Before Tiffany Rafii had a company with a recognizable name, she had a thesaurus. She and Sarah Terzic, her childhood friend and future business partner, spent two weeks looking up synonyms for words they liked. Anyone who has named a business will recognize the predicament: a few syllables must somehow accommodate an entire future. The future, inconveniently, has yet to provide a brief.
Rafii recalled that search while talking with the founders of architecture firm //3877. Their own naming story had prompted hers. It is a small moment, but a revealing one. Here is a communications executive whose work involves helping other people describe what they do, remembering how much effort it took to describe her own beginning. UpSpring eventually became the answer. The questions kept multiplying.
A year to see what would happen
That beginning came in 2009, when Rafii and Terzic were college seniors. Graduation was approaching, the economy was difficult, and the usual next step looked less certain than it had a few years earlier. They asked their parents for a year to try building something. The business began in a dorm room. Early on, they accepted whichever clients would hire them for public relations.
Their relationship had a history longer than the agency’s. Rafii has said that, even as their paths separated and met again, she and Terzic had known they wanted to go into business together. That is a different starting point from meeting a prospective co-founder over a carefully calibrated networking coffee. They already had a person in mind. They still had to discover the business.
They found a focus in design about a year into the venture. Hiring their first employee took three years. Those intervals deserve to stay in the story. A dorm-room origin is easy to remember; three years of being responsible for the work is harder to compress into a charming line. The early company had to earn the right to become a larger one.
The price of a bargain
One early purchase supplied a lesson with unusually little glamour. The founders needed a media database and could not afford the mainstream options. Their cheaper choice turned out to be a disorganized spreadsheet of contacts. Finding a single person meant searching manually through the mess. The bargain had purchased work for its purchasers.
Rafii has described that mistake as a reason to take software investment seriously, including developing tools when available products do not meet the company’s needs. There is a recognizable young-business problem here: the invoice looks measurable, while the hours lost using the wrong thing arrive quietly. A lower price can be persuasive precisely because it is easier to see.
The anecdote also gives her career a welcome rough edge. Communications businesses spend their days polishing other people’s stories. Their own working lives contain imperfect choices, awkward tools and lessons acquired after payment. Rafii tells this one with enough distance to laugh. The spreadsheet did not become useful with age. The experience did.
A different kind of creative person
Rafii’s professional world is full of people who can turn an idea into a drawing, a room or a piece of furniture. In a conversation with designer and podcast host Amy Devers, she admitted that she would like to draw, sketch and paint, but cannot. Her own description is “creative, dedicated, and forever optimistic.” Making the physical thing is another matter.
That distinction helps explain her place in architecture and design. Her work begins around the work: what a firm wants to be known for, how a manufacturer reaches the people choosing materials, what a prospective client needs to understand. The object may already exist. The explanation can still be unfinished.
She describes herself as a New York City girl, and that conversation with Devers turned naturally toward the city’s variety and creative energy. Her interest reaches beyond the finished image. She asks people about the decisions, competing roles and experiences that produced it. A polished photograph shows a result. A conversation lets someone explain the choices that the photograph cannot show.
How to describe a ship you have never designed
Rafii’s business-development thinking becomes concrete in a story about a client hoping to enter the cruise market. The client had no cruise projects to present. UpSpring worked with the company to create renderings showing how its designs might look on a ship, then built a campaign around its ideas for that industry’s future.
The distinction matters. The images represented a possibility, rather than a completed commission. Rafii said the campaign reached publications including Insider and outlets in Miami, produced conversations and requests for proposals, and gave the client a way into a market it had wanted to pursue. The work communicated an ambition without pretending it was a track record.
That is a useful window into the job she has chosen. A portfolio answers questions about what has already happened. A growth strategy needs to account for the work someone hopes to do next. Rafii wants those two conversations to meet. The future can be shown thoughtfully, provided everyone understands what they are looking at.
- An ambitionEnter a new design sector
- A visible ideaCreate conceptual ship renderings
- A conversationPitch the proposed direction
- An openingGenerate interest and RFPs
The company beyond its founders
In 2024, PRNEWS recognized Rafii in the Business Entrepreneurs category of its Top Women Awards. Her response on LinkedIn put the attention back on the people at UpSpring. She credited a practice of hiring people with greater knowledge than the founders and joked about being a self-appointed CEO. The title had become real through doing the work.
She makes a related point in conversation with Hector Sanchez, the CEO of Premier: hiring knowledgeable people requires a founder to give them space. That sounds straightforward until the founder remembers how the business used to function. At the beginning, doing everything may have been necessary. Later, the same reflex can fill the room other people need.
The exchange also reveals a competitive streak. When Sanchez discusses office outings, Rafii mentions a laser-tag incident from 2019 that still follows her around. She leaves the details tantalizingly unexplained. A corporate biography might omit this entirely. A person talking to another person lets it slip in, along with the suggestion that colleagues still want her on their team.
UpSpring acquired Epiphany Studio in July 2022, adding digital marketing expertise to its communications work. The agency’s later recognition in The PR Net 100 for 2025 described campaigns spanning PR, marketing and influencers, along with an expanded team and a new awards initiative supporting women-led nonprofits. The company was accumulating ways to put its thinking to work.
There is a practical consequence to that broader mix. A client’s story can travel through a publication, a website, a campaign or an executive’s public voice. Each place asks something different of it. Keeping those parts connected requires people with different skills, and it gives the founder a reason to keep listening beyond her own specialty.
“You can be more than one thing.”
Tiffany Rafii, on the possibilities she describes to her daughter and her team
The reveal is only the beginning
In April 2026, Rafii published an essay about rebranding that goes after a particularly understandable temptation: completing the new identity, launching the website and waiting for everyone else to notice the change. The work may be sound. The market still needs repeated reasons to see the business differently.
She proposes a test rooted in behavior. Is the firm being shortlisted by different people? Are prospects calling it first? Is it being entrusted with larger or more complex projects? Is a product being specified instead of a competitor’s? Those questions are harder to answer than whether the new logo has been approved.
Her prescription includes a focused media story, a business-development team able to explain the positioning, credible leadership content and a sustained presence. The appeal of a launch is that it gives everyone a date and a finished task. The harder work extends beyond the date. Rafii keeps directing attention toward that less photogenic stretch, where an identity has to earn its consequences.
Matches, microphones and flour
Her own public work gained a new outlet in March 2026 with the launch of Play with Matches. The podcast’s inaugural season was announced as seven weekly episodes in collaboration with the SURROUND Podcast Network. Rafii hosts conversations about the decisions behind architecture, design and building product businesses.
The first episode, released March 24, featured Pallavi Dean, founder of Roar. Other conversations have included Metropolis editor-in-chief Avi Rajagopal and HOK design principal Adaeze Cadet. The guest list brings together people making work and people deciding how it is understood. For a communications founder, it is a fitting place to keep asking questions.
There is also a career she can imagine outside this one. Rafii has said she would love to attend pastry school and open a bakery. Creativity and precision appeal to her there. At the end of a working day, she turns to dinner with her children, then tea and a little quiet after they are asleep.
The bakery remains an ambition. UpSpring is the business she has spent seventeen years building. Both give her something to make, though only one demands butter. The old thesaurus story offers a pleasing way to see the distance traveled: two friends once searched for a word roomy enough for their plans. Rafii is still finding things to put inside it.