I’ve been building brands since before I knew that’s what I was doing.

The beginning

The kid who knew the room mattered.

I was adopted. I spent time in foster care before finding my family — a family that gave me stability, love, and a front-row seat to the work of people who show up for others. My mother became the Executive Director at Head Start, and I spent a lot of my childhood volunteering alongside her. I watched her build programs, fight for resources, and bet everything on the idea that early access changes everything.

She was right. And I was paying attention.

What I absorbed from those years wasn’t a lesson about hardship. It was a lesson about access. About how the right teacher, the right program, the right environment — even the right computer — can quietly rewrite someone’s entire future.

“I understood early that where you are shapes who you become. So I started choosing my rooms very deliberately.”

When it came time for middle school and high school, I enrolled as a school-of-choice student at Amherst Regional. The town I grew up in — Bernardston, Massachusetts — was small, proud, and tight on resources. Amherst was different. Better-funded, more ambitious, more diverse in what it thought was possible. I knew I needed that environment, so I went and got it.

That decision — choosing to go to a better room before anyone told me I could — is the one I trace almost everything else back to.

The brand-building chapter

I met Mike in a marketing class. We built a candle empire.

His name was Mike Kittredge Jr. His father was Mike Kittredge — founder of Yankee Candle, one of the most successful consumer brands in New England history. We met in a marketing class at UMass Amherst, and somewhere between lectures on positioning and consumer behavior, we started talking about what we could build.

And we were doing it from one of the most extraordinary homes I’ve ever been in. Mike lived at Juggler Meadow — a massive estate in Amherst, Massachusetts that his father built. The place is legendary: an immaculately designed property that was the physical expression of what the Yankee Candle empire had made possible. Walking through it was its own education in what success could look like.

“Building at a table inside the estate of the man who built Yankee Candle — that sets a certain standard for what you think is possible.”

What we built was Kringle Candle — launched in Bernardston, Massachusetts — alongside The Farm Table restaurant. Two brands, one small town, and the kind of ambition that only makes sense when you’re young enough to not fully understand the odds. I was VP. I was also all-in.

Eventually, I was pushed out. I won’t dress that up. It happened. It hurt. And it changed the way I think about ownership, loyalty, and what it means to build something versus what it means to own something. Those aren’t always the same thing.