Meet Rachel Popp of Big Fish Collective in Santa Fe Arts District

Today we’d like to introduce you to Rachel Popp.

Rachel, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I’d always loved the agency marketing and public relations business, having explored agency after agency in college through internships. But finding my true passion for marketing and the outdoor industry didn’t come until my first full-time job after college. I was in the PR and social media department of an agency and was sent to my first Outdoor Retailer show. I was in heaven. The people, the energy, the industry – it all inspired and excited me, and I wanted more and more. I continued to work with agencies that touched multiple industries, everything from pet food to Silicon Valley’s tech world, retail, and more. And while I loved marketing in all of those spaces, the outdoor industry just kept me passionate and excited about the business. One of my clients even wanted to offer me a job, but said she just couldn’t because she wanted to see me take something in the outdoor industry – she even knew it was my passion. I was thankful I was able to stay in the space through one client year after year. And, little did I know, I’d end up meeting my future business partner years down the road at Outdoor Retailer’s final trade show in Salt Lake City.

I love that story – my business partner and I met in the airport heading back to Denver from the last OR Show in Salt Lake City. I was so eager to get back to Denver because my parents were in town visiting, but my flight kept getting delayed and delayed. She was my saving grace that night through the delayed flight insanity. We struck up a conversation, and that lead to some drinks at the bar to kill time, and lots of conversations about the business and the industry. We continued to hangout to talk shop about marketing and publicity and media relations (nerd alert!), share ideas about the biz and inspire each other week after week. Six-ish months down the road, Big Fish Collective was born.

We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
I like off-roading way too much for the business to run on a smooth road. Give me dirt, potholes and rocks to climb over. Obstacles and challenges are what keep us sharp and keep us motivated to get over the next hump.

We experiment a lot in this business, so there are always new hurdles to jump and challenges to tackle. But that’s what keeps it interesting. And we have some amazing clients who let us run with ideas so their marketing and PR activations grow and live on the adventurous side.

So, as you know, we’re impressed with Big Fish Collective – tell our readers more, for example what you’re most proud of as a company and what sets you apart from others.
Big Fish Collective is a small counsel for all things marketing. We become an extension of a client’s marketing team. We’re the people they can lean on to think critically about how to activate and elevate their brand in the marketplace. We love working with brands geared towards active, healthy, sustainable and innovative lifestyles. Brands that inspire us and that evoke something we can get behind.

We generate and incubate ideas, and give teams that little extra momentum to help lock-down more marketing and public relations results. The marketings teams we work with are so incredibly talented, and we complement their expertise by strategizing and implementing marketing and public relations initiatives that they might need more expertise in or don’t have the bandwidth to accomplish on their own.

We’re intentionally small for a reason – we want senior leadership in the day-to-day of every account we have. Being from the agency business, I was tired of personally being taken off the everyday work to serve as a figurehead. I wanted to be back in the thick of it – strategizing campaigns, implementing them and getting the results. After all, that’s all the fun stuff.

We really love working with emerging brands, especially entrepreneurs who are getting their feet wet in a new industry or with a new product idea. Or foreign brands that are new to the United States. We work both locally and nationally and have worked with multiple brands that are less than five years into their business, to help grow and accelerate their awareness in markets. Through PR, we secure exposure in top national media like Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. On the marketing side, we help with branding, content creation, social media, influencer and athlete programs, copywriting, creative direction and more.

So, what’s next? Any big plans?
We want to continue to evolve our marketing and public relations offerings, and the way we think about those strategies as these worlds evolve. Without giving too much away, we’re tackling new ideas on how to better align product development with marketing, what’s next for influencer and social media marketing, and how our world of traditional publicity and media relations is changing with the times. Our business model has helped us find some incredibly talented partners to work with as part of our “collective,” we are just scratching the surface with ideas and activations.

Contact Info:

• Address: 525 Santa Fe Drive
  Denver, CO 80204
• Website: workwithbigfish.com
• Email: iwantto@workwithbigfish.com
• Instagram: /bigfishcollective
• Facebook: /bigfishcollective

Image Credit:
Rachel Popp (Founder) Photo Credit – Casey Lorenzen

Getting in touch: VoyageDenver is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.