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About Smart Image

We don't sell marketing. We build trust.

Smart Image is a fractional marketing and PR firm headquartered in Charleston, South Carolina. We work with founder-led B2B and consumer-facing businesses that are tired of agency theater and ready to make marketing accountable to revenue.

Between us we've spent more than sixty years inside agency PR, advertising, brand strategy, ecommerce, and the founder seat. We've worked with companies you've heard of (Verizon, Chick-fil-A, Target, Ohio State) and dozens you haven't (yet). We picked the boutique structure on purpose — so the senior people you hire are the senior people who do the work.

Origin

Why focus on trust?

The story of why Smart Image exists is short: nearly every founder we've talked to has the same complaint. They've spent money on marketing and don't know what worked. They've hired agencies that produce deliverables instead of outcomes. They've watched competitors with lesser products outsell them because the competitor told the story better.

We built the Trust Engine to fix exactly that pattern. Three phases — Align, Amplify, Accelerate — that move a company from "we don't know which marketing dollar is working" to "we can name the bet, see the lift, and double down with confidence."

Trust is the input. Revenue is the output.
We tackle the work in between.

The team

Two principals on your team.

Kira Perdue

LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/kiraperdue

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Kira Perdue

Co-founder · PR Lead · Media Trainer

Kira has spent three decades in agency public relations, working with clients that span the spectrum from venture-backed startups to Fortune 100 companies. She has placed major media for clients you'd recognize, trained executives at companies most Americans interact with every week, and been the calm voice on the phone the first time a CEO's name landed in a story they didn't want.

Her work covers:

  • Media relations and earned coverage
  • Corporate messaging architecture
  • Executive media training (print, broadcast, podcast, live stage)
  • Crisis communications and reputation management
  • Communications strategy for funding rounds, launches, and acquisitions

Before founding Smart Image with Andy, Kira held senior roles inside agency PR, where she built the long-running journalist relationships that still drive Smart Image's earned-media work today.

Andy Hagedon

LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/smartimage

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Andy Hagedon

Co-founder · Chief Instigator · CMO

Andy is a serial entrepreneur and the artistic/creative spark behind Smart Image. He has spent thirty years around marketing — starting in agency PR, moving through outside sales, commercial photography, advertising, and ecommerce, and into the founder seat himself. His most recent CPG-turned-tech venture was backed by Mark Cuban and exited in 2024.

His work at Smart Image covers:

  • Fractional CMO leadership
  • Brand strategy, visual identity and art direction
  • Go-to-market planning and launch execution
  • Website optimization and AEO
  • Sales enablement and the marketing-to-revenue handoff

He's also the operator-in-chief on the Smart Image side: if you've gotten an email back from us inside 24 hours, that was probably Andy.

Companies we've worked with

A partial list

Past and present clients, and brands our principals have worked with through prior agency roles.

Operating principles

How we work.

A few things we believe and won't compromise on.

Two principals on every engagement

We're personally involved with every client. When execution scales, we bring in a trusted bench of specialists — hand-picked, briefed by us, and answerable to us. No bait-and-switch.

A 90-day initial commitment

After that, month-to-month — because honest work doesn't need a long-term lock-in.

Published pricing ranges

We don't believe in pricing theater. Our Fractional CMO and Strategic PR ranges live on the site.

A monthly business review the founder can use

Not a 60-slide deck. A one-page read.

A written AI use policy

AI augments our work; humans do the thinking. Read the policy →

Plain English

We don't write the word "synergy" anywhere. We mean it.

Location

Where we are.

Smart Image is headquartered in Charleston, South Carolina, with a distributed team and collaborator network across the United States. We work with clients nationwide — most engagements are conducted remotely with periodic on-site visits for kickoffs, workshops, and quarterly business reviews.

Let's work together.

No pitch deck, no pressure — we'll spend the 30 minutes on your business, not ours.

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