Month: August 2018

ELISABETH HOLDER RABERIN

Posted on by Stephanie Janssen

It may come as a surprise that Elisabeth Holder Raberin, the visionary behind the stateside expansion of French luxury confectioner Ladurée and its whimsical, rainbow-hued macarons, never envisioned herself working in the culinary world.

“The food business is really more male dominated,” explains Holder Raberin, co-president of Ladurée USA. “I think women give meals to their family every day, so in a way it’s ironic to have an industry that’s really masculine,” she says, recalling childhood memories spent with her grandmother at the bakery, filled with the scents of freshly baked goods. (“She knew every client by name and nobody could leave the store without a pastry or bread,” she says.)

It’s something she has witnessed since childhood, watching her parents, Francis and Francoise Holder, oversee Paul (her grandparents’ family bakery turned artisanal chain), in their hometown of Lille, France, and later with the family’s acquisition of Ladurée. Holder Raberin, the only girl and youngest of three (her eldest brother, David, is currently the chairman of Ladurée; Maxime oversees Paul International), was initially drawn to a career in fashion, working for the likes of Ralph Lauren, Et Vous and Hermès in their European and American markets—an experience, she says, that ultimately prepared her to step into her present-day universe of a luxury lifestyle brand inspired by pastries.

“Hermès has so many things in common with Ladurée because it’s a family business and the know-how is amazing,” says Holder Raberin, a graduate of the European Business School in Paris. “The clients are very specific and every client is unique. They want an experience when they go to Hermès and I think it’s the same thing at Ladurée. You’re not only buying a gown, you’re also experiencing the lifestyle.”

When Holder Raberin decided to join the family business in 2004 (“I think I got more mature and I wanted to work with my dad—I didn’t want to lose the opportunity for him to educate me,” she says), her father made her start from scratch, working her way up the ranks from a salesperson to overseeing Ladurée’s North American partnerships, development and operations with her husband, Pierre-Antoine Raberin. Together the couple resides in New York with their 9-year-old twin sons.

The family has settled into their way of life in America, which includes frequent trips to museums and traveling on weekends. But Ladurée’s French heritage remains at the heart of Holder Raberin’s work as she opens tearooms and restaurants around the country, including Miami, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. The most important aspect, she says, is the knowledge and training of their chefs, followed by the signature ornate, color-splashed décor for which the brand’s locations around the world are known. “My father is an art collector, so he has a huge storage,” she says. “I love to put a few pieces in each store to bring a family feel.”

Holder Raberin was 15 when her family acquired Ladurée in 1993. At the time it was a singular, ornate tearoom and pastry shop (dating back to 1862) where the Holders would gather as a family on Saturdays while her brother was studying in Paris. She remembers it for the confections but also for the “best omelet ever,” plus delectable finger sandwiches and vol-au-vent. “It was like a small jewel, a rough jewel,” says Holder Raberin. “Because [my father] is an entrepreneur, he knew that buying Ladurée, he could [create] something, a beautiful brand, a worldwide brand.”

The macaron—a creamy ganache sandwiched between two almond-flour shells—was always the star of the show at Ladurée. But what started out as four flavors has evolved into an array of riffs on the signature dessert—orange blossom, caramel and blackcurrant violet among them, with the introduction of new flavors each season.

“It’s the supermodel of the pastry world. It’s very photogenic,” says Holder Raberin of the confection, which not only inspired candle and home fragrances but also led to collaborations with everyone from photographer Gray Malin to fashion houses including Lanvin. Recently, Vera Wang dreamed up an all-white coconut crème chantilly macaron and a mango-and-coconut wedding cake, inspired by her own bridal designs.

The ideal macaron, according to Holder Raberin, is “a very good balance between crunchy on the outside and soft on the inside,” and not too sweet, she says. For that, she turns to chef Claire Heitzler, head of patisserie, who has been tasked with bringing that perfection to every macaron bite (not to mention other sweets, including lemon-meringue tarts, vanilla flans and chocolate eclairs) while expanding the repertoire of flavors with new collections every three months.

What about her own challenges as a female in the workplace? “It’s more in my family,” she says with a laugh. “In my business I have to fight because I am younger and the only girl. Sometimes I have to remind them I’m not a 15-year-old.”

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KIRSTEN GREEN

Posted on by Stephanie Janssen

It’s uncommon to find women in the field of venture capital. How uncommon? As Kirsten Green recalls it, when she started her VC fund Forerunner just eight years ago, just the fact that there were three women running the firm was enough to garner headlines in the tech world, where even in 2016 a staggering 93 percent of partners at the 100 top VC firms were men. “I didn’t really have an intention of being all-female anything,” says Green on the phone from her office in San Francisco. “That wasn’t what I wanted to be associated with.”

Green—who has lived in the Bay Area her whole life except for her undergraduate years at UCLA—hadn’t hired the other two women on her team because of their gender. “When people would talk about the female thing, I would push back pretty hard and say, ‘Listen, I find the best person I can find right now,’ ” she says.

Segue to today: The headlines about Green aren’t about that she’s a woman. They come down to the fact that her company, which focuses its early-stage funding almost exclusively in the e-commerce sphere, has had one of Silicon Valley’s hottest investment streaks. Her prescient picks include two unicorns (i.e., startup companies that go on to be valued at more than $1 billion): Dollar Shave Club and Jet.com. Last year, research firm CB Insights ranked Green the 12th most important venture capitalist in the world. Of note is that 40 percent of the companies Forerunner has invested in are founded by women, including Reese Witherspoon’s Draper James, beauty products site Glossier and activewear brand Outdoor Voices. Here, too, though, Green emphasizes that “I have never invested in a male or a female. We do not have any mandate to invest in any type of entrepreneur other than one who is going to be successful.”

She credits her success to being in tune with how the online marketplace is evolving. “We really believe that today’s customer values service, either better service or a new form of service. Such as right now we are seeing businesses come to us with much more thoughtful approaches to personalization on a mass scale,” says Green, who often sees online shopping sites thriving when they are entertaining as well as useful. “People like the art of the hunt and they like the satisfaction of the find. Having something that does feel like entertainment and not just transactional is increasingly important.”

But while her firm engages in traditional analysis, due diligence and research, a good idea and business plan is rarely enough. Green—whose firm gets pitched about 1,800 companies a year and invests in less than one percent of those—feels passionately that she’s investing not just in companies but in people too. A new company needs a strong founder. “You know it when you meet somebody—it’s in their bones. There’s this kind of spark. It’s their everything project. Because one general premise is, it’s gonna take an extraordinary amount of resources and buy-in to get something off the ground and scale it,” she says, cautioning would-be founders: “It most likely will be harder than you think.”

Green is not enthusiastic about the idea of getting a degree in entrepreneurship. “I think people have been a bit confused about that. You’ve got people studying entrepreneurship as a major and coming out of school and thinking it’s a career. It’s not. It really is a calling.” She characterizes the types of proposals she’s most likely to reject as having “very general rudimentary criteria, like there’s going to be some kind of shift happening in a big market, where there is new technology advancing it or opportunity or lazy incumbents or a change in distribution strategy. They come in with kind of a manufactured idea along those lines,” says Green.

So did Green, who sold women’s clothing at Nordstrom when she was a teenager, feel she had a calling? Not early on, she readily admits. Act 1 of her career was working as a retail stock analyst. “I don’t think by nature I was particularly entrepreneurial to be honest with you. I was more on the safety end of the curve. I was pretty focused on having a secure job, knowing where my paycheck and health care were coming from. But over time I grew so passionate and convinced there was an opportunity that other people or firms weren’t addressing in this space.” So in 2003 she left her job, then worked as a consultant in the investing world before starting her firm in 2010.

Interestingly, Green decided she did want to start hiring based on gender in the last couple years. She’s added two male investment professionals to her team, which now numbers eight. “I’m always thinking, ‘What is the vantage point we don’t have’ and pretty quickly the answer became, ‘We don’t have a guy.’ It’s important to be really thoughtful about your team,” says Green. When it comes to new hires, “what we look for are great team players who have a passion, who know how to be both a follower and a leader. I’m a big believer that if you like what you are doing you have a better chance for success.”

At the same time, Green—who is married to a real estate entrepreneur and has two young children—also joined a new initiative to create a more welcome avenue for women in the VC world. Called Female Founder Office Hours (femalefounder.org), it creates a way for female entrepreneurs to get their business proposals seen by Silicon Valley’s powerhouse women. “We’re starting taking 40 slots to review pitches,” says Green, who sees the new group as partly inspired by the wave of sexual harassment revelations that are rocking the business world, including tech. “I think everybody is shocked by a lot of what they are reading and felt like they want to take some action. But as opposed to talking about all the bad behavior and the ways in which women have been held back over time, we said, let’s get together to build community amongst ourselves and shine a light.”

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JEANNE DAMAS

Posted on by Stephanie Janssen

Jeanne Damas never set out looking for fame, but it found her anyway. Since launching her first Tumblr account at age 13, the now-25-year-old Damas has become a digital force to be reckoned with, embraced by nearly a million Instagram followers for her snapshots of everyday life. Equal parts fashion diary and creative outlet, Damas’ feed ranges from pictures of casual dinner parties at home with friends in the 11th arrondissement to casual streetstyle snaps, artful portraits of her cat, Charlie, and the view from her front-row perch at New York Fashion Week.

Since 2016, Damas has also been pouring herself into her truest passion, Rouje, a ready-to-wear online clothing brand comprised of understated wardrobe essentials that Damas and her Parisian pals could—and do—wear in their own lives, from ‘70s inspired velvet overalls to oversize blazers and thigh-grazing knit dresses. “I wanted to create my own universe,” says Damas, who brought that vision to life with the help of her friends, including stylist Nathalie Dumeix and photographer Sophie Arancio.

Damas grew up in the 12th arrondissement, where life revolved around her parents’ popular brasserie, Le Square Trousseau (which they sold in 2007 before opening their current bistro, Philou), located downstairs from their apartment. Paris felt more like a village than a cosmopolitan city to Damas, who spent most of her formative years within a small radius of the restaurant. “Three or four streets were my home,” says Damas. “I knew everybody in the neighborhood.”

That included restaurant regulars such as designer Jean-Paul Gaultier (who helped open Damas’ eyes to the world of fashion with a high school internship at his Paris atelier) and shop owners such as Dumeix, whose namesake boutique was on the same street as her family’s restaurant. Every day after school, 12-year-old Damas would visit Dumeix, laying the foundations for a lifelong friendship. “It was the start of everything,” says Damas, who launched her Tumblr shortly afterwards as a way to document her everyday life.

Damas’ posts quickly caught the attention of her French peers (among them, fellow blogger Simon Porte Jacquemus, who went on to launch his namesake clothing line) and the fashion world, including contemporary brand Comptoir des Cottoniers, which tapped Damas, then 15, and her mother for one of its iconic campaigns. Soon after, designer Yasmine Eslami picked Damas as both a muse and collaborator.

Damas never dreamed that she would forge a career path with her online musings. “Ten years ago, Instagram and influencers didn’t exist,” she says. “An influencer as a job?” Damas spent five years after graduating high school going through what she calls a “little bit of a lost spell,” taking part-time theater classes in between modeling. But it was also time for Damas to reflect and observe and channel her energies. “Because of this period, I am who I am now, so I am happy.”

Last year, Damas teamed up with French journalist Lauren Bastide to turn her lens on the women who inspire her with their debut book, In Paris. The goal, says Damas, was to break down the tired cliché of the Parisian woman. Damas, who featured 20 people for the book, from friends to strangers off the street wanted to communicate the real beauty of the Parisian woman, not just the superficial: “Beauty is much more than a perfect face.”

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Karmen Berentsen

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Karmen Berentsen was 26 years old when she learned first-hand the power of a great outfit. After striking out on her own with a training solutions company, the young entrepreneur was faced with the prospect of presenting her products and vision to executives at Fortune 500 companies. “I needed some confidence,” she says. “And so I went to Neiman Marcus and bought an Armani suit. I spent more than I could afford on it but it fit me and I felt confident, powerful and sophisticated.” That day, Berentsen won the job.

Today, as the owner of Denver’s A Line Boutique, Berentsen is delivering that same sense of poise and fearlessness to her clients, who turn to the boutique not only for its thoughtful selection but also for its in-house team of professional stylists, versed in everything from curating single looks to travel packing and closet edits. It’s a business model that was inspired by European hospitality. “You’re met by someone who knows the collection and who can take one look at you and start pulling. They know how to style you. You’re in and you’re out.”

For Berentsen, the worlds of tech and fashion are more parallel than one might think. “I moved from literally creating self-sufficient, confident users through the right documentation and training methods to being part of helping women feel confident and self-sufficient, to feel the way I did. I think it’s so important and most often overlooked,” says Berentsen.

What’s different, however, is Berentsen’s mindset while building her companies—a change that happened after she sold her business, when she took time to press pause on things. Born in Minnesota and raised in Arizona and California, Berentsen and her sister were brought up by their single mother, who passed away while she was in high school.

After graduating from university, Berentsen threw herself into the workforce, eventually striking out on her own in the tech world. But it was the time in between that she began to experience a shift in her outlook on all aspects of life, work included. “I realized I wanted to work in an environment and industry I loved and in one where I could be a part of helping people feel like I did, to be a difference and be closer to home.”

Berentsen, now a mother of a young daughter, has abided by that philosophy. “With my first company, I mustered, I struggled, it was intense—I wasn’t who I wanted to be.” And what about now? “The effort is more in being intentional and kind and soulful and centered,” she says. “It’s letting that magic of the universe come in and be that rush, that energy, that ride and always seeing it through.”

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Hillary Super

Posted on by Stephanie Janssen

As the president of Anthropologie Group Apparel and Accessories, Hillary Super finds the most satisfaction helping women feel their best. “To hear our customer talk about the role our clothes play in her life and the joy they bring to her, it just makes me want to raise the bar in every way,” says Super. It’s also one of the reasons why she stepped into the role last year. “I feel like I can represent her,” says Super. “I have been her over the years. I feel extremely connected to the mission of what we do.”

Retail has been a prominent part of Super’s life ever since she was old enough to work. Raised in Arcadia, California, as the eldest of two sisters, Super landed her first job at age 14 selling clothing at the mall. “I loved the mall experience. I was definitely an early adopter in terms of fashion trends,” says Super, who was both artsy and academic (“but strongly preferred the artsy,” she says).

After her dreams of attending art school were sidelined by her father, who insisted that she first obtain a liberal-arts degree, Super opted to pursue a bachelor’s in women’s studies at the University of Southern California, while working at The Gap to fund her fashion addiction along the way.

Super planned to go into academia after graduation, until a friend’s father, who happened to be the CEO of the now-shuttered department-store chain Mervyn’s, stated the obvious: Super’s real passions lay in retail and fashion. “I didn’t even know what that career path was, or what it would look like,” says Super. “He basically introduced me to that and brought me into the training program there.”

In 1996, while working as a planner for Mervyn’s in the Bay Area, Super crossed paths with Kathy Bronstein, then CEO of  Wet Seal, who took a chance and hired Super as a buyer. Super credits Bronstein with not only teaching her everything about buying in retail and how to develop product but also for instilling in her an intense level of standards and discipline. “I think of her as being one of the most influential people in my career,” says Super.

Super went on to forge her own formidable path, working for Gap, Inc., in San Francisco as a senior merchandiser and later as a divisional merchandise manager for the company’s Old Navy brand—with stints in New York at Ann Taylor and New York and Company in between. In 2013, Super landed what she had always imagined to be her dream job of running a company with Guess North America in Los Angeles, only to depart the following year. For the first time in 20 years, Super took time off to relax, and also to re-examine her career priorities. “It was the job I thought I had always wanted, but actually, it was just what I was supposed to want. It didn’t make me happy at all.”

After a summer of traveling, sailing and reflecting, Super was pointed in the direction of Maris Collective, a small Santa Monica-based startup that brings retail to five-star resorts. For the next two years, Super learned everything she could about running a nontraditional retail business. “It really showed me that retail is not dead, because if you have a unique offering and you have a personal connection and experience, it will drive people to your store,” says Super, who applies that mindset to her current job, where “it’s all about delivering joy.”

One of the big things Super hears repeatedly through customer feedback at Anthropologie is how the brand makes them feel. “The fact that women don’t feel better about themselves in general is something that’s on my mind,” says Super. “Women tend to defer and apologize, and not speak the truth or make a direct statement because of the way they fear they’re going to be perceived—something I think just has to stop.”

Super remembers the first time she felt the glass ceiling, when she began working at a senior level in retail. “I remember the men in the room talking over the women and basically disregarding what they were saying in a way that was so blatant, I sat back in the room and thought, ‘Oh, this is what it feels like.’ ”

Her advice to other women: “Help each other,” she says. “There’s no reason for us to be competing against each other, because there’s room for all of us. The place that each of us is meant to be, we’ll find it.”

Inspired by “the Kathy Bronsteins of the world,” Super, who now splits her time between Philadelphia and Palm Springs, where she and her San Francisco-based partner have a home, is committed to being a role model for women in retail. “I was very lucky that my father and an early mentor [Kathy] both had the unwavering belief that I could do anything, and that really helped to form my own self-perceptions,” she says.

To that end, Super also acts as a coach and connects female entrepreneurs to resources through LDR Ventures, a venture capital fund that invests in women. “We all have those moments where we need someone to make a call for us, make the intro, recommend us, redirect us, give us some pointed feedback, and it takes purpose. It’s easy to forget or get busy, and we as women have to act with purpose and commit to helping each other along and to encouraging each other, instilling belief in one another. We can do it.”

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ANNABELLE SELLDORF

Posted on by Stephanie Janssen

Annabelle Selldorf is not one to play favorites. The New York architect, with an impressive and varied portfolio that includes museums like New York’s Neue Galerie, luxury Manhattan residential buildings and a state-of-the-art recycling facility in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, hesitates when asked about her artistic influences or a dream commission. “I cannot say,” she says. “I don’t think like that.”

Instead she is considered in speech and thoughtful in analysis about the impact of her work. “I think architecture is a very important artistic discipline. I often say it’s the mother of all arts,” she says. “It is a fact that when you build a building, it tends to stick around for a long time. It has a function not only to fulfill its utilitarian purpose but also to play a greater role in the lives of people in the urban environment. You walk by buildings every day and they imprint themselves in your memory and they can make a positive or a not very positive difference in your life. Our job is to be conscious of what we do.”

Selldorf’s conscious approach has been characterized as minimalist, modernist in the European tradition, and she’s also been called an artist’s architect since she has designed homes for David Salle and Eric Fischl and a studio for Jeff Koons. Yet in typical Selldorf fashion, she says, “I prefer not to compare myself to what others think or say.” Instead, she lets the work speak for itself, and her elegant, restrained structures have a distinct, seductive voice that summons one closer to marvel at the details.

Take the Chelsea gallery she designed for her close friend, the gallerist David Zwirner. The façade is strong, very gray, but upon closer examination the board-formed concrete, accented with teak wood, is its own canvas—a celebration of texture and pattern that never overpowers the art it’s meant to house but signals a greater purpose. “There has to be music or poetry or enlightenment to the work we do, a spiritual dimension, not like a church or a Zen moment, but an overall intangible artistic moment,” she says.

Her drive to design with purpose and a sense of transcendence can be traced to her childhood in Cologne, Germany. While it was bombed to smithereens during the second World War, and then rebuilt again with a modern Bauhaus influence, there still remained Romanesque churches and a gothic cathedral like the Dome of Cologne—all reminders of the symbiosis between the old and new world that informs her design. “That sort of hardship, loss of life and loss of civilization is something that may get transmitted epigenetically, and I think it shaped my ideas about cities and created a desire to maintain and take care of memories.”

“But these are big topics, beyond a small conversation like ours,” she adds, in a matter-of-fact manner. It’s not that she’s uncooperative; she’s genuinely very busy. With a staff of 65 at Selldorf Architects, who work from a Union Square building once home to Andy Warhol’s Factory, the firm grew organically from a single-person practice that Selldorf started soon after she graduated from the Pratt Institute.

Even though her father was an architect, she surmises living in New York influenced her career decision more than legacy. “It wasn’t like I knew what I wanted to do. In fact, I had every reason to think the very last thing I wanted to do in life was be an architect because it was a lot of work with little pay,” she explains. “But then in the end it happened quite naturally. All of a sudden there were a couple more people in the office, and then it became an organization, and now it’s grown into a collective experience.”

Architecture is notorious for being a male-dominated profession, yet within Selldorf’s practice three of the four partners are women, which may account for her collaborative approach. “Some say women are more interested in consensus. I often wonder, is that because of our gender or because we are brought up to be that way?” But she also notes that times have changed. When she first started, very few men asked her for a job, because, she says, “it was harder for men to work for a woman but today I think that’s completely irrelevant.”

And even though Selldorf has designed a Chelsea waterfront building next to those by male “star architect” Norman Foster, which will soon be flanked by yet another by Robert A.M. Stern, she admits, “We still have a long way to go to in this profession to sort out what the concept of equality may yield. Today we are in complicated times and you have to ask me about being a woman in architecture. Ideally, I don’t want anyone to think about me as a woman in architecture. I’d rather just be thought of as an excellent architect.”

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CLARE VIVIER

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Clare Vivier distinctly remembers the day she stumbled upon four $100 bills lying on Piedmont Avenue in Oakland in 2000. At the time, she was holding down a number of jobs to make ends meet, including working alongside her now-husband, journalist Thierry Vivier, to produce a news magazine about Silicon Valley for television in his native France. “Four hundred dollars was a ton of money to me,” she recalls.

But in her mind’s eye, Vivier had already been toying with the idea of launching a handbag line, prompted by her discovery of a hole in the market for stylish and versatile laptop cases for women, and her subsequent decision to craft her own.

“I took the money as a complete sign,” says Vivier. “I thought immediately, ‘I am buying a good sewing machine, and I am going to make bags.’ ” Through that machine, the Clare V. line was eventually born, evolving from a collection of classic, minimalist bags into the beloved, made-in-L.A. luxury lifestyle brand that it is today, spanning accessories, apparel and home decor.

Vivier had always envisioned a career involving fashion, though one wielding a pen over a needle. The youngest of six children born to a Mexican lawyer father and Irish teacher mother in “beautiful and bucolic” St. Paul, Minnesota, Vivier decamped from the Midwest to the Bay Area to study English at the University of San Francisco. “I just wanted to write fashion journalism. I think it was just a way to get into fashion for me—which is where I always wanted to be.”

After earning bylines penning pieces on fashion, food and culture for the likes of the San Francisco Bay Guardian following graduation, the 23-year-old journalist packed her bags and headed to Paris in 1994, fueled by a desire “to be in a big city where things were happening,” she says.

Vivier spent the next year learning French, in between waitressing and working as an intern at a documentary film production company. A year later she returned to the Bay Area, bringing Thierry (the pair met at a dinner party in Paris, and were married in 2002) and a newfound appreciation for the timeless and chic aesthetic of French design, which eventually played a role in shaping the aesthetic of her line. “It is definitely something I always keep in mind when conceptualizing new bags,” she says.

In 2001, the couple moved to Los Angeles’s Silver Lake neighborhood, where Vivier worked as a prop stylist and production assistant, all while focusing on ways to grow her vision. A hunt for leather around town eventually led Vivier to her first factory in 2002 and, in turn, her first mentor.

“I think she really respected that I knew how to construct things, and I didn’t want to be a designer on a whim,” says Vivier. “It was a great education for me on how bags are made, and I don’t think I would be where I am without that.”

Following the birth of the couple’s son, Oscar, in 2003, Vivier shelved her fashion aspirations to focus on motherhood, not knowing if she would ever return to making her line. “Whenever we drove by the area where the factory was, I could almost cry that I had let this dream go. It was something I really believed in,” she says. When Oscar went off to preschool three years later, Vivier returned to the factory. “I said, ‘Remember me? Can we do this? I really want to do this.’ ”

Clare V. had momentum from the get-go, but over the years, a string of events helped boost the brand, including a mention of her laptop bag in the highly influential, now-defunct newsletter DailyCandy in 2006. Two years later, Vivier landed her first major wholesale account with L.A.’s Mohawk General Store, followed by Steven Alan in New York. “Those two stores were the best marketing and accounts I could have asked for,” she says.

In 2010, Vivier hired her first employee (she now has 55), and opened her flagship in a sunny spot on Sunset Boulevard in Silver Lake in 2012. Today, she has seven boutiques throughout New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. “We’ve done everything at a very organic pace.”

“I don’t know if it’s superstitious or not, but I don’t know if I have ‘made it,’ ” says Vivier, who admits that there have been plenty of “pinch me” moments throughout her career—like the time she was introduced to one of her childhood fashion idols, model Amber Valletta, who happened to be wearing one of Vivier’s bags in the brand’s infancy.

“I run a business, and I am still happy I get to do what I love, and employ a team of wonderful people in our studio,” she says. “It’s like a dream come true.”

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STEPHANIE GILMORE

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Stephanie Gilmore is a six-time world surfing champion; she won her first by entering as a virtual unknown, then taking the greatest title in professional surfing. The 30-year-old world champion is quick to give credit where credit is due—to her coach, who happens to be her father. “As a kid, I had an excellent teacher and surfing role model: my dad. However, my two sisters and I didn’t really have a choice in the matter—we were taken to the beach,” says Gilmore. “He lived and breathed the salt air and the ocean, and because he led by example, I was introduced to it in a fun way rather than, ‘Here’s what to do, you’re going to be a pro.’ ” She was about 7 years old when her first informal surfing lessons started and “really got into it. Some of my best and earliest memories are from paddling myself out and back and pulling my father around,” she says.

Though it started as a hobby, Gilmore says she eventually was overwhelmed by the same surfing passion as her dad. “I played all the other sports—hockey, soccer,” she says. “But surfing just consumed me. It was the first thing I’d think about in the morning and the last thing I thought about when I was going to bed, still covered in sunscreen and saltwater.” At school, she says she was “constantly in fear of missing good waves.” And at 12, she made a decision: “Surfing was what I wanted to do with my life.”

Luckily, growing up on the coast of Australia made that goal a little easier to achieve. “As a teenager, I’d skip school and sneak on the public bus to go surf Snapper Rocks, my favorite wave,” she says. “Nearby, in Coolangatta, was an abundance of world-class surfers.” There, she got even more essential training, in the form of observing her fellow athletes. “When you watch someone surf, you can really notice when they’re actually just feeling it and not forcing things,” she says. “As a kid, I would sometimes try to force maneuvers—my thoughts were just ahead of where my actual body was. Someone once said to me, ‘Hey, you really need to read the wave,’ and from that moment on, I’ve always used that to my advantage,” she says. “Reading the wave is about being ready to adapt—every single wave breaks differently, so I’m changing every split second, reading how fast the wave is breaking and how to fit in certain maneuvers.”

Surfing isn’t just a brute-force movement, says Gilmore, “it’s an art form. It’s not like there’s a specific finish line” she says. “It’s about the way you paint a picture on the wave, and it reflects whatever you’re going through at the time. You can see it in how they’re paddling. You can see when people are a little bit frustrated, or they’ve had a bad day. And you see people just stoked to be out there. The ocean kind of reflects what you’re feeling.”

Technique-wise, Gilmore is often praised for her effortless, elegant style. It’s one she adapted after watching her peers and idols, then finding her own path. “Surfing is definitely a male-dominated industry, and has been for a long time,” she says. “As a young girl, I looked up to both female and male surfers, but mostly to men, because that’s how I was trying to surf. I think that helped make me more of a balanced surfer. I’m not pro-woman or pro-man—I’m just like a creature in the ocean, which is a special thing.”

2018 marks Gilmore’s 11th year on tour with the World Surf League, which can be a mixed blessing. “I get a real kick out of paddling out in front of thousands of people and performing on this stage, the ocean,” she says. “I’m a pretty relaxed and happy person, but realistically, to win these events, you have to be ferocious,” she says. “I have to go into competitions as if I haven’t eaten for months and my opponent is my meal,” she says, before hesitating. “I feel like I’m giving you all my secrets . . .”

She’ll need that fierce spirit even more in about two years. As you may know, surfing was approved as an Olympic sport for the 2020 Tokyo games. Watching it transform from a niche culture to a mainstream event has been, for Gilmore, a fascinating and odd experience. “At first, it was a little scary. The Olympics is a huge platform and surfing is such a spiritual experience; people think it will end the purity of the sport, but I think it’ll shine a light on how wonderful surfing is, and introduce it to an entirely new audience.”

Her father’s influence is undeniable, though his lessons permeated more than just Gilmore’s sports technique. “When I was a kid, I remember dinging up my surfboard on some rocks,” she says. “And I said, ‘Oh no, what am I going to do?!’ I remember him saying, ‘Don’t worry, it’ll make you go faster.’ I’ve never forgotten that. We really do sweat so much small stuff, and I try to appreciate the fact that no matter what, we’re just pieces of dust floating across the Earth. We’re supposed to do what we do well, make a positive impact on others and be on our journey into the next ball of energy, wherever that is.”

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STACEY GRIFFITH

Posted on by Stephanie Janssen

In 2006, Stacey Griffith was working as a fitness instructor, holding down several different jobs, when she made a very important new contact. She met Elizabeth Cutler, who had dreamed up a new type of cycling gym. Spinning had been around for about a decade at the time but didn’t have much momentum, especially on the East Coast. “Elizabeth took my class in the Hamptons, and we just fell in love with each other’s spirit,” says Griffith. “She said, ‘We’re not open yet, but I’d love for you to teach for us when we are. In about October of the same year, I got the call and moved to New York City. We had 26 bikes in a former funeral parlor.” That little gym? SoulCycle, which now has 84 locations across the country.

SoulCycle has, of course, become more than just a place to burn off calories. It’s a cultural phenomenon—a nationally recognized name, shorthand for a workout that’s not just a workout but an immersive emotional experience. “I think we nurture and motivate and inspire people,” says Griffith. “We ask people to—for 45 minutes, three days a week—spend time aligning their thoughts, their heart rate and their lungs, and answer questions about how they want to live. When you line up all those different pathways, that’s when you actually create change in your life.”

Griffith says she was essentially “raised by coaches,” given how much time she spent playing sports as a kid. “My mom says that I came out of the womb swinging a tennis racket,” she jokes. At age 18, Griffith landed her first teaching job in a YMCA, when she was asked to teach an abs class. “Once I got a taste of being in charge of the music and the activity, it really snapped in my head that I wanted to be a fitness instructor.” She took her first spin class at age 27 and started to lead classes two years later. And teaching is clearly an innate talent for Griffith: Midway through our interview, she leads me through a quick alignment and breathing exercise.

She’s come a long way since that first YMCA class, both in her skills and on a personal level. “Before SoulCycle, I was not a sober-living person,” says Griffith. “There were times when I’d show up places high on drugs, hungover or drunk. But in the last 11 years of my sobriety, I can guarantee you that 99.9 percent of the time I walk through that door, I am bringing my best self. SoulCycle was the opportunity of a lifetime, and I think I matched that opportunity by cutting out the things that were making my life not great. Friends who remember my wild days are like, ‘Oh man, I miss crazy Stacey.’ She was fun, but this Stacey is one who’ll always show up for you. That’s the best feeling ever.”

Another great feeling? Inspiring women to follow in her foot pedals. “Now there are so many females leading the way; I hope that I can reach young girls who might want to pursue a career in fitness. I’ve written a book. I’ve opened studios. I’ve been working to impact lives.”

Griffith, who now teaches close to 900 classes a year, has a slew of fond career memories, including touring with Oprah on “The Life You Want” and speaking about branding at Columbia Business School. The latter was especially impactful for her. “It was crazy,” she says, “because I was a high school dropout. And I had so much shame about my lack of education. But after teaching for 20 years and helping create this brand, I stepped out of that shame box. My self-awareness has elevated to a whole new level.”

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AMY CAPPELLAZZO

Posted on by Stephanie Janssen

IF ANYONE EVER DOUBTED THE EXTENT OF MONEY FLOWING IN AND OUT OF THE ART WORLD, THEY HAD BUT TO LEARN OF THE RECORD $450 MILLION AUCTION SALE IN MID-NOVEMBER OF LEONARDO DA VINCI’S SALVATOR MUNDI PAINTING. OR THEY COULD CHECK IN WITH PROMINENT ART EXECUTIVE AMY CAPPELLAZZO. A MAJOR PLAYER IN THE HIGH-END ART MARKET, IN 2014 CAPPELLAZZO LEFT CHRISTIE’S AUCTION HOUSE, WHERE SHE WAS CHAIRMAN OF POST-WAR & CONTEMPORARY DEVELOPMENT, TO CO-FOUND ART AGENCY, PARTNERS, A WIDE-RANGING ART ADVISORY BUSINESS. AFTER IT WAS ACQUIRED BY SOTHEBY’S AUCTION HOUSE IN JANUARY 2016, CAPPELLAZZO EMERGED AS CHAIRMAN OF SOTHEBY’S NEW FINE ART DIVISION.

BARBARA ISENBERG: Let’s start where you started, in Buffalo, New York. Were you interested in art as a child?

AMY CAPPELLAZZO: My hometown had a superb museum, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, which had a great collection and which I loved. I had a sense of wonder about art, and it was a great inspiration to me as a child. I had a curiosity about making art, but the history and legacy of art was more interesting to me. I pretty much knew early on that I would be more successful on this side of the business.

BI: You began your art career in Miami?

AC: That was the beginning of my real art career, for sure. I had gone to NYU as an undergraduate, worked in New York for a time and gone to graduate school there. But I felt sometimes you have to leave New York, which can be an overwhelming place where it’s hard to find your voice. I liked that Miami at that time was very much a city in the making, and it was fun to be part of its becoming a global city in the cultural arena.

BI: Do you recall what your early career goals were around that time?

AC: Definitely. To make art happen, rather than to make art.

BI: How did you go about making art happen? The art world, like so many other industries, has always seemed to me like a boys’ club. Was there some success that made the next success happen, or people who were encouraging you?

AC: I don’t know about momentum. Sometimes you make life happen and sometimes life happens to you. I have always been a firm believer that you make life happen and sometimes things happen to you, but if they’re not good, you make them “unhappen.” I have a sense of foolishly thinking I can control my destiny a little bit.

BI: What are your own personal art interests?

AC: I’ve always been interested in living artists, and I’ve always been interested in pivotal moments in art history, when artists changed the course of things. I’m always interested in artists who work on the periphery and stayed with their concepts even though they didn’t have a market or academic recognition.

BI: Could you give me an example of any of these artists?

AC: For example, a lot of the women artists who are currently getting their due worked for years and years in absentia, without any prospect of financial success in their lives. Now, a lot of them are getting their due, and that’s really fantastic.

BI: What do you think changed?

AC: One change is greater recognition of people from other parts of the world and other backgrounds. There is also the desire of art history to expand its canon and the desire of the market to have more inventory to sell.

BI: How would you describe the art market these days?

AC: I feel the art market is in a moment of massive disruption, and that’s a very exciting place to be. It’s a very exciting time to be a part of this industry, because the marketplace is in constant reconfiguration, recharacterization and redefinition.

BI: Could you elaborate on how all that spurred you and art advisor Allan Schwartzman to start Art Agency, Partners?

AC: We saw a gap in service that wasn’t being filled in the art world. Collectors had questions or needs, and one particular entity couldn’t be a full-service entity. There was also a different kind of data and information that collectors were yearning for. I could see that for someone to make a decision to spend many millions of dollars, certain kinds of information were needed or would be useful to help guide that collector. It was hard to go to one place and get all that information. You could get it from a variety of different sources, but it was a lot of work.

BI: What did Art Agency, Partners bring to the table?

AC: I think typically you have a lawyer who does one thing, and you have a financial advisor who gives you a different kind of advice. You have a dealer or friend in the art world who sells you things or helps you sell things when you want to sell them. Ours was the concept of a full-stop shop.

BI: How do you help people curate a collection that’s both personal and right for them?

AC: You want them to be comfortable starting the process, so you want to see what they are guided by or what tastes they have and work with some impression of what you think they’re going to like. If they’re really attracted to Picasso, you wouldn’t tell them “No, you should buy these minimal sculptures.” You take who they are and what they like and you help them become very sophisticated about it using market data and information about works of art and their value, and collection management.

BI: What about the notion of encouraging love of art as well as seeing it as an asset or commodity?

AC: For centuries, art has been collected because it’s been desired and loved. People should always retain that feeling about art. It also has turned into a proper asset class, so you can take a calculating view of it and forget the personal passion, but why do that?

BI: As you help clients with estate planning, are you also encouraging them to think about the legacy side of leaving their collections to museums?

AC: I think a great collection is certainly a way to leave a legacy. There are lots of ways to leave a legacy, as we know, and there are very few ways that are as much fun in the process as art collecting.

BI: I’ve noticed in interviewing very successful artists that many today are thinking more about what they do with all the money they’re making. This seems relatively new to me.

AC: It is relatively new as a service, and we have an artist advisory division so we can help artists structure their own estates and think of their own legacies with their work. Normally you would go to your dealer or lawyer, but never the twain shall meet. But a lot of artists with big markets are getting to a certain age or certain station in life where they want to consider what to do next. We’ve been very quickly successful in that arena, so it shows we’re filling a need.

BI: What’s next?

AC: I don’t know. I’m just going to grow what we have for a while.

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Posted in Art