Erin Brosterhous has been working in outdoor media for a long time. As the co-founder of Inside Out Communications, a PR firm in Colorado, she has spent years developing communications strategy for brands like The North Face, Mystery Ranch, and Wigwam. Along with Inside Out co-founder Paige Boucher, she’s known as one of the most plugged-in PR pros working in outdoor media, with relationships that span the industry.
This month, Brosterhous struck out on her own with the launch of a new company, Blue Fire Collective, an “integrated marketing collective made up of content, media, design, and digital strategists.” The new firm, based in Colorado, employs freelancers all over the country who collaborate on marketing campaigns for “active lifestyle brands and community-centered organizations.”
This week, SNEWS chatted with Brosterhous to ask about about her reasons for pursuing a new venture and what she hopes to bring to the digital marketing space through Blue Fire.
First of all, what was your reason for creating this company? Why leave Inside Out?
The decision was the result of a lot of reflection. Last year was very intense for everyone, and like many others, I did a lot of soul searching. We both did—myself and Paige [Boucher], my co-founder at Inside Out.
At the beginning of the pandemic, we lost a big client, and we started thinking about how to approach business development. I kept coming back to one nagging idea: I thought we needed to evolve more into the digital space. That would have involved a big rebrand for Inside Out, and that’s just not something Paige needed or wanted to do. Paige has had a long, star-studded career as a PR professional and she’s not in a place where she needs to make a major change.
I, on the other hand, was in a place where a change made sense. For a while, I’ve felt a pull toward more digital strategy work, which is not something Inside Out specialized in. So after a lot of thinking, Paige and I concluded that it seemed like the perfect time to explore my interests by starting a venture of my own.
What does Blue Fire offer to clients?
We’re a full-service digital marketing agency, which I think a lot of companies are looking for now. We can handle search engine optimization, search engine marketing, pay-per-click marketing, retargeting, and more.
How will Blue Fire differ from Inside Out?
Inside Out was branded as an outdoor PR agency, whereas Blue Fire won’t be branded specifically as “outdoor.” That’s very much on purpose. I didn’t want to pigeonhole us into that one category, because when you work in this field, you always end up taking on work from companies you didn’t expect. At Inside Out, for instance, even though we were an outdoor PR…
Read More: A brand-new digital media firm from an industry pro, Erin Brosterhous