30+ media placements

forbes (x2), travel + leisure, men's journal, men's health, reader's digest + more

41.9% of holiday revenue generated via email

54% average email open rate

100m+ combined audience reach

zero paid media budget

30+ media placements forbes (x2), travel + leisure, men's journal, men's health, reader's digest + more 41.9% of holiday revenue generated via email 54% average email open rate 100m+ combined audience reach zero paid media budget

Rheos makes floating sunglasses for outdoor and water sports enthusiasts, a product with genuine crossover appeal, sitting at the intersection of performance gear and lifestyle accessory. The opportunity was obvious. The infrastructure to capitalize on it wasn't there yet. PR outreach was sporadic and the email program wasn't pulling its weight as a revenue channel. My job was to change both without a paid media budget to lean on.
PR & Earned Media (2021–2023)
I developed and managed a sustained PR program targeting both the outdoor/boating trade press and mainstream lifestyle publications, two audiences that require completely different pitching strategies. For the outdoor and boating outlets, the pitch was product performance and specificity: floating sunglasses for people who are actually on the water. For lifestyle and gift guide editors at Forbes, Travel + Leisure, Men's Journal, and Men's Health, the pitch was accessibility and gifting appeal, a genuinely useful product that photographs well and fits cleanly into seasonal editorial formats.
Securing gift guide placement at Forbes twice required relationship-building with editors on a long lead cycle and pitching with enough specificity and timing precision that the product was front of mind when editorial calendars opened. The result was 30+ placements across two years, spanning niche outdoor trade press and some of the highest-circulation lifestyle publications in the country.
Email Marketing (2025)
When I returned to work with Rheos on email, the goal was straightforward: make the channel actually generate revenue, particularly during the holiday window when competition for inbox attention is at its peak and every dollar of revenue has to come from somewhere. With no paid media running in parallel, email wasn't a support channel; it was the channel.
I owned the full process: strategy, design, copywriting, segmentation, and deployment. Every campaign started with the question of who specifically was receiving it and what they actually needed to hear at that moment in the purchase cycle.
- 30+ media placements secured across outdoor/boating trade and national lifestyle press
- Placement outlets include Forbes (×2), Travel + Leisure, Men's Journal, Men's Health, Reader's Digest, and 20+ outdoor and boating publications
- 100M+ combined audience reach across major placements
- Holiday email campaign generated nearly $10,000 of $24,000 in total holiday revenue (41.9%) with zero paid media support
- 54% average open rate on holiday campaigns (vs. ~21% industry average)
- 2.8% click rate on holiday campaigns (vs. ~2.3% industry average)