About · The founders & the firm

Two operators.
Twelve years.
One quiet rule.

Founder №01
Doan Nguyen
Co-founder · Partner · Toronto
Founder №02
Lisa Kruger
Co-founder · Partner · Toronto
01 · The story

Why we
started Milo.

In 2014, the Canadian PR scene was dominated by two extremes: enterprise agencies that treated their boutique clients like loss-leaders, and one-woman shops that couldn't scale past their first big launch. We started Milo to be the thing in between. Twelve years later, the gap is bigger, not smaller. So we kept building.

The story we tell ourselves about Milo's founding is simple: we kept watching brands chase headlines that didn't matter to anyone — including the journalists who were supposedly writing them. So we built a firm around a different question: what coverage would actually move your business? Then we'd go get that.

The story is true. It's also incomplete. The longer answer is that we'd both worked at agencies where the assistants pitched and the partners closed, and the work suffered every time. We thought a small firm could just have its partners do the pitching. Twelve years and 50+ brands later, we still do.

What we've built since 2014 isn't a bigger version of the original idea. It's the same idea with three more rooms attached to it. The talent house came in 2018, when we kept booking the same five faces and decided we should manage them ourselves. Alpha House came in 2024, when we got tired of paying other event producers to do campus activations badly. Wellness Reset followed in 2025 because the wellness press deserved a room of their own. The platform — Milo OS — came in 2025, when our clients kept asking for a single place to see all their coverage and we couldn't recommend a tool that didn't email them PDFs.

Every expansion was the same logic: a thing our clients needed, that we'd have to keep cobbling together unless we just owned it. That's the firm. That's the shape it takes. The four houses on the homepage aren't a marketing structure — they're the actual rooms in our actual building, and we walk between them every week.

02 · The chronology

Twelve years,
five rooms.

2014
FOUNDED

Milo opens in Toronto.

Doan and Lisa leave their separate agencies and rent half a floor on King West. First client: a Canadian beauty brand neither of them can name in public, fifteen years later.
2016
FIRST TIER-1 PLACEMENT

Vogue cover for a Canadian client.

A jewellery designer no New York editor had heard of, placed by a five-person Toronto firm. The pitch took eleven months. The afterglow paid the rent for three.
2018
TALENT HOUSE LAUNCHED

The roster begins with three.

After repeatedly booking the same on-camera talent for client work, we sign them to proper management. By the end of the year the roster is six. By 2026 it's twenty-eight.
2021
VANCOUVER + MONTRÉAL DESKS

Bilingual, bicoastal, by request.

Three Toronto clients with national rollouts kept needing French-Canadian and West Coast media. We hired in both cities rather than continuing to outsource it.
2024
ALPHA HOUSE №01

First edition. UofT. 12 brands.

A pilot we expected to do once. Twelve brands accept. Hundreds of students show up. Campus and national media file pieces. We start scouting the second city before the first one ends.
2025
WELLNESS RESET + MILO OS

Two more rooms in the building.

Wellness Reset launches in Toronto for considered wellness brands. The platform — Milo OS — opens in private beta to active Milo brands. Both come from the same impulse: the room our clients keep wishing existed.
2026
FOUR HOUSES, ONE FIRM

The shape settles.

Agency, Talent, Experiences, Platform. The four rooms we walk between every week, finally laid out clearly on the homepage of the firm we've been quietly building for twelve years.
03 · The quiet rules

How we work.

RULE 01

Partners pitch.

Founder-level relationships are not handed off to assistants. The person who closes you is the person who calls editors on your behalf. Always.

RULE 02

Earn the placement.

No paid placements. No guaranteed press. If we can't get you in on the merits, we'll tell you the merits aren't there yet — and what we'd need to change.

RULE 03

The journalist is the client.

Editors pay our bills the same way our brands do — they just pay us in trust. We protect that more carefully than we protect anything else.

RULE 04

Twelve, never thirteen.

For every room we run — the agency, the roster, Alpha House, Wellness Reset, the platform beta — we cap the cohort. Quality scales by adding rooms, not by adding chairs.

04 · The team

Beyond the founders.

We're hiring →

Sarah Choudhry

Director · Earned media

Antoine Dubois

Director · Talent

Priya Iyer

Director · Experiences

Mei Tanaka

Head · Platform

Jordan Williams

Senior · Brand & content
05 · Get in touch

Begin a
conversation.

For brands
hello@wearemilo.com · response in 2 business days
For talent
roster@wearemilo.com · we read every reel
For media
press@wearemilo.com · response in 24 hours
Toronto office
By appointment · King West & Bathurst
Vancouver desk
By appointment · Gastown
Montréal desk
Sur rendez-vous · Mile End
Press kit
milopr.com/press-kit · logos, founder bios, photography