By ROOT Marketing & PR
We’re celebrating ROOT Marketing & PR’s 25th anniversary this year, and it’s an incredible feeling to think about how all this began, and all the people who supported us along the way.
The seeds were planted when I was growing up in Boulder, Colorado, with a hippie mom who grew her own food, cooked everything from scratch and taught me what real food tasted like. One bite of a tomato from her garden, and you understood why tomatoes are, in fact, a fruit.
I didn’t know how lucky I was until age 10, when we moved to England. English food in the ’80s was… character-building. Everything was “swimming in gravy or drowning in custard.” I moved back to Boulder at age 20, met my husband, and, now having someone to cook for, really fell in love with cooking.
Through my twenties, I worked as a writer; as a DJ and in promotions for public and commercial radio; as an events, sponsorships and partnerships coordinator; and as a travel agent. Each job taught me something I still use at ROOT — how to connect people and build relationships, how to create experiences and make people want to have them.
I also learned that I’m one of those people who, when they discover something wonderful, immediately want other people to experience it too. A great restaurant, a beautiful place, a passionate farmer, a dish, drink or product someone is making with care — if I love something, my instinct is basically: HEY EVERYBODY! YOU HAVE TO KNOW ABOUT THIS.
In 2000, I landed a job at Boulder’s Cooking School of the Rockies as Director of Avocational Programs, working with local chefs to create cooking classes for the public. That’s where the path to ROOT really began.
The Accidental PR Agency
At the cooking school, I became friends with Chef James Mazzio, who had recently been named one of Food & Wine’s Best New Chefs and was opening ChefJam — part restaurant, part cooking school, part catering operation. James hired me to help promote it, and I realized that who I already was is actually a job: PR!
I used my writing experience to figure out which stories to tell, tracked down the right writers and editors one by one, and started pitching like crazy. The timing was incredible. America was becoming fascinated with chefs. Food Network was taking off. Boulder was gaining national attention as a restaurant city. And people were getting curious about more than just what they were eating — who made it, where it came from and why it mattered.
In 2001, I made it official and named the business Cutting Edge Marketing, a play on my last name, Ax. The company that would eventually become ROOT was born.
ChefJam led to Carelli’s Ristorante, which eventually led to the opening of Frasca Food & Wine. Restaurants led to food brands. Local became Colorado, and Colorado led to work across the country. Early clients included Lasater Grasslands Beef, Piece, Love & Chocolate, and Kingdom Cheddar.
The business was growing, but I also knew there was a lot I didn’t know. I wanted to learn how “the big agencies were doing it,” so in 2005 I landed a coveted position as PR/Senior PR Account Manager at The Fresh Ideas Group (FIG), while keeping one or two small clients of my own on the side.
Owner Sylvia Tawse had deep relationships with natural products brand leaders and national media, so I was able to work with big brands and organizations including Lundberg Family Farms, the International Bison Association and Natural Products Expo West. I was also heavily involved in the birth and growth of Naturally Boulder, which became Naturally Colorado, and handled PR for the Colorado Wine Industry Development Board, the Colorado Chautauqua, Boulder County Farmers Markets and Door to Door Organics as it grew from a local company into a national one.
After five years at FIG, I was ready to come back to my own agency full force. In 2010, Cutting Edge Marketing became my focus again, this time with five more years of experience, more relationships and a much clearer idea of the kind of agency I wanted to build.
Becoming ROOT
By 2013, the work had evolved enough that the name needed to evolve too. Cutting Edge Marketing became ROOT PR — a nod to being rooted in community and the planet, and to ROOTing for the people we work with.
PR itself was changing quickly. Newsrooms were shrinking, social media was becoming a real part of the communications mix, influencers emerged, and getting a story into print — while still incredibly valuable — was no longer the whole strategy. So ROOT changed too.
I hired social strategists and additional PR specialists, then grew the team to include influencer marketers, content creators and marketing strategists. I quickly learned that working with smart people was a lot more fun than doing everything myself.
As we approached our 20th anniversary, we realized we’d outgrown our name again, and ROOT PR became ROOT Marketing & PR.
By then, the agency had grown well beyond traditional PR into social media, influencer work, content, partnerships and broader marketing strategy, but the common thread was still pretty much the same thing that had pulled me into this work in the first place: finding people, products, places and ideas we genuinely cared about and helping more people discover them. Food has always been at the center of ROOT, especially healthy, natural, organic and better-for-you brands, but over the years our work has grown to include hospitality, travel, and the experiences around them. We tell stories that matter: things that make people happier, healthier and more connected to community, while making a positive difference.
Along the way, ROOT has worked with more than 50 restaurants; helped launch products and brands; put client stories in The New York Times, USA Today and on Good Morning America; filled rooms with journalists; walked an absurd number of trade show floors; and made countless introductions and connections that never became flashy case studies but made a real difference for someone’s business. I’ve also been lucky enough to spend a lot of that time contributing to the communities around the work — through Slow Food Boulder County, Naturally Colorado, the NEXTY Awards, Expo West, Colorado Proud, food and travel organizations, boards, committees, speaking, mentoring and plenty of other things I probably never would have imagined when I was with James Mazzio and ChefJam, trying to figure out how PR worked.
There have been huge wins, plenty of weird and frustrating moments, more pitches than any human should probably write in one lifetime, and an extraordinary number of smart and passionate people I’m grateful this work brought into my life. Speaking of which…
The View From Inside ROOT: Emily Tracy
No one has had a closer view of ROOT’s evolution over the last several years than Emily Tracy.
Emily joined ROOT seven years ago and is our Senior PR Account Manager. She’s an extraordinary PR strategist, media-relations pro, team leader, sounding board, and one of the people most responsible for what our clients experience as ROOT today.
So rather than have me tell this entire story, we asked Emily to tell us what ROOT looks like from her side of the desk.
“ When I started with ROOT I immediately felt welcomed into this group of women who all had one thing in common: lifting up good food businesses. It was such a fun client list from the get-go, with clients like Rio Grande Mexican Restaurant and Boulder County Restaurant Week. Kuvy’s adage has always rung true: “We’re serious, we’re fun and we’re serious about having fun.”
In seven years, I’ve seen us bring bigger and bigger clients into the fold. It is so distinctly ROOT to be able to offer the same level of attention and results to a client with one brick-and-mortar location as to a category leader with products in 9,000 stores. Six years ago, media relations was our bread and butter, and influencers had just started earning a major spot in our proposals. We’ve evolved to broaden our services to better serve our clients, adding things like affiliate marketing, AEO and activation planning.
One of my very favorite parts is how ROOT truly is a national PR firm for “good food” (in my completely unbiased opinion), while still being deeply connected to Colorado. Our footprint extends well beyond Colorado, but Colorado is home, and we’re incredibly lucky to be involved with so many restaurants, cookbooks, food thought leaders and organizations. There’s nothing like walking into a room and feeling immediately at home with your fellow foodies!
If I could tell prospective clients one thing about ROOT, it would be that ROOT – led by example with Kuvy at the helm – cares SO much (too much??) about its clients and will move heaven and earth to bring them success.“
So, What’s Next?
At 20 years, reaching that milestone felt like a pretty big accomplishment. At 25, I think I have a little more perspective on how much can change in five years. The work changes, the tools change, the media changes, clients need different things, and we’ll keep changing too.
What I hope doesn’t change is the part that has been there from the beginning: essentially, we get to work with people doing interesting, meaningful things, figure out what’s special about what they’re doing, and help other people care about it too. Which, come to think of it, isn’t all that different from the person who finds a great restaurant or an incredible food and immediately wants to yell, HEY EVERYBODY! YOU HAVE TO KNOW ABOUT THIS.
So to the clients, teammates, journalists, mentors, collaborators, industry friends and people who have recommended ROOT when we weren’t in the room: thank you. ROOT wouldn’t be here without all of you. Thank you for allowing me to be genuinely excited sitting down at my desk every day.
Here’s to the next 25!
Want help telling your brand’s story? Get in touch here! 25 years in, that’s still our favorite thing to do!
