Valerie Wilson is a 15 year Public Relations veteran with vast experience in the food, wine, hospitality and lifestyle industries.  She has first-hand experience in working with both small and emerging companies, as well as large and established organizations.  After a couple of  years at agencies In Chicago, where she started her career, she realized that Chicago was lacking the opportunity to give a voice to and represent the point of view of local fashion and art talent.  So she created Valerie Neal Communications.  Its first project was to promote a fashion show with local talent.  The show attracted all of the city’s top fashion editors from the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun Times, Chicago magazine among others.  The show went on to help launch the careers of Chicago designers Peter Soronen(now designer to Michelle Obama) Amy Zoeller, Patrick Patterson, as well as Artist LeRone Wilson. Her work and passion for pushing Chicago’s talent also helped spur a citywide interest in promoting Chicago fashion.  Her agency also did work for Playboy and she was later tapped to launch the Chicago office for Wagstaff Worldwide, an L.A. based food and hospitality agency. As an agency Vice Preisdent, her clients included top restaurants like Nine, Levy Restaurants, Spruce, Bin 36,Onesixtyblue, House of Blues (Chicago), and Drink (Chicago).  Valerie later moved to New York where she landed a job as Media Director with 

M. Young Communications, a well-established industry player representing the highend food and wine world.  Her clients at the agency included The James Beard Foundation Awards (the Oscars of the Food industry), Wines from Spain(representing Spanish wines in the United States) the region of Campania, Italy, (representing food and wine producers from the region in the united states), New York Restaurant Week, Bertolli Sous Chef Awards, Brunello de Montalcino, City Harvest BID against Hunger, and many more.  Her work with M. Young exposed her to the top chefs, journalists and trendsetters in the food and entertainment worlds.After leaving M. Young, Valerie branched off to consumer marketing with a consulting position at Kaplow Communications, where she worked with LeapFrog Enterprises, both on the creation of a national literacy program and the launch of the companies FLY pen product.  While at Kaplow, her entrepreneurial bug once again surfaced when she recognized that the agency was sitting on a golden goose of a client in Robert Mondavi, but was only doing a small amount of work for them.  She took the initiative to reach out to members of the Mondavi team and convince them to do a series of events for the various wine brands.  This led to turning the Mondavi account into a bonafide Kaplow client.  She was later tapped to go to DeVries Public Relations where as Vice President she oversaw the E & J Gallo accounts for that agency.Valerie is a graduate of Northwestern University.