2,296 Placements Taught Me About PR

I spent the better part of a decade buying links for Hockerty and Sumissura. Thousands of them. Guest posts, niche edits, directory placements — the whole SEO playbook that everyone in the industry was running between 2015 and 2020.

Some of those links worked. Many didn't. A few got us penalized. But I kept buying because I didn't know a better way.

Then around 2020, my team and I started experimenting with a different approach: reactive PR. Data-driven stories timed to moments when journalists were already looking for expert sources. Within two years, earned media placements did what years of paid link building never could.

This is the story of what my marketing team built at Hockerty and Sumissura — and the results that eventually made me start Presslei.

Background: A Decade of SEO for Custom Fashion

Hockerty and Sumissura are custom menswear and womenswear brands based in Barcelona. I managed their SEO and digital marketing from 2015 to 2024. Custom suits, custom shirts, custom dresses — made to measure, shipped globally.

For a brand like that, search visibility is everything. Nobody walks past a Hockerty storefront. Every customer finds us through Google, or they don't find us at all.

So I did what SEO managers do. I built links. Hundreds per year. Some were decent — relevant fashion blogs, industry directories. Others were the kind of links that make you wince when you look back at your backlink profile.

By 2020, the returns were diminishing badly. Google was getting better at spotting paid placements. The links that moved the needle in 2016 were doing nothing in 2020, and the cost kept climbing. I was spending serious money on links that had maybe a 6-month shelf life before they either got deindexed or lost their value.

We had maybe 5 earned media placements that entire year. Five. Out of hundreds of link-building activities.

Something had to change.

Shifting to Reactive PR

The model was different from anything I'd tried before: instead of paying websites to place links, we'd create data-driven stories timed to moments when journalists were already looking for expert sources.

Fashion rankings. Celebrity style analysis. Seasonal gift guides backed by real search data. Wedding trend reports. The kind of content that a journalist at GQ or Cosmopolitan actually wants to write about — not the kind you have to pay someone to publish.

I was skeptical at first. I'd been buying links for five years at that point, and the idea that journalists would voluntarily link to a custom suit brand felt optimistic.

I was wrong.

The Campaign Types That Actually Worked

Over the next two years, my team ran dozens of reactive PR campaigns for Hockerty and Sumissura. Not all of them hit. But the ones that did generated coverage I never could have bought.

Celebrity spike campaigns. When a public figure wore a notable outfit to an event — an awards show, a royal wedding, a political appearance — we'd have data-backed commentary ready within hours. Which styles were trending, what the search data showed about public interest, how it compared to previous years. Journalists covering these moments needed expert quotes and data. We provided both.

Seasonal fashion rankings. “Most popular suit styles by country,” “Top wedding dress trends for 2022,” “How men's formalwear preferences shifted post-pandemic.” These weren't opinion pieces. They were built on actual search volume data and purchasing trends from Hockerty and Sumissura's own customer base. That made them credible and hard to replicate.

Gift guide placements. Every November and December, fashion editors build gift guides. If you have genuinely interesting products with a story behind them — custom-made, sustainable fabrics, specific fit guarantees — you can earn spots in those guides. But you have to pitch at the right time, to the right people, with the right angle. We got this down to a science.

Data-driven trend stories. “Which European countries spend the most on wedding attire?” “How has remote work changed what men wear to the office?” These studies used real data, generated genuine press interest, and resulted in coverage that linked back naturally because the brand was the source of the research.

The pattern was clear: campaigns that gave journalists something they actually needed — data, expert commentary, timely angles — earned coverage. Everything else was noise.

The Results: What 2,296 Placements Look Like

By the time I left the Hockerty/Sumissura SEO role in 2024, the combined reactive PR efforts had generated a dataset I later analyzed in detail:

• 2,296 verified media placements across both brands
• 990 dofollow backlinks earned (not paid, not negotiated — earned because editors chose to link)
• 56% of those links came from outlets with DR 41+ — real publications, not blog networks
• Coverage across Esquire, GQ, Cosmopolitan, Brides Magazine, The Manual, Marie Claire, Harper's Bazaar, and dozens more
• Multi-regional reach: US (32%), Spain (20%), UK (12%), France (11%), with additional coverage in Italy, Germany, and Latin America

To put this in perspective: we went from 5 earned placements in 2020 to over 500 per year by 2022.

The DR distribution tells the real story:

More than half of all placements were in DR 41+ outlets. Try buying links from Esquire or Cosmopolitan. You can't. They don't sell them. But if you give their writers a good story with real data behind it, they'll link to you because it serves their readers.

What I Learned as the Client

Here's the part nobody talks about in PR case studies: I was running paid link building and earned PR simultaneously for over two years. Same brands, same sites, same SEO dashboard. I could see both side by side.

Earned placements lasted longer. A paid guest post on a mid-tier blog might keep its value for 6-12 months before the site's quality degraded or the page got buried. An earned placement in a real publication? Many of those links are still live and passing value four years later.

The traffic was different. Paid links brought almost zero referral traffic — they were pure link equity plays. Earned placements in real outlets brought actual visitors. People who read an article in GQ about suit trends and clicked through to Hockerty. Real potential customers.

The brand effect compounded. After a certain volume of legitimate press coverage, journalists started coming to us proactively. “I'm writing a piece about wedding fashion trends — can Hockerty provide data?” That never happens with paid links. Nobody proactively offers to sell you a guest post because your brand is impressive.

Reactive PR scales better than link buying. The cost per earned placement dropped over time as the team built journalist relationships and refined their pitch angles. Paid link building does the opposite — prices climb every year as Google gets stricter and the supply of quality sites willing to sell links shrinks.

Not every campaign works, and that's fine. Some pitches landed zero coverage. That's the nature of earned media — you can't guarantee a journalist will bite. But across a portfolio of campaigns, the hit rate was consistent enough to generate 500+ placements per year. One failed campaign doesn't break the model.

How This Led to Presslei

I spent ten years in SEO buying links. I spent two of those years running earned media alongside it and watching reactive PR outperform everything I'd been paying for — at a lower cost per placement, with better longevity and actual brand-building effects.

The math was obvious. I knew I could take what my team built at Hockerty and Sumissura and offer it to other brands — but with improvements. More transparent with clients about what reactive PR can and can't do. Better data infrastructure to find and reach journalists faster. And a price point that smaller brands could actually afford.

Later, I discovered Fery Kaszoni's agency Search Intelligence and their dataset of 50,000+ placements. Reverse-engineering 5,272 of those placements gave me the pattern library and data backbone to turn what we'd done intuitively at Hockerty into a repeatable system.

That's Presslei. A reactive PR agency built on the principle that earned media placements in real publications will always outperform paid link schemes — because I spent a decade proving it to myself the hard way.

I'm not going to tell you we never bought a link. We did, for years. But I can tell you that every earned placement we got was worth more than every link we paid for. And that's not a theory — it's something I measured, in the same Google Search Console, on the same domains, over the same time period.

If you're still buying links and wondering whether earned media is worth the effort: it is. I wish I'd figured that out five years earlier.

Presslei is a reactive PR agency based in Zurich. We help brands earn media coverage through data-driven stories, not paid placements. Get in touch to discuss how reactive PR could work for your brand.

Keep Reading

• I spent 10 years buying links. Here's why I stopped
• What is reactive PR? A practical guide
• Our first campaign that missed its targets

“The best PR results come from brands that understand what journalists need and deliver it consistently — not from brands that shout the loudest about themselves.”

— Salva Jovells, Presslei

About the Author

Salva Jovells

Founder of Presslei. 12+ years in ecommerce SEO across international markets. After a decade of link buying for Hockerty and Sumissura, I reverse-engineered 5,272 earned media placements and founded a reactive PR agency that builds authority through data-driven stories journalists actually want to publish. Based in Zurich.