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.

In this episode of Professional Jealousy, I sit down with someone I've admired since long before she became a CEO: MC Gasco-Bouisson. I first met MC years ago when she was at P&G Ventures — sharp, ambitious, and exactly the kind of client who kept your whole team on its toes. Since then, her path has taken her from CPG to prestige beauty and luxury, from P&G to Pandora to her current role as CEO of Unilever Prestige, the house of brands behind names like Hourglass, K18, Dermalogica, Tatcha, and Paula's Choice.

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 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.

EP.20 with Annie Jackson, co-founder and CEO of Credo Beauty, a pioneer in the clean beauty and retail space.

EP.17 with Jake Bullock, Co-Founder of Cann, the leading THC beverage. Cann is a trailblazer on a mission to change how we socialize with natural and delicious cannabis infused drinks that can help you feel social without alcohol.

Craig Dubitsky is a serial entrepreneur, having blazed a trail within CPG with disruptive, design-led brands like EOS, Hello Oral Care which he sold to Colgate, and most recently Happy Coffee co-founded with Robert Downey Jr.

Melissa Shin Mash is co-founder of Dagne Dover, the fashion and lifestyle brand.