Four years after launching Wawner Strategies as a one-woman operation, Kat Wawner is taking her name off the door.

The Mount Pleasant PR + brand strategy firm officially relaunched Aug. 18 as The Category, reflecting its growth from a solo venture founded out of the Harbor Entrepreneur Center in 2022 to a team of eight serving brands in Charleston and beyond.

The agency has helped place clients in outlets including Forbes, Vogue, CNN, People, Southern Living, Garden & Gun, and Travel + Leisure, and was named the Charleston Metro Chamber’s 2025 Innovator of the Year.

But for Wawner, the biggest marker of growth may be the one disappearing from the brand: her own last name.

“The name stopped being true to the work being done,” she said.

We caught up with Wawner about why now was the right time for a rebrand, how the company has evolved, and what comes next for The Category.

What prompted the decision to rebrand Wawner Strategies as The Category, and why did now feel like the right time?

The honest answer is that the agency outgrew my name. I started Wawner Strategies in 2022 off my resume, a career spent representing brands like Johnson & Johnson and Comcast, and in the beginning the name on the door was the proof of concept. Four years later, we're a team of eight, every one of them with their own resume and their own strengths, and the work stopped being about me a while ago. As for why now: I have never felt so dialed in as an agency owner. The team, the clients, the way everything is humming, this is the moment you relaunch, when the brand has to catch up to the business. We spent six months on the process because the name needed to carry the poise and maturity of who we are today.

You've grown from a solo operation in 2022 to a team of eight today. What has that growth looked like over the past four years, and was there a moment when you realized the business had become bigger than just you?

2022 was my PR experience and a conviction: big agency expertise, small agency soul. The growth since then has not been a straight line, and I wouldn't pretend otherwise, but every year the team got stronger and the work got sharper. The moment I knew it was bigger than me came when we won Ben Hogan under Perry Ellis, our first major national brand, and the first we had not grown from infancy ourselves. Every national story we had told before belonged to a brand we raised, from the first storefront or first bottle to the spotlight. Ben Hogan arrived fully formed: a heritage American name with a legacy already written. They did not need us to make them known. They needed a partner they could trust with a legend, and they chose a boutique agency in Charleston. That win is not my resume at work. That is a team of eight and an approach that holds up no matter who is in the room.

Why was it important to take your own name off the company as you enter this next stage?

Because the name stopped being true to the work being done. Today this agency is composed of eight people with their own strengths and their own client relationships, senior-led on every account, and keeping my name above all of that felt like taking credit for something that had become collective. There was also a test I kept coming back to during the process: would our clients be proud to say the name? I want a client’s founder to tell an outsider who represents them and have the name itself say something about their standards. Taking my name off the door is the most honest branding decision I have ever made, and I wrote an essay about it because it also turned out to be the hardest.

How has the company's client base and scope of work evolved since you first launched at the Harbor Entrepreneur Center?

We launched with founder-led brands at the intersection of food, wellness, lifestyle, and hospitality, and that is still our center of gravity. What has evolved is the scale and the mix: multi-concept hospitality groups, nonprofits doing nationally significant work, and consumer brands with retail footprints well beyond South Carolina. The geography has changed too. We represent brands outside the Lowcountry now, and the work has moved further upstream into positioning and category strategy alongside the earned media we have always been known for. The approach is the same no matter the client: we do not help brands fit into somebody else's category. We define one around them.

What role has Charleston's business and entrepreneurial community played in the company's growth?

Charleston made us. I launched out of the Harbor Entrepreneur Center, and this community showed up for us from day one, as clients, as champions, and more recently with recognition like Innovator of the Year from the Charleston Metro Chamber. That is why the 843 icon exists in the new identity. We represent brands well outside the Lowcountry now, but 843 is home, and we wanted that stitched into the brand permanently as a quiet nod rather than a billboard. My hope is that The Category returns the favor and is proof that a Charleston agency can define categories nationally without leaving.

What does the rebrand allow you to do that Wawner Strategies couldn't, and what are your plans for The Category moving forward?

Practically, nothing changes: same team, same senior-led model, same standards. What the rebrand gives us is language. For the past year, whenever I pitched new business, I found myself explaining that there are brands that compete and there are brands that define the space everyone else is competing in, and that we work with the second kind and help the first kind get there. I was talking like The Category before the name existed. Wawner Strategies could do that work, but it couldn't say it. Now the name does it from the moment someone hears it, and that clarity sharpens everything: the clients we take on, the way we scope, the stories we go out and tell.

Are you planning to continue growing the team, expanding into new markets or adding new services?

Deliberately, yes. We added a publicist to the team this summer, and every hire has to raise the level of the room, because I would rather stay senior-led at a larger scale than get big and thin. On markets, the expansion is already underway; a growing share of our roster sits outside the Lowcountry, and you can expect more of that. On services, I am not interested in a longer menu. I am interested in going deeper on the thing nobody else does the way we do, which is creating categories around our clients.

Looking back at the company you started in 2022 versus where it is today, what has surprised you most about building and scaling a business?

How emotional it is. I expected the hard parts; anyone who leaves a global career to start something alone expects those. What I did not expect was how much of the joy would come from watching other people carry it: a team member winning a 12-month renewal on her own, a client who came to us competing for attention now expanding into new states, and nationally-distributed brands seeking us out first. I started this company based on my personal experience, and the biggest surprise is that the proudest decision of the whole four years was deciding my name no longer belonged on the door. Scaling, it turns out, is a long exercise in getting out of the way.