Amy Peterson survived a near-fatal accident at 18 — and turned that experience into a 20-year career as one of the most trusted names in aesthetics. Known as "the Skincare Savant," Amy is a celebrity aesthetician, owner of two Miami-based clinics, and founder of Lennox & 16th, a luxury clinical-grade skincare line built on the treatments she uses in her own practice.

In this episode, Natasha and Amy talk about how that accident shaped her empathy and her drive, why most "new" beauty devices boil down to just 12 or 13 base technologies, and the strict rule she follows before launching any product: if it isn't demonstrably better than what already exists, it doesn't ship. They also get into the Botox and filler boom, what actually makes a brand work, and a quickfire round covering her desert-island product, her best career advice, and who she's professionally jealous of.

Whether you're curious about skincare, building a beauty brand, or just love a good resilience story, this one delivers.

Follow Professional Jealousy for more conversations with founders, creatives, and business leaders redefining their industries.

Wölffer Estate Vineyard started on Hamptons potato fields in the 1980s, when Christian Wölffer's dream of a Long Island vineyard was such a long shot that he had to lure his own winemaker across the Atlantic with a small exaggeration — Roman was told the estate was "20 minutes from New York City." (It's closer to four hours in traffic.) The winery's first rosé, released in 1992, was so pink and so sweet that Zinfandel drinkers called it disgusting. Today, that rosé's descendant — the now-iconic Summer in a Bottle — is one of the most copied labels in wine, and the business has grown from 20,000 cases a year to 300,000.

In this episode of Professional Jealousy, host Natasha Jakubowski talks with Joey Wölffer, Chief Brand Officer and co-owner of Wölffer Estate Vineyard, about the hungover, middle-of-the-night decision at 27 that led her to buy into her father's struggling business instead of selling it, how she and her brother rebuilt the brand around the "soul" of the Hamptons rather than the wine itself, and why she recently turned down an acquisition offer from a much bigger company to protect what she'd built.

A Hungover Decision Not to Sell

When her father died, Joey was 27, building a career in fashion, and leaning toward selling the family winery. Her mother and older brother, Marc, talked her out of it. "I remember the moment I was lying in bed — I was, to be honest, hungover," she says. "My mom and Max were like, you're not selling... you're just doing it because you think it's what's right, but in the end you'll really regret it." Marc, whom she barely knew growing up, told her, "Nothing would make me happier than being your partner." Looking back, she credits naivety as much as conviction: "If that happened to me now, no way I would have taken that chance. The business was not making money."

Designing the Brand Around a Place, Not a Product

Rather than starting with the wine, Joey built the brand around the Hamptons itself. "We need to make the soul of this brand the history of the area," she says. "What does this area mean? It's creativity, it's curiosity, it's artists." Summer in a Bottle came out of a three-hour conversation at a pub in East London with a designer her husband tracked down: "We sat there talking about the area and the brand and my family and the history, and became so connected. And he just got it." There was no research behind it — "There was no board. There was no industry research. It was just: cider is big in England, and Wölffer is summer in a bottle."

The Label Everyone Copies but No One Can Replicate

Summer in a Bottle's floral artwork became one of the most imitated designs in wine. "I've seen a version of that bottle everywhere," Joey says, "but nobody can actually do the artwork, because it's actually printed on the bottle." Her advice for tuning out the copycats flooding the rosé category is blunt: "Don't try to be them. Don't even look at them. Don't even engage with them. You keep doing what we're doing."

Turning Down a Buyer to Protect the Brand

As Wölffer scaled from a boutique tasting room into Whole Foods and California's Pavilions grocery chain, Joey says she's had to actively guard against consolidation. "We had somebody come to us recently... they were like, well, we're huge," she recalls. "This is my brand, and I have to protect it. Would you hurt my brand? Yes. Is it worth it for what comes of that? Probably not."

Rejecting the "Founder Is Sexy" Myth

Joey pushes back on how entrepreneurship gets marketed online. "I think social media is such b.s. in the way that they present these founders," she says. "Why don't you present the other side — the tears, the fights — that makes a lot of founders feel a lot better?" Asked about the single biggest misconception about being a founder, her answer is one word: "That it's sexy."

April Gargiulo, founder and CEO of Vintner's Daughter, joins Professional Jealousy to share how growing up in a Napa Valley winemaking family shaped her approach to skincare — and why she's released just three products in twelve years, each one taking three to six weeks to formulate from whole plants.

April walks host Natasha Jakubowski through the early days of building Vintner's Daughter: convincing skeptical labs to break from decades of standard practice, hand-packing the brand's first 500-bottle run herself, and growing an entirely word-of-mouth following — "girlfriend to girlfriend" — with no paid advertising, ever. She also explains why Vintner's Daughter's nutritional skincare formulas reject the beauty industry's "anti-aging" and "fix and correct" messaging, what it takes to scale a luxury brand without compromising quality, and her vision to build a heritage skincare company meant to last for generations, not one built to sell.

They close with a look at what's next for the brand — the limited-edition Understory scent and the new Active Renewal Cleanser — and April's honest answer to the question: who is she professionally jealous of?

In this episode:

• How a wine country upbringing shaped Vintner's Daughter's three-to-six-week formulation process
• Why April built a cult beauty brand on just three products instead of constant new SKUs
• The word-of-mouth growth strategy behind one of skincare's most talked-about brands
• Why Vintner's Daughter avoids "anti-aging" and "corrective" beauty marketing language
• What's next: the Understory scent and the new Active Renewal Cleanser
• Who April Gargiulo is professionally jealous of

Full show notes and timestamps at professionaljealousy.com.

Professional Jealousy is hosted by Natasha Jakubowski, Chief Innovation Officer at Anomaly, a global marketing agency, featuring candid conversations with the founders, CEOs, and creatives she's lucky enough to talk to — and a little envious of. New episodes every week.

MC Gasco-Buisson spent 23 years at P&G before becoming CEO of Pandora's design business, and now leads Unilever Prestige — the house of beauty brands behind Hourglass, K18, Dermalogica, Tatcha, and Paula's Choice.

Natasha talks with MC about what actually makes a brand worth scaling, why emotion and storytelling matter even more in luxury than in CPG, how founder-led brands like Dermalogica get built right, and where she's applying AI in the business (and where she's deliberately not).

They also get into MC's own career philosophy, and how she spent 23 years at one company without job-hopping, moving from chemical engineering into marketing, and the side business that didn't work out but taught her the most.

Plus: her desert island beauty product, the best and worst career advice she's ever received, and who she's still professionally jealous of.

Professional Jealousy is hosted by Natasha Jakubowski, Chief Innovation Officer at Anomaly. New episodes feature founders, CEOs, and creatives she admires — and is a little jealous of.

Vanessa Phillips, co-founder and CEO of Feel Good Foods, joins Professional Jealousy to share how a celiac disease diagnosis in college — and a doctor's advice to give up on food entirely — became the origin story for one of the fastest-growing gluten-free frozen food brands in the country. Vanessa walks through her path from growing up in her family's New York bagel and Chinese restaurant business, to opening the gluten-free café Friedman's in Chelsea Market, to mailing homemade gluten-free pot stickers to Whole Foods in a Ziploc bag and landing a regional launch just months later.

In this conversation, Vanessa gets candid about the early bootstrapped years demoing product in Whole Foods aisles for months on end, the manufacturing mistake that nearly derailed the brand's first production run, and how she built a company culture around grit, generalist skill-building, and staying close to the consumer. She also opens up about the mentor who shaped her mindset, the tools she uses to stay grounded as a founder, and who she's most professionally jealous of today.

Whether you're building a CPG brand, working in food and beverage, or just love a founder story rooted in personal struggle turned purpose, this episode is packed with real, tactical lessons on category creation, scaling from founder to CEO, and building a brand that can grow with you instead of boxing you in.

In this episode:

• Building a gluten-free frozen food brand from a personal health diagnosis
• Creating a new grocery category from scratch
• Bootstrapping a CPG brand without outside capital
• Lessons from a costly early manufacturing mistake
• Mentorship, mindset, and staying grounded as a founder
• How the gluten-free consumer has evolved into the mainstream "curious consumer"
• Who Vanessa Phillips is professionally jealous of

Watch, subscribe, and follow Professional Jealousy on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube for more conversations with founders, CEOs, and creatives redefining their industries.

In this episode I chat with Richard Christiansen, the founder of Flamingo Estate. Richard shares his journey from running Chandelier, a high-end fashion and luxury advertising agency in New York City, to building a global lifestyle brand almost by accident. After facing severe burnout, Richard escaped to Los Angeles just as COVID-19 hit. What started as a chaotic effort to help a local farmer sell her vegetables out of his bookstore quickly transformed into a thriving bath, body, and agricultural empire.

Richard discusses the grueling reality of raising capital, the deliberate choice to choose pleasure over his successful marketing business, and what it takes to protect the intimacy and authenticity of a brand as it scales. As we chatted, I was inspired and also increasingly convinced that Richard is savvily building a new type of luxury lifestyle brand that could become of force globally.

Key Themes:

1. Fiercely "Acting Small - Big brands often lose their magic because they get too self-conscious and safe. Richard keeps Flamingo Estate intimate by writing all company copy himself, rejecting AI in customer service, and managing operations internally. Staying intentionally small protects the brand's soul.

2. Selling Pleasure, Not Sustainability - Consumers quickly tune out dry environmental lectures. Flamingo Estate uses strict regenerative sourcing, but hooks customers through design, hedonism, and sensuality. The brand wins by framing pleasure—not sustainability—as a basic human right.

3. Rewriting the Scaling Playbook - Scaling a business that mixes low-margin agriculture with high-margin beauty means ignoring traditional venture capital advice. Richard survived 162 investor rejections, triple-mortgaged his home, and ignored pressure to drop the food items to protect his multi-dimensional vision.

Richard was professionally jealouse of Jane Goodall who met after reading her book and cold-calling her foundation to offer her pro-bono services. Richard admired her work, and how she ran a massive global organization dedicated to changing the world, all while leading with unparalleled grace, kindness, and quiet power. In fact, it was Jane Goodall who delivered the final push for Flamingo Estate, telling Richard to take everything he learned from "selling people shit they don't need" and use it to do something genuinely good for the planet.

Check out https: https://flamingoestate.com/

How do you turn a traditional tile game into a $40,000,000 business without taking a single dollar of venture capital?

In this episode of Professional Jealousy, Natasha Jakubowski (Chief Innovation Officer at Anomaly) chats with Megan Trottier, the entrepreneurial force behind Oh My Mahjong (OMM). Megan shares her blueprint for scaling an ultra-fast-growing consumer brand. From realizing a product failed because it was ahead of its time, to building an army of local brand ambassadors that unlocked the wholesale market, this is a masterclass in modern brand building, marketing, and the art of the business pivot. If you are a founder, creator, or marketeer looking to understand how to build authentic demand and a lifestyle category from scratch, this episode is for you. 🔔

Subscribe for more deep dives into business innovation and founder stories!

Check out Oh My Mahjong: https://ohmymahjong.com/

If you are completely exhausted by national political noise and panic-driven fundraising spam, you are looking at the wrong political map.

On this episode of Professional Jealousy, Anomaly’s Chief Innovation Officer Natasha Jakubowski sits down with Daniel Squadron (former NY State Senator, Co-founder and Executive Director of The States Project, and author of the new book The Fourth Branch) and Melissa Walker (Head of Giving Circles at The States Project) to explore how true political power can be reclaimed from the ground up.

As Melissa puts it: "We work not where the glamour is, just where the power is." 💡By bypassing traditional, top-down political gatekeepers and focusing directly on community grassroots, The States Project has engineered a model that allows everyday friend circles to completely shift the balance of power in state capitols. They have taken complex, intimidating political systems and turned them into a simple, collaborative math problem that trusted social networks can solve together.

Tune in to discover how a former state lawmaker and a novelist teamed up to demystify power, break right-wing supermajorities on razor-thin margins, and prove that real change starts right within your own social circle.

Key topics include:

00:00 – Intro: The Illusion of Federal Power

04:15 – Why Daniel Left the State Senate to Build a Movement

11:30 – Enter Melissa Walker: Translating Politics into Human Stories

18:45 – What is a Giving Circle? (And Why It Beats Traditional Campaigns)

27:10 – The ROI of Grassroots Dollars: State vs. National

36:15 – Overcoming Cynicism: How to Build a Brand People Trust

44:30 – Outro & How to Take Action

Check out:

https://statesproject.org/

And look for 'The Fourth Brand: How State Governments Can Save Our Union' by Daniel Squadron, Co-Founder of The States Project

https://statesproject.org/fourthbranch/

Six months into launching her clean luxury fragrance brand, NETTE, Sephora slid into Carol Han Pyle's DMs.

In this episode of Professional Jealousy, host Natasha Jakubowski (Chief Innovation Officer at Anomaly) sits down with Carol to discuss her wild journey from fashion editor at Elle to beauty mogul. Carol shares the raw reality of building a physical product business, the supply chain nightmares that cost her six months of revenue, and why she chose to keep her business 100% bootstrapped. If you've ever wanted to know what it really takes to get onto the shelves of Sephora, and stay there. This episode is a masterclass in resilience, brand clarity, and creative intuition.✨

What we cover:

- How a pandemic client-loss sparked a luxury beauty brand.

- The concept of functional fragrance: Blending poetry with neuroscience.

- Why your brand message needs to be simple before you ever touch social media.

- The operational hurdles of "hardware vs. software" businesses.

- Carol's advice for corporate giants who have lost their connection to consumers.

Subscribe for more behind-the-scenes interviews with founders, CEOs, and creatives we are secretly (and professionally) jealous of!

Checkout:https://nettenyc.com/

In this episode of Professional Jealousy, Natasha Jakubowski chats with Richard Mumby, CEO of Wip, to discuss the birth of the next generation energy pouch. Richard shares his journey from DTC pioneers like Gilt and Bonobos to the front lines of category disruption at Juul, and how those experiences informed the launch of Wip.We dive into why liquid caffeine is failing specific consumer groups—from marathon runners to construction workers—and how Wip is using a "product-first" mentality to mask the bitterness of caffeine while building a brand that feels like a "witch’s cauldron of Red Bull, GoPro, and Supreme."Whether you’re an entrepreneur interested in retail velocity or just someone looking for that 25th hour in the day, Richard’s insights on building movements and the "set by 40" career trajectory are not to be missed.Key Themes[00:00] – Introduction: Meeting Richard Mumby and the Wip origin story.[01:58] – The "Zyn" Effect: Why pouches are the next generational shift in consumption.[03:55] – Solving the Liquid Problem: Bloating, spills, and the "biological" bathroom issue.[07:02] – Product vs. Marketing: The science of masking caffeine’s bitterness.[09:32] – Pilot to Launch: Transitioning from LFGO to the global brand identity of Wip.[14:19] – The Brief: Combining the DNA of Red Bull, GoPro, and Supreme.[17:26] – Lessons from Juul & Gilt: Using culture to create a category.[20:40] – Retail Strategy: Why "retail velocity" matters more than vanity metrics.[33:07] – Career Philosophy: Why your trajectory is often "set by 40."[38:25] – Superpowers: The art of building movements and pulling people along.