For almost two years, Erin Boiger's job was to be the voice of the world's largest retailer.
As a spokesperson for Walmart, many of the words she said in public were by design not really her own. She spoke for a corporation with global reach and a reputation to protect.
Today, running her own boutique marketing and communications agency, Magnolia Communications, in Northwest Arkansas, she's built a career on the exact opposite approach: staying invisible so someone else's story can be the one that shines.
"It's not about me," she said. "I love helping my clients and sharing their stories. That's why I do what I do."
The path to getting here took time. Erin's first role at Walmart wasn't in public relations at all, but working with the company's small-format neighborhood market team under the mentorship of Vice President Marc Lieberman and SVP Deborah Layron.
"Very good leaders, very good examples," she called them. They were the kind of mentors who handed her real work early. She absorbed whatever skills and information they were willing to teach her: strategy, honesty, listening before speaking, aligning goals, and respect.
That early willingness to learn, she said, became the foundation for everything she built after.
None of this was the plan she started with. Erin once pictured a career in international law, working for the United Nations, and she even shadowed professionals in Geneva at one point in her career.
What pulled her toward corporate communications instead was simpler: a lifelong love of storytelling, a love of learning not just what people do, but what drives them. That passion carried her from Walmart's small-format division into corporate communications, and eventually into the role of spokesperson.
The job of being a spokesperson for Walmart, however, was all consuming. Erin said that she learned a great deal from this position, but she knew it wasn’t sustainable long-term.
The jump from a stable corporate career to building something of her own wasn't an obvious one. Erin comes from a family of corporate climbers, and stepping outside that mold felt unfamiliar. The push came from her husband, John Boiger, who has run his own companies for nearly two decades.
Deep into work late one night, well past normal hours, he told her, "You can do something different."
She wasn't convinced at first, but he was.
That late-night conversation became the blueprint for her firm's entire philosophy.
"We're not a traditional agency in the sense that we're not standing in front of our clients," Erin said. "We're standing behind them."
There's no cookie-cutter package, no single campaign built in isolation. Branding, communication, and strategy move together with an eye toward where a client will stand a year from now, not just this quarter.
Outside the office, Erin and John run four separate companies together, plus a nonprofit supporting Northwest Arkansas first responders that's relaunching this fall. For the Boiger’s, mornings start around four a.m., before the rest of the day takes over with kids, meetings, and work for clients.
Through it all, Erin has remained rooted in Northwest Arkansas, a region she describes as being built around family-first values and a sense of community. Erin tries to reflect these same values in how she treats her clients at Magnolia Communications.
Erin Boiger spent years being a voice for others. Now, she helps to give others a voice for themselves. Though her role may have changed, her purpose has remained the same: helping people communicate what matters most.