The co-lab career stories

A storyteller at heart, Phil is dedicated to supporting the LGBTQ community. Thus, they make use of their skills, talent, and experience to help others tell their stories. In that spirit, they lend their voice to narrate other people's messages as a voiceover artist. Hoping to help listeners connect with the moving stories, They are committed to telling each story with authenticity, honesty, and g...

Meghan Houle is a one-stop-shop for all things career pivots and personal development. She's a globally recognized Senior Executive Recruiter, an ACC accredited Professional Career & Business Master Coach, and host of the Pivot with Purpose Podcast. Meghan has spent the past 20+ years working in the luxury, specialty, and consumer retail industries, placing high-achievers in their dream jobs a...

Holly Cole is a retail executive with $3B in sales volume across companies including Neiman Marcus, Victoria’s Secret, Rue Gilt Groupe, as well as helping launch a DTC fashion startup. She has 20+ years’ experience driving merchandising strategies for eCommerce, DTC, brick & mortar, catalog and mobile. Holly has been able to transform businesses and drive multi-million-dollar growth through st...

In 2007 Kate Sheldon founded Fashioneering LLC;  a management consultancy working internationally across classifications advising brands, retailers, investors, and service providers in the luxury goods, affordable luxury, and sustainability spaces. Kate formally launched the Fashioneering Lab in January 2022.  A new division of her management consultancy comprised of a global team of ind...

Emerald Carroll is a New York based creative director and brand strategist driving desire and growth on a global scale. 15 years of expertise in storytelling, strategy, and brand-building across media for legacy and new brands in luxury, CPG, fashion, beauty, retail, and lifestyle. She has guided numerous disruptor brands through launch and lent counsel to heritage players such as Coach, Amazon, R...

Originally from Louisiana, Elizabeth studied International Business at Spring Hill College in Alabama and Spanish in Latin America. She resides with her children in Marin County, California, where she combines her business acumen, love of design, sustainability, fashion, food and horses in her luxury lifestyle brand, Stick & Ball. On this episode, she talks with Emerald Carroll about the inspi...

Kathryn Shah is the co-founder of Spring & Mulberry, a food-meets-wellness brand exploring a world of sweet beyond sugar. The company’s inaugural line our date-sweetened chocolate bars are topped with beautiful & fantastic-for-you ingredients, from mango with Urfa Chili to lavender with bee pollen, all with 0g added sugar. Kathryn was inspired to start the brand after a cancer diagnosis in...

Allison is the founder and creative director for Letter A, an all female-brand building agency based in Portland, Oregon. Allison’s love of branding comes from over 20 years of leading top tier, in-house creative marketing teams that were integral to capturing the essence of the brand from A-to-Z. Allison was the founding Design Director for the cult favorite brand, Kate Spade Saturday, led the re...

After a 12-year career focus on social media marketing for Fortune 50 companies including PepsiCo, Disney, and General Electric, and with storied brands across European luxury houses including LVMH, Kering, Richemont, and Chanel, Gina Gretchko launched her own consultancy which helps brands define and scale their content strategies to execution. Most recently, Gina built a best-in-class social med...

Grace is a brand-builder specializing in integrated marketing, content & social media within Fashion & Beauty. She has spent the last decade driving consumer engagement for iconic global brands, including growing Calvin Klein’s Instagram community from 500K to 15M+ through award-winning and culture-shaping content, and launching Laura Mercier digitally in the $106 billion Chinese beauty &a...

Maria is a New York based fashion expert and historian. Born and raised in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Although her love for fashion started very early in life reading every fashion magazine she would come across; Maria studied law. Realizing that albeit a great education it was not for her she perused her first Master in Fashion Management Experience and Design from SDA Bocconi in Milan similar to a...

Originally from Istanbul, Turkey, Turna started her career at Young and Rubicam Advertising many moons ago and continued her career around Madison Avenue until she decided to jump to client side. She has joined the auction mega house Sotheby’s in the Spring of 2016 and is continuing to hold global business executive positions in the company. Prior to Sotheby’s Turna held positions at the Fragrance...

Charlotte is a copy and content person raised in New York City by Condé Nast. She specializes in beauty and fashion, clear, crisp messaging and lots of energy. Let’s do something different together. In this episode, Charlotte talks with Katie Levine about how her experiences with beauty growing up led her into the industry, and her transitions between freelancing and working for one steady employe...

Katie Levine is a photographer new to the Phoenix area from NYC/LA. She got her start in the business through her internships at Vogue + being an assistant for Annie Leibovitz. Since launching on her own, she has worked with clients such as Kourtney Kardashian, Mary Fitzgerald of Selling Sunset, and Paper Magazine. Her goal is to make her subjects at ease while capturing high quality images. Since...

Daniella Stromberg grew up on the vibrant streets of NYC, in the full-spectrum technicolor of the 1970s. Her teachers described her as “delightfully social.” Anything and everything that made life cozier was and still is Daniella’s obsession. Luxe, chic, cozy and comfortable became her passion. Hotel lobby lounges were her favorite place to hang out and concentrate on getting homework done. It’s n...

Jenni Shaw is a freelance makeup artist with 15 years of production experience in New York City. In 2018 she started Shaw + Co., a boutique agency currently representing 8 phenomenal makeup artists for film, tv, advertising, fashion, celebrity, red carpet and runway. In March of this year Jenni became bicoastal and founded Zen Beauty in Sedona, Arizona. Zen is a company that combines allied therap...

Carmen is a New York-based designer born and raised in Mexico. She attended Parsons The New School for Design and graduated as a finalist for the ‘Designer of the Year’ Award, Class of 2015. Upon graduation, Gama’s ‘Sustainable Urban Outerwear’ thesis earned her the inaugural Eileen Fisher x CFDA Social Innovator fellowship. During her fellowship, Gama worked collaboratively to design a scalable a...

Lauren B Fay works with brands and non-profits for the benefit of people and planet. Her main passion is preventing textile and clothing waste. She designs circular initiatives for retail companies and brands, and helps connect the dots in the circular economy with the team at Helpsy. Her projects and events have been featured in Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, WWD, Refinery 29 and Sourcing Journ...

Originally from Russia, Rita came to the U.S. as a Fulbright Program’s Graduate Student to study journalism and communications. Prior to that, she was an associate fashion editor at Sobaka.ru magazine in St. Petersburg, Russia, and a freelance writer for advertising agencies. In addition to that, she was involved in event and entertainment industries helping with St. Petersburg Fashion Week and na...

Ilina Luthra is a 2022 graduate of MS Business of Fashion, from Rutgers Business School. She moved to New York City after working her way up from being a Marketing intern through her undergrad, to becoming an Assistant Manager of Marketing and Communications at Good Earth, India's most precious luxury lifestyle brand. On this episode, she talks with Rita Shmakova about her inside-Fashion podcast (...

Paula Haza, based in NYC, has recently launched her own global consultancy “Haza Global Partners” with the main goal of helping Brazilian/Latin brands to expand and grow their presence globally. Prior to pivoting into consulting she spent more than 15 years helping global apparel/retail brands expand their international presence. Paula worked at VF Corporation for 10 years, as Director of Internat...

Karin Dauch moved to New York in 1998 to attend Columbia School of Journalism and has transitioned from working as a foreign correspondent to helping people buy and sell their homes about 8 years ago. She speaks five languages, has three daughters, and is a board member of BrazilFoundation, a non-profit that gives grants and offers capacity training for social projects all over Brazil. A couple of...

Cecelia St. Clair Rembert is an artist based in Brooklyn, NY. She received an MFA in Painting from the New York Studio School in 2007, and has shown locally and nationally, in solo and group exhibitions, over the last 15 years. In addition to painting, Rembert has a passion for sustainability and agriculture and is a produce buyer at the Park Slope Food Coop. Her interests are far-reaching and inc...

With over 25 years of experience, Pam has worked with some of the largest fashion brands globally with major success in designing, developing, and implementing brand growth strategies. Spanning luxury to the mass sector, her expertise is in bringing aspirational appeal to brands and telling stories that resonate with audiences, alongside the marketing acumen to drive from community to commerce. Pr...

Yashica Dutt is the author of the non-fiction memoir, Coming Out as Dalit. It was recently awarded the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puruskar, 2020 (India’s National Academy of Letters’ Young Writers Award; among the country’s highest literary honors). Yashica Dutt is an emerging figure recognized for highlighting Dalit rights globally and her voice has been instrumental in understanding the realities of t...