Brooke Hammerling built one of the defining boutique tech PR firms of the 2005–2016 era, sold it to a London holding company at the top of the cycle, and reinvented her practice in 2020 as a founder-focused strategic communications advisory. Her career is one of the reference case studies for how a personal network in Silicon Valley converts into an operating PR business — and how to exit that business at the right moment.
Brew PR: 2005 to 2016
Hammerling founded Brew Media Relations in 2005 out of a New York apartment. "Brew" is Hammerling's long-time nickname; the firm carried it as an identity. Brew built its practice around early-stage and growth-stage technology companies at a moment when the incumbent PR firms were still running the industry on cold calls and press-release cycles. Brew's differentiator was access — Hammerling's personal network across the founding cohort of the modern consumer technology industry.
That network was built through years in the Bay Area during the late-1990s and early-2000s tech scene, when the current generation of platform founders and executives were operating figures rather than public ones. The client roster and referral flow that followed from those relationships was the durable operating asset of Brew for its first decade.
Brew scaled from a New York apartment operation into a firm with offices in New York, San Francisco, and Santa Monica, with Dena Cook as CEO.
The 2016 Freuds acquisition
In 2016, Brew was acquired by Freuds, the London-based independent communications firm founded by Matthew Freud. The reported purchase price was approximately $15 million. The Freuds deal placed Brew inside one of the more distinctive independent PR structures in the industry and gave Hammerling a clean exit from the operating-CEO role of the firm she had founded.
The timing of the sale — before the 2017–2019 slowdown in venture and the significant tightening of tech PR budgets — has since been read across the industry as one of the better-timed founder exits in independent PR.
The New New Thing: 2020 to now
In January 2020, Hammerling launched The New New Thing, a strategic communications advisory built around a small roster of founder-driven companies. The model is deliberately different from Brew's: less product-launch and press-release cycle, more high-level narrative advisory built directly with CEOs and executive leadership teams.
The New New Thing operates inside Plan A, a collective of independent service providers spanning communications, branding, advertising, and creative. Hammerling's client work has included Lemonade, Live Nation, Framebridge, Splice, and Eko, among others.
Where Hammerling sits in the industry
Hammerling's career trajectory is now a template for a specific kind of founder in independent PR — build a network-driven boutique, scale it, sell to a strategic acquirer at the top of the cycle, then reinvent the practice at a smaller scale around senior counsel rather than production work.
That trajectory is increasingly common in the AI Communications era. As the executional work of PR gets increasingly compressed by AI, the durable premium sits at the top of the funnel — narrative strategy, founder positioning, and the relationships that produce placement rather than the pitch mechanics that follow from them. Hammerling was operating that model, at small scale, before the current shift made it broadly visible.
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The Everything-PR Editorial Team produces original reporting, research, and analysis on communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question. Publishing since 2009.
