A single offering defines most event agencies. They plant a flag in corporate events, or weddings, or experiential marketing, and they stay there. Jessica Boskoff took a different approach. Over more than a decade of building 23 Layers into one of the most recognized corporate event planners in New York, she has also built three adjacent brands — each serving a distinct audience, each growing from the same design and production foundation that underpins the original agency.
The result is a four-brand ecosystem that spans corporate event production, wedding planning, professional education, and now curated travel — a structure that has drawn coverage from outlets including SWAAY, which profiled how Boskoff created dedicated brands in the event space to meet different dimensions of client need. It is the kind of expansion that looks obvious in retrospect but requires both clarity of vision and operational discipline to execute without letting the core business drift.
23 Layers, headquartered at 420 West 14th Street in New York’s Meatpacking District, remains the flagship. Founded in 2011, it has built its reputation as a global event production and design agency working across corporate, social, and experiential event categories. Clients including Google, Airbnb, Spotify, Glossier, Slack, and Waterdrop have worked with the agency on projects ranging from brand conferences to retail flagship openings. The Waterdrop U.S. retail debut in Miami Beach, covered by Retail Touchpoints, is one example of the kind of brand milestone that 23 Layers has been entrusted to produce.
Neon River, the wedding arm born from 23 Layers, applies the same production infrastructure and design sensibility to a different client category. Where corporate event planners in New York typically operate in a world of conference halls, branded activations, and executive hospitality, Neon River brings the same strategic thinking and creative vision to couples navigating one of the most personal events of their lives. The separation is intentional — it allows each brand to speak directly to its audience without the other getting in the way.
The Assembly Workshop, Boskoff’s education platform for event professionals, extends 23 Layers’ influence to the next generation of the industry. Created by event planners for event planners, the workshops pull back the curtain on the processes, strategies, and business decisions that have shaped 23 Layers over the past decade. For an industry that has historically operated on apprenticeship and informal knowledge transfer, The Assembly represents a more structured approach to professional development — one with clear roots in Boskoff’s own formation, working across departments at Soho House New York and later as VP of Member Experiences at Four Hundred.
La Retreat, the most recently launched brand, was born from Boskoff’s personal connection to Italian culture, design, and the kind of intentional togetherness that great hospitality can create. It represents a further extension of the core 23 Layers belief that experiences, when designed with enough care and attention to detail, can shape how people feel about a place, a brand, or one another.
For brands considering which event companies in NYC to partner with for their next major production, the 23 Layers ecosystem’s multi-brand structure reveals something important about how the agency thinks. Each brand was created to solve a specific problem for a specific audience — not to dilute what 23 Layers does, but to serve needs that fall outside its primary scope. That kind of structural clarity is not common among boutique firms, which often try to be everything to everyone until they are nothing in particular to anyone.
Boskoff has spoken about what drives the expansion: a desire to serve clients at every stage of their event and experience needs, and a belief that great design thinking should not be confined to a single format. For a New York-based, globally active corporate event planner, that philosophy has found expression not just in individual events but in the shape of the company itself.
As one of the more distinctive figures among corporate event planners NYC has produced in the past two decades, Boskoff has built something that transcends the transactional model of most agencies. The 23 Layers ecosystem is not a collection of businesses. It is a single point of view, expressed across four different platforms — and it shows no signs of stopping there.
