The cover story
The Marketer
At fourteen she was working summers and taking an active part in international projects. At twenty-one she took over the family agency. Since then she has built a group of brands across advertising, wellness, lifestyle, real estate and education, and taken one of them to America.
The stripped-back issue · Sofia, autumn 2026
No titles. No filters. Just Elina.
ELINA
TheMarketerOn the agency her mother founded in 1990, the brands she built and what she is doing next
45+countries on five continents
Smart Stripsfrom a desk in Sofia to the American market
Life Lessonsher first book, coming soon
Elina Ivanova-Atanassov
Throw far, so you have something to chase.From her Forbes Bulgaria interview, Women at the Top, 2022
Princeps began in 1990, when Elena Marinova and a handful of advertising specialists opened Bulgaria's first full-service communication agency. It won its first international clients and was named Agency of the Year in 1999.
Elina was thirteen when her mother died in a car accident. She rarely speaks about it, but it shaped her character, her ambition and the way she builds. Years later, accepted to a university in the United States, she chose to stay in Sofia: she wanted to carry her mother's story forward, keep the agency and make it even better. In 2007 she stepped up as the second generation.
Elina took it further, with luxury clients including BOSS, Bvlgari, Calvin Klein and Gucci, and built Princeps Group into a marketing powerhouse for all of her advertising and media lines. At Princeps she has built dozens of brands from scratch, several of them now multimillion companies. Thirty-five years on, the house counts more than 11,000 projects.
She calls herself a marketer first, and the training shows in everything she has launched since: Smart Creative Group, the venture studio where her consumer brands are built; El Shisha and Vapy, which reached sales in the millions; ETRIA and Smart Strips, now sold in Bulgaria and the US; EA Assets in luxury real estate; and EUBA, a licensed vocational training academy.
She studied at the Russian and then the French Language High School, holds a Bachelor's in Advertising from New Bulgarian University and a Specialization in Entrepreneurship and Innovation from Harvard Business School Online, and speaks five languages.
