Marissa Vosper: Co-Founder of Negative Underwear

Katie Sturino is the founder of Megababe, the innovative beauty brand known for nontoxic, cult-favorite products like Thigh Rescue and Bust Dust. She's also a body-acceptance advocate with a highly engaged community of close to one million supporters across platforms. Sturino joined Hillary Kerr on Second Life back in 2020 to talk about her winding career path from PR to social media to beauty (listen to her first episode here), but we had to have her back on to discuss her most recent pivot to fiction writing. In this episode, Sturino shares why she decided to write her debut novel, Sunny Side Up, and gets refreshingly candid about the challenges of continuing to transform your career when everyone has feedback. She opens up about what it's like to work with a ghostwriter and where she hopes to take this creative endeavor moving forward. Of course, she also catches us up on the last five years of bootstrapped growth for Megababe and shares what's on the horizon for the business. Buy Sturino's new book, Sunny Side Up, here! (It's Hillary Kerr approved.)

Ann Foley is the costume designer behind the grounded and detailed wardrobes of the hit show The Last of Us. In this episode, Foley (whose extensive career also includes work on Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and She Hulk) sits down with Who What Wear Senior Fashion and Social Media Editor Tara Gonzalez to discuss the costume design process for The Last of Us season 2. Foley shares the journey of developing character-driven styles, the inspiration behind the apocalyptic fashion and how it reflected the different environments, and the subtle styling changes that marked character growth after a five-year time jump. She reveals the challenges of costuming an apocalyptic world, why The Last of Us is technically a period piece, the significance of specific items like Joel's jacket and Ellie's Converse, and the collaborative process with actors and showrunners that brought the characters to life.

Shannon Watts is the founder of Moms Demand Action, a prominent grassroots organization fighting gun violence in the United States. She initially aspired to be an investigative journalist, and she earned a journalism degree but transitioned into a career in public relations, spending nearly two decades in corporate communications at companies like Anthem and GE Healthcare. After taking a step back from her career to become a stay-at-home mom, the Sandy Hook tragedy in 2012 spurred her into action, and she founded Moms Demand Action with a simple Facebook group. Leveraging her communications and branding expertise, she transformed the group into a powerful nationwide movement, now part of Everytown for Gun Safety, the largest gun violence prevention organization in the country, with nearly 11 million supporters. She has since been recognized as one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People and a Forbes 50 Over 50 Changemaker. She’s also authored books including Fight Like a Mother and Fired Up. Buy Shannon’s new book here.

Emilia Wickstead is a New Zealand–born, London-based fashion designer known for her refined yet playful approach to feminine dressing. Since launching in 2008, she’s evolved her namesake brand from a made-to-measure model to producing seasonal ready-to-wear collections, shown at London Fashion Week for the past 13 years, and expanded into bridalwear. In this episode, Wickstead joins Senior Fashion Editor Anna LaPlaca to discuss her early design influences, the trademarks of an Emilia Wickstead piece, and how she selects artistic muses for her cinematic collections. Wickstead also shares which pieces to shop from her pre-fall collection and details on her upcoming collaborations with the Palm Heights Hotel and Paperless Post.

Jessica Malaty Rivera is an infectious disease epidemiologist and science communicator renowned for making complex public health information accessible, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. While initially premed at USC, she pivoted to studying health promotion and disease prevention, and worked in the nonprofit sector after college. She was later recruited to research emerging biological threats at Georgetown University and simultaneously decided to pursue a master’s degree there in biohazardous threat agents and emerging infectious diseases. While she’s always loved science, she began to realize that where she truly excelled was in “speaking science.” And the deeper Rivera got into infectious disease epidemiology—whether through work or academia—the more she realized how critical the communications aspect of science was to public health. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, she joined The Atlantic to lend her expertise to the COVID Tracking Project to provide publicly available, comprehensive data on COVID-19 cases in real time. She then began using Instagram to explain and interpret global health news, unexpectedly gaining a large following for her easy-to-understand information. Over the past five years, she has grown her platform, launched a Substack, and is currently completing a Doctorate in Public Health from Johns Hopkins University, all while remaining dedicated to science facts and public health literacy.