Born in Portugal but a New Yorker of 30 years standing, Ana Martins lives and breathes her job. Ana founded her PR and marketing company Ana Martins Communications in 2001, having spent years learning the ropes as an intern at Versace and then working at a PR agency.
It now represents a range of companies in the watch space, including retailer Stephen Silver and brands Arnold & Son, Angelus and Kross Studio, as well as New York watch show WatchTime.
Along with many others in the world of media and communications, Ana looks back on the lockdowns during the Covid pandemic as being an incredibly testing time. “Our toughest challenge as a small business has been to keep business flowing during, and coming out of, the pandemic, and to build out our service offerings and maintain our infrastructure,” she says.
It led to an evolve-or-die mentality emerging at the agency. “For us, pandemic pivoting as an agency has meant delving deeper into the digital space that entails all communication services, but we have also substantially broadened our service offerings to offer more digital marketing and content development solutions,” says Ana.
While the lessons she learned during this time remain fresh in her mind, Ana says that business is now back to normal. “We have geared back up into pre-pandemic production mode with large-format events and red carpets, which is where I was trained, and it’s exciting to be back working with big media,” she says.
Big-brand media might be where the excitement lies for PR, but the buzz in the watch market is clustering around small brands, according to Ana: “The exciting part of the future for the watch industry lives with the small independents: the innovators, the engineers, designers and the artists. This is the reason why we fell in love with the product and the industry in the first place.”
On the rare occasions that watches aren’t front and center of her mind, Ana tells us she is a woman of simple pleasures: “You will find me walking Central Park, the reservoir, and Madison Avenue when I need to breathe. I have many memories in these places from an early age that bring a sense of grounding. Anyone close to me knows that I truly cherish my time with friends and family, and I love to travel anywhere with crystal, see-through, warm water and visit my happy place – the beach.”