Cathy O’Brien

Stacy Shoemaker Rauen: Hi. I’m here with Cathy O’Brien of Naturopathica. How are you? Thanks so much for joining us today.

Cathy O’Brien: Thank you for having me. I’m so happy to be with you. Appreciate it.

SSR: Okay, so we always start at the beginning. Where did you grow up?

CO: I grew up in a small town, 20 miles north of Manhattan, called Larchmont, New York.

SSR: And what were you like as a kid?

CO: I was really active, really sporty, really social. I had a pile of good, really close friends, outside all the time. Just from a young age, I became really tight and deep with friends. Really, really deep, long friendships. Some of them, I’m still friends with.

SSR: Any inkling of early interests? I mean, you’ve had such a very career path that we’ll get into, but any kind of early inkling that you’d end up where you are today?

CO: It’s really funny, when I was thinking about it, because I had two distinct paths, really. The first one, my mom used to always call me the Ann Landers of Larchmont, because for whatever reason, I just used to be the go-to for people to talk to about problems. It was totally comfortable for me that people would just dish, and I’d help them solve problems. Then, I also would go sit in this park in Larchmont, called Manor Park, and would do what I now know to be meditating. I would sit on the rocks, just chill, and look at the water from a very young age, and I did it regularly, which is meditation, actually. I also ran and walked, and was always doing that kind of stuff, and I also loved flowers because of the smells. I would go to flower stores, and just walk in and smell flowers, and that is aromatherapy.

So when I look back, and I still incorporate all those things into my life now in a different kind of way, because they have names and they’re called things, but I was doing it just intuitively as a child. I carried it through, even through college. It’s just something that’s always been with me. Then, on the other path was the music, and I always, always, always, always had music, always. From the beginning of time with the turntable, which morphed into an iPod, which first was a walkman, and I was making mixtapes, and first stacking LPs that would drop and they’d play all night long, and I’d just drop one, drop another, like constant. Then, when I got to college and started being moody, I would use it as a drug. It was my drug. If I was upset about something, I’d put on certain kind of music, and it would run. So that, to me, was something that was just always in my life, but I never realized that it was actually a business. I had no idea. I didn’t know.

SSR: Lo and behold, here we are.

CO: I know, right? It is so funny.

SSR: Thinking back, I mean, this is just funny. How much time you spent making mixtapes and …

CO: They were the best. Oh my God. So, one time I was in the city, and I had a car, and in it, do you remember? I don’t know if you remember this, but you could pull out your player, because car thievery in Manhattan was bad, so I drove in, and somebody had broken into my car and taken my radio, which I did not care about, but it had my best mixtape in it. I was so upset, because my dad was like, “Cathy, seriously?” I was like, “No, no. The mixtape,” because really, I was very upset about it.

SSR: Yeah. It took a while, and it took a lot of thought.

CO: Exactly.

SSR: You were on a journey. All right. So, you’re in college. Where did you go to college, and what were you studying?

CO: I went to the University of Vermont in Burlington, and I was studying political science, because I thought I wanted to be a state Supreme Court judge.

SSR: Oh. It’s very specific.

CO: Don’t ask. I don’t know. I didn’t do that.

SSR: Was anyone in politics in your family?

CO: No, but they were all lawyers. Everyone was lawyers. They were all lawyers, so I applied to law school, and my uncle, who was a big lawyer was like, “Cathy, no. Definitely not for you.”

SSR: How did you end up in the music business?

CO: Actually, when I was in college, I worked every summer. I worked at Conde Nast at Vogue, specifically for one of the old, grand dom editors who’d been around forever, and every summer I became her assistant, because her assistant went away to Ireland. It’s very specific, but anyhow, so I thought that’s what I do. I studied in Paris for a year, my junior year, and she made me get a job. She was like, “You have to get a job.” She was really tough, so I did. I got a job, working for Karl Lagerfeld when he had his own studio, and I preferred to do that than go to school.

So, I did a lot of that, and I came back and I was like, “All right. I’m going to go work at Vogue for Conde Nast.” Then, there was one sitting where I had to throw stuff for these shoots that we did, and every editor who was responsible for a certain area threw whatever, and I was in charge of accessories and shoes, and I threw a belt. One of the editor, who was in charge, and her underling, they literally talked about a belt. They went on and on and talked about a belt, for how it was amazing, and they went on and on, and I thought, “You know what? That’s not for me. It’s not for me. It’s just not my thing,” so I was like, “Okay. Cross that off.”

I was like, “Now where do I go? What do I do?” So, anyhow, so I knew I had to be in sort of pop culture-y, zeitgeisty stuff, because that’s the thing that really resonated with me the most, and just figuring out what people liked and related to. And so, I met a woman who had gone to UVM, actually, and she was the VP of video for electoral records, and so I went and met her and sat in this really cool lobby that was, literally, black suede, and I had paid to park my car, which was super expensive, so I was all stressed out about it. I waited for hours. Then, they finally called me in, and I met with the guy who I ended up working for, who I’m still close to. He was the best. They were like, “Well, what do you want to do?” I was like, “I don’t care. I’ll clean the bathroom. I’ll get you coffee. I don’t care.” They were like, “Okay, come. You’re hired,” so that’s how I started. That’s what I started. It was the greatest thing. Literally, like I said, I had no idea it was actually a business. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe how lucky I was that I got to do it every day and be part of it. Yeah, it was amazing.

SSR: How did you work your way up, your first job, and then what do you think was your secret to success, to continue to evolve in this very competitive industry?

CO: Yeah, yeah. It’s super competitive, and when I was there, totally 100% male dominated. I mean, it was tough. It was tough, and you had to be tough, and you just had to get it done. It was really about work ethic and attitude, honestly, but what isn’t? But there, because it’s such a rough crowd, you just have to work harder than anybody else, and I did because I loved it so much. I just worked like a dog and grew thick, thick, thick skin. Thick skin, yeah. Oh, yeah. Because people just can really be not nice. That’s a nice way of saying it. And not nice.

SSR: Very, very PC. Yes, but you worked with some incredible musicians. I mean, tell us a little bit about what you did and what it was like to work with these very creative and talented people.

CO: I know. They were. Gosh, it’s sort of like the music industry is sort of a big, dysfunctional family. It’s like you’re all connected. You’re all connected because of this deep love and connectedness to music and artistry, and that’s what sort of unites everybody in all these different companies. It’s sort of like, “Oh, yeah. We know why we’re here. We get it. We’re all here for this,” and the artists are passionate and driven, and artists are really different people. They’re different. I grew up with an artist’s mother and different person. I have an artist’s daughter, and they’re wired differently, and they speak a different language. They are infused in a way that we are not, not to say that none of us sitting here aren’t artistic-

Because we all are. We’re in creative businesses, and we bring things to life, and that’s creative and artistic in its own right, but these artists, painters, writers, musicians, are infused with a vision and a capability that gives me goosebumps just to talk about it, because I felt so lucky to be able to get it. I got them, and I could interpret what they were doing into business, and I could talk both languages. I could relate to them and explain things to them in a way that didn’t sound like something they didn’t want to be part of.

And I could hear them when they said no to something. It was a great trajectory for me. I started in the marketing and creative side of life, because that just is what came naturally in me in New York. Then, I was brought out with my boss, this guy, Hale Milgram. He became the head of Capital in LA, and he brought me with him, and then I was there for about four years and also did marketing, a lot of field marketing. So, I worked with our field team, and worked in selling, marketing, and understanding what accounts were like. I actually went, this was fun, there was this huge tower records on Sunset Boulevard in LA for years and years and years. It was awesome.

SSR: Cool, iconic building.

CO: Do you remember? Yeah. It was amazing, and I just went and said, “Can I just be an intern here for you at night and work in there?” There was this huge customer service desk in the middle, just to hear what people were saying, so I did that for a while, just for fun. It was fun while I was working, just to get into it. You know what I mean? And so, I did that for a while, and then I was asked by somebody at Capital to come back to New York and do international marketing, which I’d never done before, which was fun, because I got to take everything from America. I had my own little roster. I was a director of international, had a roster, and got to work with, take the US stuff outside of America. Then, from there, I went and ran the department at Arista for international, so I ran the international division at Arista, which was a wild ride.

SSR: Yeah. I was going to say wild.

CO: Wild ride. Oh my God. That was a wild ride, yeah. Yeah., So that was my sort of timeline of the different things I got to do.

SSR: Did you get to travel, then, all over as well?

CO: I traveled all over the place. Yeah, all over. When I did domestic stuff, I was all over the country, and then when I did international, I was gone all the time. All the time. Traveled all the time. You know what I did, and I didn’t realize that I did this until I got headhunted for Estee Lauder, is I used to spend all my excess money and duty-free on makeup, just so I would play with it on the planes, because it’s fun, and I never wore it-

SSR: Yeah. Gives you something to do.

CO: Yeah. Gives you something to do, and then it smells good. So I was figuring out formulas, textures, and things that I liked, and I had them all in different shoe boxes in my apartment, and city apartments are tiny. It was shoved in all over the place. I didn’t know I really would just shove it and then keep going, but no, so I traveled all the time, and I’ll tell you something. That was hard, because I was in charge of the most important and relevant repertoire at the time because of Arista.

Clive Davis was my boss, and I reported to him, which he was amazing, by the way. Amazing. I would be in charge of this repertoire that was literally groundbreaking and global. The world was, outside of America, there were no women, none, and they were not very supportive of me. Let’s put it that way. I mean, I could tell you stories about things that went down. Nothing, it wasn’t like there was none of the sexual abuse shenanigans stuff. It was none of that stuff. No, but there was other shenanigans that were just like, “Oh my God. Really? Really, guys. Really? Are we going to do that?” Anyhow. Yeah.

SSR: Who is this roster that you had? Who are the people that included?

CO: Oh, for Arista? Arista was cool. Well, that was the time when the contemporary hip hop and urban stuff was really exploding. So, aside from the contemporary artists that we just had on Arista, like a Sarah McLaughlin, and we had Whitney Houston, and I was her little international product manager. I kid you not. I traveled with her all over the place, and I remember I was going to therapy, actually, one day, and I put out in the middle of the day, because I needed it. I was walking, and then Clive called me on my phone, and he’s like, “Cathy, we need to talk about Whitney, and we need to talk about the trip to Germany that you’re doing.”

I had this outer body experience. I was like, “Can I just pause for a minute and say I am on the phone with Clive Davis talking about Whitney Houston,” and it just blew my mind, and then I went to therapy. I was like, “I don’t know if I can do this anymore.” It was really funny. Anyhow, so there was that, but there were two joint ventures that had just happened. One of them was called LaFace, which was La Reid and Babyface, which was amazing, and they were in Atlanta, and they were bringing this whole Atlanta sound to music. It was not only the likes of Pink, but it was OutKast, TLC. Gosh, who am I missing? Jermaine Dupree, Escape, The Brat. Anyhow, all those cool things.

It was super fun, and then on the other side of it, it was Bad Boy. So, it was Puffy. It was Puffy’s label, and at the time, we didn’t know what was going on with him at all. There was no knowledge of any of that stuff. He had this real bubbling repertoire of Notorious BIG , Mace, and oh my gosh, Faith Evans, and the music was really happening. Aside from those, that crew, like Kenny G was a big deal. Kenny G was huge. No, huge, and Tony Braxton was huge. Gosh, who am I missing? I’m sure I’m missing big people. We had people like Carly Simon and Grateful Dead, but that was cataloging stuff, so I didn’t work with them.

Oh, Patti Smith. We had Patti Smith. That was awesome. Oh my God, yes. I brought her to London, and we had, who else did we? Wait, God. When did I do Pink Floyd? I’m trying to remember what label I was at where we did Pink Floyd. Anyhow, brought Patti Smith to London, because she was having a resurgence, and Soho House was one place in Soho, and this guy, Nick, started it. So, somebody was like, “Soho House is really cool. You should go check it out for this Patty thing.” I was like, “All right,” so I went into Soho house. I met Nick, who was the owner and founder, and I was like, “Hey, can I do a thing here with Patty Smith?” He was like, “Yeah,” so I did.

SSR: Fair enough.

CO: And I was with her at the Soho House, and we had people from all over Europe come and meet her, and we did all these little gatherings, and it was just cool. It was great. Yeah, that was great. She was awesome, as you can imagine. She was great. Oh, and Shawn Colvin. Wait, but Shawn was when I was at Sony. Yeah, she was good to work with too.

SSR: Yeah. What did you learn from Clive? What was that like?

CO: There is no “no.” The word no does not exist. Anything, anything is possible. Anything is possible. I was in a label lunch once, and it was Whitney moment, and these label lunches were lnotorious, and they were like five hours long, and they were freezing cold to keep everyone awake. Literally, we’d go record by record by record, artist by artist by artist. I had a binder because I was responsible for the work, and I could not remember everything. I had to know sales and charts and singles and radio stations, and blah, blah for everybody, for every country, so it was a lot. So, I had tabs by artist, and I just had those clear things you stuck stuff in, and I just would flip through. I’m like, “Charts, sales,” so I just knew where to go, because I was constantly having anxiety attacks. He goes, “Cathy.”

SSR: I’m having one for you, and I wasn’t even there.

CO: I know. No. Did I mention I was in therapy? Oh my God. I got acupuncture to try and help me. I did. I went to acupuncture. I was like, “Something has to help me here.” Anyhow, and it did. It was good. Acupuncture was good. See, wellness?

SSR: Yes, wellness. You were doing acupuncture before It was cool to do acupuncture.

CO: See? Exactly. I was like, “I don’t want to take Prilosec. I’m afraid that.” Anyhow, so he goes, “I want to bring Whitney to Europe next week, and I want to do one in London and one in France, and we’ll have her perform, and we’ll bring everybody.” I was like, “Yeah. We can do that,” and I was like, “Okay. Let’s shut my book.” I was like, “Okay, so I’m going to go now. I’m going to go now.”

SSR: I’ll figure this out. Thank you so much.”

CO: “I’m going to get right on that.” He was like, “Yeah. We’ll leave on such and such date. We’ll start here and end there.” I was like, “Okay,” and we did. We did it, but I was like, “Okay, everybody. Let’s go.”

SSR: Well, this is like landline phones.

CO: It was tough. It was tricky. Yeah, it was tricky. But we did have, I know you said a funny thing about landline phones. We did have a portable phone, and it was big. It worked internationally

SSR: Feel like this could be an entire podcast, just about your time in the music business. All right, so what made you decide to leave the music business? And you mentioned Estee Lauder, and kind of pivot to the beauty then wellness life that you leave now.

CO: It was, like I said, it was a really tough crowd, and there was no place for me to go. I was at this level at a really young age, and I also wanted to have kids, and I wanted to stay married. I have kids. I did not stay married, but that’s okay, but I have great kids, and there was no one I could look at as a mentor, and everyone needs mentors, and there just weren’t any. The women, bless them, and they’ve worked hard, but I didn’t aspire to be single or have a drug addiction. It wasn’t something that looked good to me. I wanted a full round life around women. So, randomly, I got head-hunted. I got called by a headhunter, as I was thinking these things in my brain, and it was from Estee Lauder, saying that they wanted to do things differently. They’re looking for people to do things differently. They thought this would be a natural industry for them to connect with. I was like, “Okay. You don’t know what you’re talking about over here in this joint, but okay, let’s do it.”

SSR: Let’s give it a whirl. Yeah.

CO: Yeah. Let’s give it a whirl. Yeah.

SSR: And so, what did you do for them?

CO: Well, they brought me in to interview for an Origins job, which I did not take. Then, I interviewed for a clinic international job, which I did not want, because I didn’t want to do international anymore, although they were lovely. They were all lovely, and simultaneously, right in the middle of that, I got head-hunted for head of International for Miramax films. Can you imagine? It was the Harvey Weinstein group.

SSR Oh, no.

CO: Yeah, and he had a bad rap, and I was like, “Yeah, no. I’m not interested in that one, coming from the fire I just came from,” so I kept up with Estee Lauder, and I interviewed for a Mac job and I did not take that one either. Then, I reached out and gave it some time, and then I reached back out to the Estee Lauder folks, and I was like, “All right. I’m ready now.” And they’re like, “Okay. This is it. This is the last one. This is the last time.”

I ended up meeting a woman named Pamela Baxter who ran, she was running the prestige brands, like the little baby brands at the time. No, that’s not true. What was she running? Fragrances? Because I ended up going and working for Tommy Hilfiger for her, for Tommy Hilfiger. I loved her, and I felt like, “I can relate to this woman. She can be a great mentor to me,” and she was smart and she was just awesome. We got along really well, and so she hired me, and I went and worked for Tommy. I did global communications, which I didn’t even know what that was. I was like, “Okay,” and then I realized what it was, and I was like, “Oh, okay,” and then they just kept giving me more brands.

So, then I had prescriptives, and they gave me Kate Spade. They gave me the La Mer, and then they gave Jo Malone. I had this mini little agency within Lauder. Then, they sent me to Harvard Business School to do a mini executive MBA thing where you go live there for three or four months and stay, and you do case studies. Literally, six out of seven days a week. It was amazing. Then, I came back and they gave me Jo Malone to just take care, just do with Pamela. Pamela was my boss, and she was running all of them. She had La Mer, and she had all of them. I was handling the Jo business and driving that. And Jo and I, that business was probably, I don’t know, $15 million business when we bought it. $20 million I don’t remember, but when I left, it was like $125 million business.

SSR: Wow.

CO: And positioned to go global. We had just started contemplating rolling out globally. Jo and I traveled all over the country together with our babies, and she only has one kid. I have two, but I had my first child when she was having Josh, and we took our babies and traveled, and we built it. It was good.

SSR: What do you think about the success of getting it from 15-ish to more than 100 million when you left?

CO: Consistency of story, staying focused and committed to the brand, and absolute laser focus on brand, and not getting diverted into going off on different tangents of whatever it may be. The beautiful thing about Estee Lauder is they gave us time. They gave us time to grow it. They knew better than anybody about how much time it takes to have something take hold when you’ve got the right leadership, so did the whole operations’ thing with her because we brought it in, and we had to scale it, and we had to repackage it, and we had to find different manufacturers, because the one she had couldn’t scale.

We had to reformulate everything. And simultaneously, we had to grow and build the brand. So, key message, over and over and over again, did not deviate. Then, as that took hold, the distribution is what helped grow it, so we partnered with Neimans and Saks, and we did a very small manageable distribution assortment, product assortment, but also number of doors. We just traveled and hammered away at different markets, one after another, because there was no social media. There’s nothing. We had to do it all manually, but it works. It just works. I don’t think that old school stuff ever goes away, because we talk about that it’s important, the sort of just meeting, talking. That’s just the best way to make things work.

SSR: Yeah. When you all bought it, was it just colognes, or did it have the candles and everything, or did you diversify the products too?

CO: No. We took what she had, and she was skincare. She started as a facialist. Did you know that?

SSR: Yes, I do remember that.

CO: She was an aesthetician, so that was my entree into the world of skincare, really, and spa. I opened her first spa in America in the flat iron building. And honed the assortment and worked on what was the best way to sample it, what’s the best way to grow it and, really, eventually looked at the business and where the business was going to be, which was fragrance. Sometimes something starts one way and evolves naturally into something else. It’s funny.

SSR: Yeah, no. It’s crazy how intertwined things become when you start to look back, when you reminisce about where you’ve been. What did you learn from Jo and from your boss, as women leaders and as mentors?

CO: I have worked for and with some really amazing women. Gizem is one of them, by the way. Powerhouse. No, it’s amazing to work with driven, focused, non-ego women, who just want nothing but to drive a business, bring you along with it, and help you grow. Pamela was the epitome of that. Pamela Baxter. She and I ended up going into business together, actually, but no. Also, so that’s one facet of it. From Jo, what I learned as a founder is she was 100% clear, directed, and focused on her vision for her business. Marcia Kilgore’s that way too. I helped her when I ran AAM. We helped her launch and then build FitFlop, and I loved working with her because she was just hand’s on. I don’t know how she did it, because she had Soap and Glory happening at the same time, and then she was starting Beauty Pie. I mean, she’s something special.

SSR: Yeah. You mentioned AAM, and I think we skipped over it. Tell us a little bit about AAM, what you created, and why.

CO: AAM, I loved it. I loved AAM, and AAM, when I was at Lauder, actually, so I had my daughter Jess, and then, shortly thereafter, I had my son, Doug, and I was running a business, I was working full time, and I had these babies, and all of a sudden my world was like, “Holy, mother of God. Oh my God,” and pretty much everything was falling in all facets of my life. I felt very underserved, and I needed things. I needed a lot, and I felt like I just wasn’t getting it, and I didn’t have a lot of time in the day, and I wanted to just feel better. I want it to feel good, and so I’d always wanted to found and run my own. I didn’t know what it was going to be, and then it just came to me and I thought the girls need some help here, and there are many of us. AAM stands for All About Mom, actually, and so I called it AAM Brand Management, and I loved it too. It was to provide goods and services to help women feel better, basically.

It was that simple. I ended up, and originally the plan was to offer talk services, information, blah, blah, blah, but the agency took hold, and I had amazing clients. Also, it fed my family. I was a breadwinner, and that took priority, and you know when you have kids. I mean, you have three of them. They are not inexpensive, so there were houses in school and everything that goes along with it. It just took on a life of its own. I really loved it, and it really served me, and I was thrilled to be of service. I hired only women. Am I allowed to say that now, or am I going to get canceled? I don’t know. I hired only women, and my vision and goal always was to train and support young women, give them a good salary, give them good 401k, so that way they could sock money away, and really, hopefully just get them going. They were all just such great, great young women. I was really lucky, and we had a great thing for many, many years, like many years. We all worked together.

SSR: Who were some of your clients?

CO: A bunch of the LVMH brands. Hermes, we worked with for years on their fragrances. Avon, years and years and years, worked for Avon in a bunch of different capacities. Fitflop with Marcia. We helped literally launch it, and then built it. That was a lot of fun. We worked with Juice Press. We worked with Hint Water, and these were as they’re early bubblers, so it was really kind of the stuff I was used to doing at Jo Malone and Lumiere, which is building. I’m just trying to think of other things that might be cool and interesting.

Oh. Sam Edelman, we did. I worked with this group called Cal-Wood, and they were fashion, so through them, Rebecca Taylor Parker, I made some great girlfriends there too, the woman who ran Parker, the woman who ran Rebecca Taylor, who are now running other fashion businesses. They’re like my gals, and I’m in a book club now with one of them. It’s great. They were great. Really great, wonderful women, who we learn from each other. That’s all you can hope for, I think, as you go along, to find women that you can learn from, work with, and just get ideas, support, and help from along the way, because it’s a slog.

SSR: Yeah, and I think your point too about not having an ego, right? Finding women that just-

CO: Oh, yeah. Because I had some that did that were bad. Horrible. One of them tried to get me fired once. It’s all little life snippets. We’ve all had them. You know what I mean? We all have these things.

SSR: And so, did you fold that company? Tell us now how you got to where you are today.

CO: So, what I did with AAM is, so Pamela Baxter was running LVMH Beauty and Dior fashion, and had her whole empire there, and I was running AAM. I’d been running AAM for 10 years, I think, and she was at LVMH for a long time. She was ready to go. I was tired of doing it myself. I ran my own business for a long time, and so we talked about creating something called Bonafide Beauty Lab, which was going to be an incubator that we would get funding for.

Then, we’d invest in small beauty startups that were founded by women, that were doing between $5 and $10 million a year. That was our premise, and we had a handful of brands that we were talking to and working with. Then, we ended up meeting Lisa Sugar, who was the founder of Pop Sugar, and she asked us to create a color brand for her, so we did, so it was called Beauty by Pop Sugar. That was, we own the license for that. And we created, in partnership with Ulta, we created an ADSKU color brand for pop sugar called Beauty by Pop Sugar, and it was beautiful.

SSR: That’s amazing.

CO: It was beautiful. It was alive for literally two minutes, because we ended up expanding distribution. We were in Macy’s, we were in Kohl’s, we were in Ulta. I mean, we were all over the place. Pamela and I were like, “Let’s go to retail,” And we were in stores, setting up our kiosks, hosting events, doing makeup. She started as a makeup artist, so she was happy as a clam, but then we had COVID, and the COVID closed the retail, and we were a baby, and it just wasn’t going to happen. It was too not going to happen. It was just over before it started, so we closed it, and-

SSR: Was that sad?

CO: Yes and no. I learned a lot. When you start a company, especially one like that, which was so multifaceted in retail, and 80 skews is a lot to start a business with, by the way. I would not do that again. Good to know, but it was a really great experience, but I was like, “Okay. We’re moving on. Moving on.” It was COVID too, so we were all sort of, I didn’t have time to mourn the loss of that. I was more sort of like, “Holy God. What’s going on here?” Like, all of us.

SSR: Yeah. It was almost like a forced reset, right?

CO: Yeah. Exactly.

SSR: And so, how then did Naturopathica come about? And tell us a little bit about that company and what you’re doing with it.

CO: All along the way, for me, the through line was I’d always been, or for many, many years I’ve been working with women’s organizations around domestic violence. It had just been something that women, again, women need help, women get themselves into situations that sort of can spin out of control pretty quickly without realizing it, and the word domestic violence is pretty heavy and harsh to say, and there are a lot of underlying things that are easier to say, like toxic relationship, like controlling relationship. Things like that, like gaslighting, stuff that are more relatable, but it rolls up into this thing. A number of us have had situations like that in our lives, because it’s common, and the stats are one in four women, and there are those stats only because those numbers are reported through police and social services. A lot of people don’t report things, just because it’s easier not to.

So anyhow, it’s a pretty crushing stat, and so I’ve over the years worked with organizations, there’s a group called One Love Foundation, which is phenomenal. I worked on the domestic violence hotline for quite a while as an advocate. I worked for something called SAVI at Mount Sinai, which stands for Sexual Assault and Victims Intervention, where you go as an advocate, and when somebody comes into the ER for domestic violence or sexual assault, you’re the buffer between that person and the rest of the world, just to keep them calm and help them just take a breath. I worked for Safe Horizon, which is an amazing, one of the two founded original domestic violence groups in Manhattan. I worked in their, it was teaching women financial work sophistication work, oh my God, I can’t pronounce it. Teaching people tools so that they can get a job that is not just an hourly job.

And then, now I serve on the board of a group called Project Sage, which is in the Northwest corner of Connecticut where I have my home, and it’s the domestic violence group, basically, in that area of Connecticut, so that’s just been, and so then, during that time, I got educated on it, because I had gotten divorced, and I had a lot of time on my hands. I was home with my kids, and so I did an online course for domestic violence prevention, which is funny to say that, through the University of Massachusetts. It was me and policemen. They were introducing themselves, and I was like, “I run a beauty brand. I make lipstick,” and it was just funny. That was great. Then, from there, I had a great professor, and she was like, “You should get some more education,” because I was telling her what I wanted to do, my vision for what I wanted to do. So, I actually went to Columbia and got a master’s in social work.

That started towards the end of COVID and then ended after COVID. So, I got a master’s in social work, and my plan was I bought this house in Connecticut that has a second, little outhouse, and that was going to be my place called the Well Space for Women. There, I was going to be able to do some, I don’t want to say therapy work, but just be like an advisor/counselor for women who are going through, under the umbrella, toxic relationship, controlling relationship, stuff where they just feel not good, and just all they just need is somebody to tell them they’re not crazy, and help give them some tools to get a little stronger, because all you need is to get stronger. When I worked on the domestic violence hotline, I would say to these women, you get them to a calmer state, and I would say things like, “Is there any way for you to do anything for yourself right now?”

When you’re in that state of mind, that’s the last thing on your mind. I was like, “Can you step outside and breathe some air right now? Bring the phone? I’ll go with you. Can you take a shower and get some water on you right now, to get some steam in there? Can you sit down, close your eyes, and do a box breathing exercise?” and all of those things are wellness techniques, and they take two seconds, but what they do is they disconnect you from an agitation state. It just disconnects you from where you are, and you’re like, “Okay,” and that’s sometimes all people really need, is that, to change their mindset or help them think clearly or get out of the house if they need to get out. You know what I mean? Little things like that. The way Naturopathica came to be, going back to it, so I’d given up my family apartment in the city.

I’m on my way to Connecticut to start the well space. I’m studying to take my license tests so I can become a licensed MSW, as opposed to just an MSW, so I can start training. An old friend called Gary Furman calls me, and Gary, I knew him from Estee Lauder, because he is a finance person, a private equity guy, among other things, and he was involved in many of the Estee Lauder acquisitions, Jo Malone being one of them. So, we met when he was involved in the Jo Malone purchase, and we just stayed connected over the years. He called me, so his private equity firm had bought Naturopathica, I think, in 2019 maybe, so just before COVID, and it wasn’t at the place he wanted it to be. This was like, what? 2022, right? He said it wasn’t there. He said, “Could you just take a look at it?”

I was like, “Well, so I’m graduating from school, and I’m going to go build the well space for women, and I’m going to work with women.” He was like, “Why don’t you do it here, because it’s like a wellness company?” I looked at it, and I’d always known about Naturopathica, and I believed in what it does, very much so, and I was like, “All right,” so I did. I had to quickly find an apartment, because I’d given mine up, literally. I gave up my apartment. I was like, “Okay. Go buy furniture, find an apartment fast, and start,” so that’s how it all started. That’s what got me into it. I was like, “All right. Let’s see what can happen here on a platform that’s already built.”

SSR: Yeah. That’s cool. So, did you merge the two? You wanted to do one thing, so how have you kind of taken it from there?

CO: The way I stayed involved in the domestic stuff, that is very important to me, is I got involved with this board, which I love and appreciate, and so that sort of keeps me there. With Naturopathica world though, it’s literally been all consuming. So, when I first got to Naturopathica, and realizing the spas, spending time in the spas, and knowing what the spas do in terms of the healing power of touch, I had all of our therapists, massage therapists, and estheticians trained and certified in oncology treatment services so that they could touch people who are going through chemo and radiation, because your skin changes and your whole body is just an entirely different thing, and it becomes a different thing. Cancer, as I’m sure you know, is on the rise, and it is just proliferating on all ends of the sort of median age spectrum of when people get it. Younger people now with colon cancer is happening a lot. Breast cancer in women is crazy. These are all happening young now and breast cancer is just everywhere. So, I started that in the beginning of 2023, and at the same time, we forged partnerships with Mount Sinai Hospital and with U Penn Abramson’s Cancer Center in Philadelphia. And we have our therapists actually going into chemo rooms and giving massage therapy while people are going through chemo.

SSR: That’s amazing.

CO: So, what happened was, the random thing is that, at the end of 2023 in November, I got diagnosed with breast cancer, and out of nowhere, I had no family history, no genetics at all, they panel test you for everything. I’d never had a call back on my mammogram. I do mammograms religiously every year. I’m healthy, my blood work is perfect, but I had the breast cancer. They do this thing called an Onco score now at stage one, and I had stage one, thank God. They test the aggressiveness of it. They didn’t use to test stage one, but they do now. If you’re 1 to 24, you get radiation or nothing. If you’re above 24, you get chemo, and I was a 31, so I got chemo. I was like, “All right. Let’s try it all. Let’s do it all.”

SSR: So, you were the patient for your own?

CO: Yeah, I was. I got to tell you. It made me feel so good that we were doing this and offering this stuff, because it matters. When you’re going through that, you are in an alternative world, your body dramatically changes, your energy is just gone. You’re totally scared and freaked out and vulnerable in every way. You know what I mean? You don’t know what I mean, and please don’t know what I mean. But it’s to have that experience of the physical touch and feel your body respond, and lucky me, I could go get a massage after chemo every time I went to chemo, and not everybody can. I had the skincare that made my skin stay, because it wrecks you. It wrecks you. Chemo wrecks your skin, wrecks it, and radiation burnt from here, below my boob. Burnt. It’s bright red, so they gave me a cream, which was like, I’m not getting use this cream. What is this cream? I talked to them about it. I’m like, “What is this?” And we kind of laughed about it, and I brought them our stuff and said, “What do you think about this? Is this safe to use?” They were like, “Oh my god. Yeah, definitely.” They would remark to me when I came back for check-ins. They were like, “Oh my God. You’re healing so fast. You look great,” and it was all the skincare and the massage, honestly, among just eating well and blah, blah, blah. That stuff.

SSR: Are you okay now?

CO: I had a six-month an MRI in January, I want to say. February. Recently, and it was fine, but once you have it, to be honest with you, Stacy, you’re always sort of like, “Okay.” “Let’s see what’s going on here,” but all you can do is live your life, honestly. My doctor said, “You’re going to get hit by a bus before you’re going to die from this.” I was like, “Okay, thank you. I appreciate that. But who knows anything? None of us know anything. None of us know anything, so all you can do is just live. That’s what I do.

SSR: So, moving forward, where do you see the company headed, what are you guys focused on, and what are you excited about?

CO: I’m super excited about continuing to grow the thinking around wellbeing, just living a well life and offering our people, people who know about us, people who plug in and people who are aware of it, ways to be healthy, ways to be well, ways to feel good, so that’s what our vision is. And certainly, right now, the mechanisms by which we’re doing that is through the healing power of touch. In our spaces and other people’s spaces, through skincare that we know is clinically proven and totally non-toxic, that’s great, but also things that you learn when you’re in one of our spaces, which are different massage rituals you can do for yourself, different breathing techniques you can do for yourself while you’re at work.

I regularly will take a minute to just breathe during work. I really will. I’ll do a box breathe thing or just close my eyes for just a minute, and it means everything. It’s really just the stuff that I would talk to the women who would call in to the hotline about, just what are ways where you can incorporate the concept of being well during your day? That’s what our thinking is around being a company. That is about living a good life. A healthy life.

SSR: Yeah, and you’re partnering with hotels too, right? To bring your services to them?

CO: Right now we’re in 300. We have 300, we call them professional spa partners, and that is luxury spas, like a Miraval, as well as day spas, like Hay Day or Sana. They’re great partners of ours. Kohler Water Spas is a great partner of ours. So places like that all over the country. And then we now have six of our own spas. When I started, we were New York. It was just little, one in Manhattan and one in East Hampton, and so it was really important, I felt, to get our footprint out of just the Northeast/New York, and spread our sort of word and message to partner, be able to partner with other hospitals.

So, actually, I was diagnosed when I was at Kohler in 2023 on my way to open our spa in Palm Beach, so Colony. We’re opened at The Colony in November of last year, 2024? 2024, yeah. God, crazy. And we just opened in Hotel Mollie in Aspen, and we just opened in the Renaissance in downtown Phoenix, and we opened a spa in Tribeca in Manhattan, which is great. It’s going phenomenally well, and we opened another one in Midtown Manhattan in a hotel called The Chatwal, which is a beautiful, iconic luxury hotel. Also, it’s going great. Yeah, that’s what we have.

SSR: Amazing. And more to come, I’m sure.

CO: Yeah. Absolutely, more to come. Yeah, all of us are really excited. Everyone on the team is really excited. We have a great team. We have an energized team, and everyone’s super passionate about the healing aspect of it, and that’s what makes us excited. It’s like we’re not just working for a beauty company. We don’t call ourselves that. It’s really special. Yeah, it’s really special.

SSR: Amazing. Well, we always end the podcast, not that I want to, but we have to for time, with the question that is the podcast. So what has been your greatest lesson learned along the way, or lessons? It could be two.

CO: My greatest lessons learned along the way, honestly, is this too shall pass.

SSR: Oh, I love that.

CO: This too shall pass. Don’t let it rile you. It is a moment in time, and it will pass.

SSR: Well, we’ll leave it at that, because I think that’s a perfect way to end. Thank you so much for sharing your incredible story and taking the time to be with us today.

CO: Thank you so much, Stacy. Really good to see you.