, the California-founded swimwear and beachwear brand that grew from a single-category bet into a global direct-to-consumer business with roughly $420 million in annual revenue. She joined in February 2025 after a run through some of the loudest brand-building rooms in the business: Head of Media, Content and Partnerships at Nike; VP and Head of Media, Strategy and Audiences at Red Bull; VP and Head of Communications at GUESS?, Inc.; VP of Communications at American Eagle Outfitters; and VP of Global Marketing and PR at Quiksilver. She started in music, running marketing and PR at Universal Records in the early 2000s, and has built campaigns around names including Britney Spears, Nelly, Kelly Slater, Tony Hawk and Torah Bright. A Washington University in St. Louis graduate who studied anthropology alongside marketing, Yen tends to treat brands as cultures rather than catalogs - a habit visible in Cupshe's 10th-anniversary work, its fourth Miami Swim Week runway show, and its 2026 Casa del Sol collaboration with Jessie James Decker.
Kevin Mitchael
Kevin Mitchael is the Chief Marketing Officer of Careismatic Brands, the Los Angeles-based healthcare apparel group behind Cherokee, Dickies Medical, Heartsoul, Med Couture, Healing Hands, Infinity, Medelita, allheart, Scrubstar, Classroom and Real School. He announced the appointment on LinkedIn in February 2024, weeks after the company entered Chapter 11 restructuring, and stayed through its emergence that June under new ownership. His earlier career was built in apparel brand, product, digital and retail marketing, with work across Carter's, OshKosh B'gosh, Adidas, Carhartt, Lee, Fruit of the Loom, French Toast and Healthtex, according to a 2019 Connecticut newspaper notice announcing his appointment to the board of Flanders Nature Center and Land Trust. He keeps a notably quiet public profile for a CMO: no published interviews, no podcast circuit, and a single LinkedIn account doing most of the talking.
FIGS
FIGS is a direct-to-consumer healthcare apparel brand that reinvented the medical scrub. Founded in 2013 by Heather Hasson and Trina Spear, the Santa Monica company sells comfortable, technical scrubs, lab coats, footwear and lifestyle wear made from its proprietary FIONx fabric, sold almost entirely online to nurses, doctors and other healthcare professionals. FIGS reached $631 million in revenue in 2025, serves roughly 2.9 million active customers, and trades on the NYSE under the ticker FIGS after a landmark 2021 IPO.
Aaron Heiser
Aaron Heiser is the first-ever Chief Executive Officer of Malbon Golf, the Santa Monica streetwear-meets-golf brand founded by Stephen and Erica Malbon. Appointed in October 2024, he runs day-to-day operations while the founders steer creative as co-Chief Creative Officers. Heiser arrived after roughly 18 years at Nike, where he ran retail across Western Europe and Greater China before serving as Global VP of Apparel, Accessories and Licensing. A Cornell graduate and former varsity wrestler, he has built a career relocating across Amsterdam, Shanghai and Oregon, and now leads Malbon as it pushes toward roughly $100 million in revenue and deeper international expansion.
LiveControl
LiveControl is a Santa Monica-based company that turns any venue into a broadcast studio without an on-site crew. It combines proprietary PTZ camera hardware and an encoder with cloud software and a nationwide network of professional videographers who remotely pan, tilt, zoom, switch angles, and produce live events - for houses of worship, funeral homes, schools, theaters, conferences, and corporate clients. Founded in 2018 and backed by a $30M Series A led by Coatue, LiveControl produces tens of thousands of professionally streamed events each year at a fraction of the cost of hiring a traditional production team.
Quantum Energy Square
Quantum Energy Square is a Venice, California-born food brand that makes plant-based energy bars engineered to replace the energy drink. Each square pairs 100mg of caffeine from organic green coffee with 10g of plant protein and balanced macronutrients from fruits, nuts and seeds, so the caffeine releases slowly for steady, no-crash energy. Founded by Daniel Medvene and Leah Marquez after 200-plus recipe iterations, the company sells direct-to-consumer and through Whole Foods, Sprouts, REI and Thrive Market, and is the official energy bar of IRONMAN and Rock 'n' Roll Marathon events.
Quinn
Quinn is a Santa Monica-based audio erotica platform - often described as a 'Spotify for erotica' - that turns intimate, narrative-driven stories into 15-to-20-minute immersive audio experiences. Founded by Caroline Spiegel and built primarily for women and underserved audiences, Quinn pairs a creator-driven content marketplace with an ever-growing roster of professional voice actors and Hollywood celebrities. With roughly 300,000 users, over 900,000 TikTok followers, and around $5M in annual recurring revenue, it has reframed adult content around imagination, storytelling, and discreet listening rather than the visual mainstream.
Russ Wallace
Russ Wallace is the co-founder and CEO of Freestyle, a Santa Monica baby-care brand rebuilding the diaper aisle for modern parents. A recovering NYU-trained lawyer who traded courtrooms for supply chains, he cut his operating teeth scaling Hello Bello past a $100M run rate before teaming up with Cameo co-founder Mike Constantiner. Freestyle's tree-free, bamboo-core diapers launched online in 2022 and now sit on shelves at Target, Walmart, and Whole Foods, riding roughly 400% year-over-year growth and a fresh $10M Series A.