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 entire SEO playbook everyone in the industry was running between 2015 and 2020.

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

Around 2020, my team and I started testing something different: reactive PR — data-driven stories timed to moments when journalists were already hunting for expert sources. It changed everything. This is the story of what we 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 out of Barcelona — made-to-measure suits, shirts, and dresses, shipped globally. I ran their SEO and digital marketing from 2015 to 2024.

For a brand like that, search is everything. Nobody walks past a Hockerty storefront. Customers find you through Google, or they don’t find you at all.

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

By 2020, the returns were ugly. Google kept getting better at spotting paid placements. Links that moved the needle in 2016 were doing nothing in 2020, and the price kept climbing. I was paying real money for links with maybe a six-month shelf life before they got deindexed or lost their value.

We earned five legitimate media placements that entire year — five, out of hundreds of link-building pushes.

Something had to change.

Shifting to Reactive PR

The model flipped the whole approach: instead of paying sites to place links, we built data-driven stories timed to moments when journalists were already looking for expert sources.

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

I was skeptical. I’d spent five years buying links at that point, and the idea that journalists would voluntarily link to a custom suit brand felt like wishful thinking.

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 landed. The ones that did earned coverage no amount of money 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 had data-backed commentary ready within hours: which styles were trending, what the search data showed about public interest, how it compared to past years. Journalists covering these moments needed expert quotes and data. We gave them 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 real search volume and purchasing data from our 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 a spot. 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 used real data, generated genuine press interest, and earned coverage that linked back naturally because the brand was the source of the research.

The pattern was simple: campaigns that gave journalists something they actually needed — data, expert commentary, a timely angle — 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, our combined reactive PR effort had produced a dataset I later broke down 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%), plus coverage in Italy, Germany, and Latin America

To put that in perspective: we went from 5 earned placements in 2020 to 500+ a year by 2022.

The DR distribution tells the real story:

More than half of all placements landed on DR 41+ outlets, averaging out to DR 44 across the full dataset. Try buying a link from Esquire or Cosmopolitan — you can’t, they don’t sell them. But give their writers a real story backed by real data, and they’ll link to you because it serves their readers, not because you paid them to.

What I Learned as the Client

Here’s the part nobody talks about in PR case studies: I ran paid link building and earned PR side by side for years — same brands, same sites, same SEO dashboard. I could compare them directly.

Earned placements lasted longer. A paid guest post on a mid-tier blog kept its value for maybe 6-12 months before the site 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 — 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. Past a certain volume of legitimate press, journalists started coming to us. “I’m writing about wedding fashion trends — can Hockerty provide data?” That never happens with paid links. Nobody offers to sell you a guest post because your brand impresses them.

Reactive PR scales better than link buying. Cost per earned placement dropped over time as we built journalist relationships and sharpened our pitch angles. Paid link building does the opposite — prices climb every year as Google gets stricter and fewer quality sites will sell.

Not every campaign works, and that’s fine. Some pitches landed zero coverage. That’s earned media — you can’t guarantee a journalist bites. But across a portfolio of campaigns, the hit rate held steady enough to produce 500+ placements a year. One dud campaign doesn’t break the model.

How This Led to Presslei

I spent a decade in SEO buying links. The last two years of that, I ran earned media right alongside it — and watched reactive PR outperform everything I’d been paying for: lower cost per placement, better longevity, real brand-building effects on top.

The math was obvious. I could take what my team built at Hockerty and Sumissura and offer it to other brands — with upgrades: more transparency with clients about what reactive PR can and can’t do, better data infrastructure to find and reach journalists faster, and a price point smaller brands could actually afford.

Later, I found Fery Kaszoni’s agency Search Intelligence and their dataset of 50,000+ placements. Reverse-engineering 5,272 of those third-party placements — research into how a leading UK digital PR agency wins coverage, not results Presslei itself produced — 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 in real publications will always beat paid link schemes — because I spent a decade proving it to myself the hard way.

I’m not going to pretend we never bought a link. We did, for years. But every earned placement was worth more than every link we paid for. That’s not a theory — I measured it, in the same 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.

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“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

Salvador 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.