It’s a Thursday night at Le Bain nightclub in the Standard Hotel, and girls in prom dresses and tiaras are twirling under the disco ball while boys in tuxes pull out their best moves. The theme of the night is Adult Prom — a launch party for an online prom-dress retailer. At the center of the dance floor, two pretty brunettes in ball gowns boogie to the beat, looking like they just split the vote for prom queen.
And in a sense, they did. Bianca Caampued, 26, and Mallory Blair, 22, have become the reigning prom queens of New York’s tech scene since launching their party-planning and marketing company — Small Girls PR— nine months ago. The duo, (who are both under 5-foot-3) throw the buzziest parties for the city’s tech scene. They have legions of followers on their Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook accounts. They go out almost every night. They get recognized on the subway by boys who have online crushes on them.
“Could we have expected that in the first 10 months of working together we’d be doing this well?” asks Blair. “No way. But we are.”
When Rick Webb, co-founder of the digital marketing firm the Barbarian Group, gets an invite to one of their events, he goes. Half the employees at Foursquare, including co-founder Dennis Crowley, descended upon a recent party at the Tribeca Grand to celebrate a dating site’s mobile-app launch. Christopher Poole, the reclusive founder of the chat room 4chan, was at their Halloween party.
Within the tech crowd — which has swelled of late thanks to the high visibility of NYC startups like Foursquare and Tumblr — the Small Girls are adored. They hit the sweet spot somewhere between techie nerd, fashionista and cartoon character.
“They’re ridiculously cute and happy,” says Webb, who has taken them under his wing by helping them with their business model.
“People are smitten by them.”
“They pretend to be ditzy and girly, but it works well for them,” adds friend Mattan Griffel, a marketing coordinator for appssavvy, a social network ad company.
The Small Girls say they’re popular because they behave, well, like themselves — in front of tens of thousands of online followers. They love cupcakes, fashion and blogging. Blair uses lots of exclamation points, hearts and “Yays!” in her e-mails to clients.
Caampued, from Linwood, NJ, always wanted to be an evolutionary biologist, but at the last minute decided to go into fashion. She attended the fashion business school LIM College in Midtown and worked in advertising for Lucky Magazine before starting her own fashion blog. Her style is rocker chic — a flannel shirt with cutoff jean shorts. She says she spends most evenings seeing bands, hitting tech or media events or attending launch parties for the latest startup. Blair dresses like “Punky Brewster having tea at the Plaza” — vintage dresses, a high bun atop her head. She has always been a vocal member of society. When she was a kid growing up on the Upper East Side, she was upset that the Empire State Building didn’t glow in blue and white lights for Hanukkah. She wrote letters to Leona Helmsley, who managed the building, and asked that the holiday be honored. Helmsley agreed, and Blair was a child sensation in the next day’s news cycle.
“We are both really, really Type A,” says Caampued.
When new client Tiza.com, a prom-fashion company, came to them and asked for help promoting its brand online, they wore prom dresses for 30 days straight and photographed the stunt for their 30,000-odd blog followers. At the end of the 30 days, they threw the Adult Prom at Le Bain and got their previously unknown client a ton of press.
“They become walking billboards for their clients,” says Peter Feld, a former market research director for Condé Nast and tech consultant. “And they make super-cute billboards.”
On a typical day they will tweet, Facebook and blog on Tumblr — both for themselves and their clients — an “unquantifiable” number of times, says Caampued. They have a knack for making cute videos that go viral, and for throwing parties that make the “I’d rather be coding” crowd a megabyte cooler.
The two joined forces in a typical tech meet-cute. Caampued went with some friends to a party in the East Village. Turns out, it was Blair’s, who was a senior at New York University. At the end of the night, they were dancing together. A few days later, Caampued came across Blair’s blog. “I was like, ‘Hey, I went to that girl’s party!’ ” Caampued says. She Facebook-messaged her; Blair Facebooked back, and a friendship was formed. One night Blair e-mailed Caampued and said, “We should be running a company together,” Caampued remembers. “I said, ‘I’m down. Let’s call it Small Girls, Big Business.’ ”
Since then, they’ve had a steady roster of clients, thrown dozens of parties, been voted the top 10 sexiest Web geeks on Nerve.com (they both were No. 9) and are filming a reel for their own reality show.
They owe part of their success to their friends and relationships. Caampued used to date Jacob Bijani, the creative head of popular blog-hosting platform Tumblr. (She has his name tattooed on her wrist.) And Blair wrote her college thesis — and then forged a close friendship — with Poole of 4chan.
Sometimes they even land a client thanks to their size — the founder of a Web site for women with size 4 feet wanted to meet with them recently because she thought that, being Small Girls themselves, they would understand the concept. They did.
“We love it!” Caampued exclaimed when presented with the idea. It also helps that they are easily recognizable, says Blair. “We are always the smallest girls at the party.”