Nora Wolf + Kirsten Larson
Co-founders of Wolf Craft
Brooklyn, NY
www.wolf-craft.com
instagram @go.wolf.craft
pinterest @gowolfcraft
linkedin @wolf-craft
Q What do you do?
“We’re an à la carte PR shop for creative businesses.”
Nora: At our sister company Wolf PR we've been getting top media features for our retainer clients for over a decade. However, we know retainer PR services aren’t for everyone, and that there still aren’t a lot of other options. We set out to fix that. We help creative businesses build brand awareness with actionable PR and content strategies that resonate with clients and the media.
What we do:
+ Create useful, actionable DIY PR courses and guides
+ Support businesses with custom media lists and pitch templates
+ Give critical, personalized feedback so you get more press, sales, and brand awareness
+ Consult one-on-one with creative entrepreneurs
+ Help growing businesses stand out with client and media-worthy content
+ Publish a free weekly newsletter to help you get media attention
Q What steps did you take to get to where you are now?
Nora: I’ve worked in PR my entire professional life and have been running the boutique public relations shop Wolf PR since 2011. My undergraduate degree in art and design continues to inform/inspire my current work as a design publicist. Wolf PR specializes in furniture, textiles, lighting, and collectable design. In 2020 (during the Corona outbreak, no less!) I decided to launch this second business, called Wolf Craft, to address PR needs that my first company, Wolf PR, was not designed to do. I’m particularly excited about working one-on-one with other small businesses to help them tell their stories.
Kirsten: My path was quite different from Nora’s although we’ve worked together on and off for over a decade and been friends for nearly 20 years! I’m an interdisciplinary designer, urbanist, and communications strategist. My research skills and ability to connect the dots are where I provide the most value. This is the thread that ties my wide breadth of experience together, from Fulbright Scholar to design instructor, architect, research lead—and now storytelling strategist. When Nora asked me to help her put together some content for Wolf Craft I suggested we become business partners and we hit the ground running.
Q How do you stand out in your field?
Nora: We use design thinking methodology to undertake all things PR strategy. When researching other á la carte PR companies, we saw a lot of the advice was fluffy, and not actionable. While they were presenting good concepts, they missed all the steps on how to execute on these concepts.
Everything we do is rooted in research and broken down into clear stages. This structure makes overwhelming and unfamiliar processes much more manageable, small victories at every stage! Most importantly, we give specific action tasks for every stage. Instead of “build relationships with editors!” we actually go through *how* to do that.
Our hard-line no-fluff policy also applies to our free content. We’re really proud of our free weekly newsletter with over 8000 subscribers! and work hard to make sure it’s relevant and helpful to small business owners. We’re happy to say that many readers have let us know it’s one of the only newsletters they consistently read every week!
Q What are you working on right now?
Nora: Spinning a lot of plates at the same time. And constantly reflecting on how to help businesses be successful in this super fast-changing media environment. In that vein, we recently put together a niche training for product brands all about how to get more press using affiliate links. The media has changed A LOT, especially since the pandemic. For example, before 2020 none of my retainer clients had affiliate link programs. Now they all do. I wanted this knowledge to be available to brands that were pitching their products to publications themselves. Thus, our newest (super-affordable, $57) training.
Kirsten: Onboarding new 1-1 clients. Nora has been doing PR-focused consulting since we started Wolf Craft. I’ve recently added slots to my schedule as well. I focus specifically on helping you optimize your content to better show off your work and sell your products or services. This covers website optimization, photography improvement, social media strategy, and my personal favorite (and most effective marketing channel), newsletter creation! I also had a baby recently, and together with my husband and toddler, we’ve been looking for our forever home! Wish us luck!
Q What’s your style?
Nora: We’re big into tightening up all visual assets. Our blog is a broken record about how important media-quality photos are if you want top press features- we even created three (!) guides about photography for media outreach. They are super niche, focused on small, giftable products, larger pieces like furniture and art, and interior design and architecture photography.
If I were to boil it down into one statement it would be: “There isn’t an editor in the world that will print your product if you don’t have a good photo.”
Q Out of all your slashies, which one do you wish you could do more often?
Kirsten: Nora would agree with me here. Our absolute favorite service is our Tweak & Edit PR Review. If we could just do those all day long, that’s what we’d do.
We love that we can deep-dive into individual businesses to give clear, actionable advice on a quick turnaround with quick wins for our clients. We really nerd-out on finding best-in-show examples of each piece of advice we give and our past clients have said this is the most helpful part.
Maybe you’d like to get media attention, convert more lookers into buyers, build brand awareness, and effectively launch new products?? Get our video review of your website & marketing content here.
Q What is frustrating you right now?
Kirsten: Not being able to find time to write more. We have a long list of future blog post content that we’re so excited to put out into the world. But, since our client projects always come first this sometimes falls to the bottom of the list. We’ve been able to get one new in-depth post per quarter. But, we’d love to do one a month! Psst- one of our most recent, and most popular posts is How to Write Email Subject Lines that Editors Will Actually Open. Check the post here.
Nora: There are also so many weird little tech moments like verifying your DNS settings, or an obscure thing about a pixel, or a broken zapier connection... We’re getting better every day, but it feels like we’ve taken a crash course in technical marketing!
Q If you could hire someone for $20/hour, what would you have them do to make your day easier?
Kirsten: Manage the back-end systems for our live PR workshops! Every two weeks from April to September every year we do a live workshop all about Holiday Gift Guide Pitching for product businesses. I love showing up live and answering questions IRL. But the set up, reminder emails, zoom links, etc. can be a slog!
PS- if you’d like to come to one of our gift guide pitching workshops, be sure to get on our email list, that’s where we announce dates!
Q If you could talk to an expert to gain more insight on something, what would it be about?
Nora: I feel like in a way I did this because I’ve been running a PR firm (Wolf PR) for over a decade already! I took a lot of those learnings to help us avoid alllllllll the mistakes I already made my first time launching a company.
Something that I wish I had known earlier in my PR career is understanding what a story really is, versus what my client thinks it is. They are so *in it* that they fall in love with their point of view. They rely on me for a reality check about what will work for the media. This actually segways nicely into the second thing I wish I had known earlier--when to push back against a client. This is how I do my best work, but it takes a lot of bravery. Now I’m old hat at telling my clients no and they respect me for and get better results from it.
Q What kind of opportunities/projects are you looking for?
Kirsten: We both have backgrounds in art and design and we love working with clients from these areas- architects and interior designers, industrial designers, technology companies, furniture makers, textile artists, jewelry designers, home goods brands...the list is long!
Nora: We’ve found that creatives have such a strong point of view and dedication to their craft and I love helping them understand how this feeds into storytelling that works for the media. That said, some of our favorite projects from our first year were with bigger companies and doing reporting for them, so we want to keep that going too! It’s very satisfying to look at a brand that already has all the dots and just needs some nudging to connect them.
Q Describe your ideal job/client/collaboration.
Nora: In addition to our DIY PR tools, we love working on big content and PR strategy projects. We do our best work when we get in at the ground level--so working with new companies or start-ups as they define their values, messaging, and public persona OR with businesses that are already about to start a rebrand.
We’re super lucky that we’ve already been able to work with some ideal clients, like:
This B2B start-up for the design, construction, and real estate industries — Assemplify
This uber-creative office furniture manufacturer — Pair
This hard-working commercial installation company — All Modular
This women-led industrial design studio — Level
We’d love to work with more growing businesses like these! If that sounds like you, send us a note — hello@wolf-craft.com.
Q: What is your rate?
Kirsten: Great question! At Wolf Craft we have a huge range and we built our business that way because so many brands and designers want press, but their budgets are all so different. We literally set out to create something for everyone!
Our one-time DIY PR tools range from $15 - $100.
Our lifetime-access Holiday Gift Guide pitching course for product businesses is about 1k depending on if we’re in a sale period or not.
Our super-popular Tweak & Edit PR Review is $655.
One-on-one consulting is $250 per hour-long session with no minimum number of sessions.
Our Custom Media List + Opportunity Kits range from 6k to 9k depending on your scope. As a reference, retainer PR is anywhere from 5k to 10k per month. Good for a year, our kits are 1/12th the cost, and past clients have seen great results!
Our custom storytelling and business growth strategy work ranges from 8k to 11k depending on your scope. The upper end of our services, our strategy clients have seen amazing results!
Q How should someone approach you about working together?
Kirsten: Please send an email to hello@wolf-craft.com. Be sure to include links to your website and social media. We always like to check these out so we can come prepared for our first call. If you want to expand a bit more you can tell us about your PR/media outreach goals, struggles, and/or past experiences.
Q Who is a creative you admire?
There are several depending on what you're looking for. BUT one really stands out. We started working with Kimberly at Whomp to do our Meta ads management this year. She was a third of the cost of the company we worked with in 2023. AND she was wayyyyy better, easier to work with and cut our cost-per-lead in half. We can't recommend her enough. If you reach out please let her know that Nora & Kirsten sent you ;)
Q Oh! and… how do you stay creative?
Kirsten: Learning ceramics. Spending time in nature. Nora: Walking my sweet, small, scrappy dog.
This member profile was originally published in March 2021, Updated October 2024.