Harri Magaldi is the founder of My Neighbors, a regenerative skincare brand built on beef tallow, seven ingredients or fewer, and single-origin sourcing from Hudson Valley farms. She was a derivatives trader at Morgan Stanley and UBS — the only woman on a desk of 13 men — until she left after maternity leave. Her daughter's eczema is the reason the company exists.
She started in her kitchen, launched at the Hudson farmers market as "the cancellation girl," and made $4,000 on her first morning. An Anthropologie buyer found her there. Two and a half years later she's in roughly 500 stores and forecasting over a thousand.
This one is unusually open about the numbers: margins in the nineties, a 28–32% six-week reorder rate against a beauty average of 20, $13–22 CAC, $109 AOV, and why she's deliberately unprofitable. We get into why she still manufactures in-house, the by-product loop that pays her local farmers twice, the $45,000 Oprah box that got a no, the 534-door deal that vanished, and the six-figure Black Friday that let her write herself a paycheck for the first time.
⏱️ Timestamps
00:00 — Cold open
00:12 — Intro: The Margin Room
01:33 — Meet Harri Magaldi, founder of My Neighbors
02:31 — Why beef tallow, and why the timing worked
03:41 — What's quietly stressing her out
05:54 — Why manufacturing stays in-house
06:48 — The by-product loop that pays farmers twice
09:13 — Her daughter's eczema and leaving Wall Street
12:34 — Business plan or desperate mom?
14:17 — "The cancellation girl": $4,000 on day one
16:26 — The dark horse: getting hired at Morgan Stanley
19:56 — How a derivatives brain runs a skincare brand
21:48 — Metrics-driven growth vs a community-led brand
24:55 — Margins in the nineties
26:59 — Price accessibility and "girl math"
31:38 — Building their own subscriptions instead of paying $24k a year
33:17 — The numbers: reorder rate, CAC, AOV, LTV
34:41 — Three full-timers, equity, and a fractional C-suite
35:45 — $2M this year, forecasting $15M in 2027
37:19 — The 534-door deal that vanished
39:58 — Where she's still the bottleneck
47:25 — Snail mail at a 98% open rate
50:12 — The $45,000 Oprah box
53:26 — Showing up in person: the Texas road trip
58:00 — The fear underneath it all
1:00:43 — What she'd do differently
1:01:54 — Where to find Harri
🔗 Connect with Harri: Website: myneighbors.co | Instagram: @myneighbors.co | TikTok: @myneighbors.co
🔗 Connect with Shopé: Instagram: @allofshope | LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mosope-adeyemi-b5418a14b/
The Margin Room is an ecommerce podcast for early-stage DTC founders building from zero to seven figures, presented by Building Block Digital, a world-class retention agency for 6-8 figure brands.
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