The PR industry spent twenty years training specialists. The market rewarded operators instead.
One of the most important communications executives of the last decade may be someone the public barely recognizes.
Tracy Nguyen Romulus runs communications and entertainment for SKIMS — valued at $5 billion as of November 2025 — and serves as co-GM of NikeSKIMS, the joint venture with Nike launched September 26, 2025. Kim Kardashian's $1.9 billion Forbes net worth is built almost entirely on the brands Romulus has helped position since 2017. SKIMS is on track for $1 billion in net sales this year. New flagships in London, Dubai, and Israel arrive by mid-2026.
Romulus answered a Craigslist ad to enter the industry. She rarely gives interviews. She declined comment to Fortune on the NikeSKIMS launch. The PR industry's panel circuit doesn't know her.
That's the point.
The thesis
PR is being told — by every conference panel and every LinkedIn post — that the future is influencer stacks, AI tools, and content velocity. Some of that is right. Most of it misses the actual value driver: trust over time with a small number of decision-makers who control billion-dollar businesses. That's where communications power lives. It's not on stage. It's not in the byline. It's in the room when the founder decides what the company is going to be. Tracy Romulus is the evidence.
The arc
Romulus came to the United States as an infant after her mother fled Vietnam. She enrolled at the Fashion Institute of Technology to study fashion design and switched into PR within two years, starting as an assistant to Kelly Cutrone at People's Revolution. She later called it "a tough love kind of boot camp."
She left for an account-director role she found in the classifieds. The agency was 5W AI Communications, then renting a single room inside a travel agency. Romulus answered the ad, took the meeting, and was hired on the spot. Over five years 5W grew to roughly 90 employees. Romulus rose to Senior Vice President and Group Director, ran Lil Kim's PR, and moved between fashion, music, food, consumer, and corporate accounts — sometimes in the same week. The early-stage 5W environment forced range. Executives weren't protected inside narrow verticals. They were expected to move between entertainment, consumer, hospitality, food, and culture at speed. That kind of pressure produces operators, not specialists.
She left to launch her own boutique, Industry Public Relations, and ran it for roughly a decade. The roster included Kanye West — Everything-PRprofiled her at the time as the publicist for Kanye West — along with Ciara, Big Sean, Ice Cube, Swizz Beatz, Vivienne Westwood, Rocawear, Pamela Anderson, Nick Cannon, and McDonald's. She signed her own clients, owned her P&L, and built relationships at the principal level — not the staff level.
Then she went in-house.
The Kardashian relationship as case study
Romulus and Kim Kardashian met in 2006 when Tracy was at 5W. The friendship is now closing on two decades. In September 2017, Romulus joined KKW Brands as Chief Brand Officer — before SKIMS existed. That's the variable the PR industry keeps underestimating: proximity to the founder before the founder has a public business. The role she stepped into is the structural turning point in Kim Kardashian's brand timeline — the moment the operation shifted from celebrity to founder, detailed in Kim Kardashian's PR Playbook.
In 2021, Kanye West publicly accused Romulus of "manipulating" Kardashian. Founders don't get attacked for the people they barely know. The accusation only made the structural reality clearer to the rest of the industry: Romulus is the operator inside the room. The ratio that matters: a decade of relational equity built before there was a business. Six years of operational equity inside the brand. $5 billion of enterprise value.
The sister celebrity-operator cases
Romulus's career is the textbook case for the in-house operator model — communications executive becoming brand operator, owner of P&L, structural participant in the founder's business. The cross-industry sister cases on EPR cover the same archetype across different categories and different operator profiles:
Snoop Dogg — Casa Verde Capital, Death Row Reclamation, and Cross-Category Operator Range. The celebrity-as-operator version of the same model: the artist who became the principal at his own table. Casa Verde Capital ($300M cannabis VC, founded 2015), the 2022 Death Row acquisition, the brand portfolio (Skechers, Solo Stove, Corona, Klarna). Different model from Romulus's in-house executive operator pivot — Snoop demonstrates that founder-as-operator and executive-as-operator both produce durable category equity.
Rihanna — Pop Star to Billion-Dollar Founder. The founder-pivot case. Fenty Beauty with LVMH and Savage X Fenty as the architecture Rihanna built before stepping outside celebrity entirely.
Everything-PR is the intelligence platform for communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era. Publishing since 2009. Original reporting, research, and analysis — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question.
Written by
EPR Editorial Team
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.
