BPCM is More Than Just Your Typical Public Relations Agency
Carrie Ellen Phillips and Vanessa von Bismarck met when they were working together at Nike Communications in the late nineties. Carrie was actually Vanessa’s boss, but it didn’t take long before the duo realized their joint potential for success beyond those office walls. They founded BPCM, which is now celebrating its 25th anniversary. BPCM is more than a brand agency or a public relations house. It is an all-encompassing communications and strategy team that seeks to build brands and take their operations to new heights.
Founders Carrie Ellen Phillips and Vanessa von Bismarck
Photography by Hilary Swift
Founders Carrie Ellen Phillips and Vanessa von Bismarck
Photography by Hilary Swift
After signing a few initial clients, namely Stella McCartney and Louis Vuitton, BPCM became more than just a bootstraps project organized by two friends. It became a serious operation, and traction grew with time. But what truly differentiates BPCM from other agencies is Carrie and Vanessa’s dedication to understanding what truly makes a brand and what allows it to grow and flourish with time.
Below the two partners reflect on their effortless partnership and impressive accolades. Within that time, BPCM established a sustainability practice, a core tenet of the company that allows Carrie and Vanessa to keep brands accountable and to push forward-thinking advancements.
Tell us about how both of you got started in the industry and why you both have a passion for brand-building and brand strategy.
Vanessa: I decided to take an internship at 27 years old, because I was new to the PR world. In time, Carrie and I sort of struck up this relationship. After three months I said to her, “Okay, so now I know more or less what needs to be done. You have experience in this field and I have an investment we can use.' It took Carrie a minute to say yes, to be honest. Eventually I said, “Well, what do you have to lose?” It was so scrappy. We went after literally everything you can imagine, every store on Broadway, we said, “You need PR.” All of a sudden, we had a real office. We had a bunch of friends helping and about two employees. It grew pretty fast.
I think one of the big things that was a differentiating factor for us was that we were more about the brand and understanding what builds a brand than glamour. We later started building a beauty team, and that has grown. We have about 30 people on the beauty team now and it's a massive part of our business. We helped Volkswagen build some more cultural relevance here in the U.S, and the same with Rimowa. We really like the idea of almost inserting ourselves into these brands and helping them build their own path. Today, we're around about a hundred people. We're in three offices and we're deep into the territory of social media. It used to be about the product, and now it's about the consumer. Where does the consumer travel to? What beauty brands do they like? What fashion brands do they engage with? Who is their network? And then we build a strategy around that.
Tell me more about BPCM’s Sustainability Practice and why it’s important to work with and foster brands that have ethical values?
Carrie: Well, it's interesting because it wasn't a huge consideration when we first started. I attended an event at the United Nations and listened to how bad fashion was for the world and I just couldn't stop thinking about that. There's so much education on sustainability now, but there wasn't back then. I was calling university switchboards and academics. I attended a lot of webinars. So, I went to Vanessa and said, “Hey, listen, we have so much access to so many companies and we could be really good at helping them think differently about this, because this is massive.” I knew this wave of awareness was going to change the entire industry. I think we've really learned to trust each other's passions in that way. When we have an idea that we cannot let go of, that's where the juice is and that's where we need to go.
With sustainability, Vanessa was like, “Okay, do it. But we cannot risk the company.” We had to find the right way to approach it so that it didn't sink the ship and alienate our clients. So, we created this a philosophy where we say we will work with anyone on sustainability and we'll be a no judgment zone as long as they are telling us the full story. Even if people are at the beginning of the journey and they're not ready to start, we allow them to come in, feel safe, and we see where we can go from there. I love nerding out over incredible new technologies and fibers that are going propel the future. Back when we were sitting in our cubicles, I don't think we ever thought that we would be talking to venture capital firms about advanced cellulosic materials. But we both love solving interesting problems.
How do you emphasize transparency to these brands and show them that leading in that way is going to make a lot of modern-day consumers feel a little bit more comfortable buying into them? How do you also help them to avoid greenwashing?
Carrie: There is a lot of greenwashing. I believe that 80% of it is not necessarily nefarious but comes from a lack of education, information, and transparency. So, it’s incredibly important for me and , for my team, and for all of the teams that work with us, that we are up on things like FTC regulations. It is so important to educate yourself and a lot of brands don't have internal education. So, we look at that as part of our responsibility. We call it a practice because it goes all the way across our agency and into each department. We teach the brands we work with that language is important and transparency is key. Transparency is the thing that we're all going to be talking about for the next three years because we can't measure what we don't know about and we can't assign solutions to things we don't know about. Ten years ago, when we started, there were almost no turnkey ways to trace your supply chain in any industry. Now, we're seeing it happen with regulation, so I think it's actually possible to be more transparent.
How do you effectively guide every brand you work with while also staying true to their ethos and values?
Carrie: One of the things that's really important is for us to work within the C-suite. We're working with owners, founders, CEOs, and CMOs — the people who are really the guidance system for the brand. And the closer you are to the guidance system, the better of a guide you can be. Brands have to speak with their own voice, which means that we have to be multilingual in that way. I think that's part of what makes it fun. We have to understand them in a deep way in order to market to them.
Taking this holistic approach that you do makes a lot of sense. Reflecting on more than 25 years together, what have been some of the most fun or fulfilling projects that you have worked on to date?
Carrie: It's like choosing our children. But I have to say, opening the Glossier store felt like so much more than a store opening. Everything about it, from beginning to end, every person inside of that company who worked on it, it was this shared vision that just was so beautifully executed. We also work with Estée Lauder on their breast cancer research campaign. That one was special. Watching our innovators pair with our clients is great too. MycoWorks makes leather out of mycelium and Hermès is our client, so getting to work with both of those brands on their collaboration was so exciting.
Vanessa: For me, working with Hermès, a brand that is always at the top of its game is great. The Hermès gym in Brooklyn was so fun.
If you advised younger, emerging professionals or creatives who may want to get started in the PR, brand building, and communication spaces, but don't really know where to start, how would you advise them and what words of wisdom would you share?
Vanessa: Take one step after the other. Show up with confidence. And if you want to work in PR, you have to know how to communicate. In terms of starting a business. Start a business and if it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out. Carrie and I always said, 'The worst they can tell us is “no,” which is not actually physically harmful. It's just annoying and you move on. You have to have fun with what you do. You have to be passionate; you have to read up on what's going on in the world. And you have to be able to listen to what people's, objectives, issues, and problems are. I think empathy plays a huge role in this field.
Carrie: You don't learn from success. You learn from failures. And if you are afraid of failing, you're not going to be the most successful that you could be. You're not going to be the most developed human being you could be. We are built as iterative beings, so we're meant to fall and get up again.
What are you two proudest of going into the 25th year of BPCM?
Carrie: Our relationship. Vanessa and I are really good at being partners. We fight fairly. We know how and when to disagree. We're 50/50, and I always joke that everything I know about relationships, I learned from Vanessa. And this is supposed to be fun. Vanessa has always said, “If this stops being fun, we can stop.'” And it really has been so much fun for these past 25 years. And then the team. We have people come back, we have people who have started other agencies, and we refer business to each other all the time. We collaborate on stuff. We love the people who've worked with us. We always say that once you're BPCM, you're always BPCM.
Vanessa: This is a people's business. Carrie and I couldn't build this by ourselves. We depend on the people who work for us to help us keep building it and keep growing. I think our biggest accomplishment is that after 25 years, we are stronger than ever.
Article by Kayla Curtis-Evans, Contributing Sustainable Editor, PhotoBook Magazine
Tearsheets by Robin Chou, Graphic Design Intern, PhotoBook Magazine
*Photos courtesy of BPCM
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