What's up, DTC Pod? Today we're joined by Jenny Meyer and Melissa Connor of JBC PR. So guys, I'll let you kick us off. Why don't you tell us a little bit about JBC and your both respective backgrounds in PR and getting everything up and running at JBC.

Melissa, do you want me to take this one?

You can kick off and then I'll jump in with my spiel.

So Melissa and I actually have similar backgrounds. We both worked at various various agencies and in house in PR for a while. We actually met because I hired her at a now defunct PR agency about, I don't know, Melissa, maybe like 15 years ago now. Maybe twelve years ago now.

Not put timing on anything, please.

Yeah, the joke there is that I hired her. I was running comms at this PR agency. I met her, she was super young, super, super smart, and I was like, yeah, come work with us. She accepted the job, she started the job, and one day later I resigned. And so, funny enough, we never even really had the opportunity to work together. But she made such a mark on me that I kind of made a mental note in the back of my head that if we were I were to ever do anything with a leadership role, I would find a way to somehow kidnap her and get her to work with me, because I was really insanely wowed. By her at a really young age. So after kind of doing PR for various brands, specifically, actually fashion, we did a lot of fashion.

We both kind of hit a crossroads at the same time. So about ten years ago, we both found ourselves, frankly, extremely bored. We had been doing PR for a really long time. Brands were just kind of expecting the same results from kind of traditional agencies. Traditional agencies were operating with the same roadmap they had been operating with for frankly, decades. And there didn't seem to be a lot of agencies. There were a few. But addressing kind of this shift with the consumer and this shift in the economy and this shift in the media landscape and how people were beginning to consume information.

So it was no longer about reading a magazine and seeing like a really cute pair of jeans and going into a store and saying, look, I saw this pair of jeans in Lucky magazine and I want to buy it. It really became about I listened to a podcast today and I heard them mention this really cool direct to consumer dish company and now I want to Google it. And now I read an article on SAS company and then, funny enough, the next day I saw it on the Today show. So everyone started kind of getting bombarded by information and we didn't feel like there were really enough agencies out there that were addressing this new boom in innovative businesses. But also the shift in how the media was behaving. So we started JBC, frankly, as like a really small consultancy. Like, it was Melissa and I sitting on our couches. We rarely saw each other.

I sat on my couch on the Upper West Side. She was in Brooklyn. And we just were kind of like, listen, we'll find some brands and we'll see if we can approach their media relations in a really strategic way. So not just about kind of like, straightforward product placement, but around real, meaningful storytelling. How do we tell really interesting narratives about the founders how do we tell really interesting narratives about the product, about how this brand began? So kind of like a little bit of a more intellectual type of PR, but a PR that took more time and a lot more effort, a lot more creativity. And frankly, we did that for a year, and it was awesome because we got to sit on our couches and consult and make a significant amount of money, and we were both really happy. But what happened was brands started kind of calling us and saying, listen, we keep reading these really great stories about brand X, Y and Z, and they say, you're doing the PR. Can we talk to you? And then it just kind of happened.

And I always say, like, we didn't have a business plan. Neither Melissa nor I wanted to run an agency. I was so anti agency by that point. I was like, if I talk to someone else at an agency, I'm going to lose my mind. The whole way agencies were set up, frankly, were set up to fail, there was like this whole kind of image of a lot of peer agencies just being really kind of catty, mean girls. We were not into it. But as we started getting this interest from brands, we started realizing we can do this differently. We can actually take everything we've learned from working at other agencies and retaining other agencies and do the opposite, take every mistake, take everything that made us insane and try to fix it.