Women In Wellness: Melissa Eamer of Modern Age on the Five Lifestyle Tweaks That Will Help Support People’s Journey Towards Better Wellbeing
An Interview With Candice Georgiadis
Most people are fairly risk averse. So, when you are hiring a team to build something that doesn’t yet exist, you have to paint a very clear vision and have a strong mission that they relate to.
As a part of my series about women in wellness, I had the pleasure of interviewing Melissa Eamer.
Melissa Eamer is the CEO of Modern Age, an evidence-based aging wellness platform that empowers people to take control of how they age. Prior to starting Modern Age, Melissa served as the COO for Glossier. Founded in 2014, Glossier is widely touted as one of the earliest breakout successes of the DTC model, and raised its Series E last July at a $1.8 billion valuation.
At Glossier, Melissa led teams responsible for e-commerce technology, offline retail development, digital innovation and revenue generation.
Before joining Glossier, Melissa spent 19 years at Amazon, most recently as Vice President of Amazon Devices, where she managed a team of over 800 people across engineering, product management, branding, marketing, demand planning and retail partnerships. Over the course of her career at Amazon, she held many different roles, across both retail leadership and product development and grew P&Ls from less than $1B to greater than $12B in annual revenue.
Melissa received her MBA from the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan and holds a BA in English from the University of Vermont. Prior to business school, Melissa owned and operated a restaurant in Richmond, Vermont. She lives in Seattle, Washington, with her husband and two daughters. She enjoys spending time outdoors racing and riding with an all-women cycling team.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Our readers would love to “get to know you” better. Can you share your “backstory” with us?
Thanks for having me! My interest in why people age differently began as I watched my mother and grandmother get older as I was growing up. I was curious as to how much of aging was due to genetics versus lifestyle, and if there was a reasoning behind why we age the way we do. I went to graduate school with the intention of getting into long-term care management but struggled to find any innovative companies in the space at that time (1998) who were willing to hire a newly minted MBA. So instead, I decided to take a job at a startup called Amazon as a product manager. I ended up spending the next 20 years there building new products, including Look Inside the Book, Kindle, and Echo. I learned an incredible amount over those years, but really missed being in a smaller company, and that curiosity and interest in aging had always been in the back of my mind. So I decided to start Modern Age, a holistic wellness company, with the mission of helping people take more control over how they age.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career? What were the main lessons or takeaways from that story?
When I worked at Amazon, I was asked to take over a project that was in real trouble. It was one of those ‘offers’ you couldn’t really refuse. Unfortunately, it was a very high-visibility project that had already experienced several public missteps. The team was under a tight timeline to fix the problem and deliver the product, so I felt an immense amount of pressure to quickly provide results. But as I dove into the work that had been done so far, it became clear that the team was incredibly demoralized and many didn’t have the necessary skills or experience for the task at hand. After a few very stressful days of thinking through my options, I realized I would have to deliver a very unpopular recommendation to my manager: I needed to push the launch out eight months so that I could make the team changes needed and start rebuilding. I laid out a balanced and realistic list of the risks and opportunities of trying to launch quickly versus taking the time to do it right, and thankfully, he trusted me. After hiring the right team, we built and launched the project on the timeline we committed to and it was a huge hit with customers.
This is one of the more interesting projects I worked on because it required a lot from me as a leader and taught me a great deal about how to motivate a team. The biggest lessons I took from the experience were:
You have to ask for what you need to be successful. If I had tried to hit the original delivery date with the team I inherited, I would have failed.
Having the right talent is critical, particularly in your leadership roles, because they allow you to do better work faster.
When you are tackling something hard, it’s really important to set a clear north star and remind people of where they are headed. You can never remind them of the mission and why their work is important too often.
Can you share a story about the biggest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
Early in my career at Amazon, one of the department leaders asked me to pull together a report to send to a partner. At the time, I thought the request was really strange–we did not typically share this type of reporting. But because the request came from a senior leader that I didn’t report to, I ignored my intuition, didn’t ask any questions, pulled together the information, and sent it out. It turned out that my intuition was correct — the information I shared was very strategically sensitive. In fact, my manager was almost fired over the incident. It was an important lesson about ownership to learn early on in my career — just because the request came from someone more senior, I still had a responsibility to speak up and ask questions.
Let’s jump to our main focus. When it comes to health and wellness, how is the work you are doing helping to make a bigger impact in the world?
We have spoken with hundreds of people through our research, and two things really stand out: 1) aging is a topic filled with anxiety, misinformation, and feelings of helplessness; and 2) people don’t know where to turn for advice and help.
The great news is that so much of how we age really is in our control–only 20–30% is based on genetics. There is a tremendous amount of research that suggests taking steps to feel younger can actually add many years to your lifespan. People who feel younger have better strength, brain function, and even healthier biomarkers. So our mission at Modern Age is to help eliminate that fear of aging, help people take steps to feel younger and ultimately live happier and longer lives.
Can you share your top five “lifestyle tweaks” that you believe will help support people’s journey towards better wellbeing? Please give an example or story for each.
- Optimize your sleep quality — Having high-quality sleep is essential to overall health. Establishing proper sleep hygiene is key, specifically minimizing exposure to screens within two hours of bedtime. For many people, supplementation can be helpful and melatonin can be a useful tool to ensure that people are able to fall asleep and stay asleep effectively.
- Proactively manage stress — The negative impacts of stress on the human body are now well established. Yet, it is nearly impossible to avoid stress in daily life. The best approach is to build in strategies to proactively address stress. Habits like daily meditation, gratitude journaling, and mindfulness can be very helpful in building up “reserves” to help handle stress when it inevitably comes. A useful supplement to boost your body’s ability to handle stress is Ashwagandha, which helps to control the response of your adrenal glands — the organs responsible for pumping out the stress hormone cortisol.
- Maintain healthy levels of key nutrients — specifically Vitamin D and Omega 3 — Eating a well-formulated diet free of refined carbohydrates and processed foods can go a long way toward giving your body the nutrients it needs. However, there are some that are hard to get sufficient amounts from diet and daily life. These are Vitamin D and Omega 3, both of which have been shown to be beneficial in a variety of ways, including strengthening the immune system, reducing inflammation, and controlling the risk of cardiovascular disease. Taking both supplements daily can be helpful in achieving and maintaining well-being.
- Correct meal timing — While there continues to be much debate about what foods to eat, the question of when to eat is a bit more clear. For example, research consistently finds that eating meals within 2 hours of sleeping causes weight gain and disturbs sleep quality. Therefore, it is important to give yourself time to digest prior to bed.
- Exercise with the right recovery regime — Most people know about the benefits of exercise, but fewer people think about recovery from exercise. Without the right recovery strategy, you don’t get as much benefit from the exercise you are doing. Using a post-workout massage gun or cold immersion (if you are up to it) can be very beneficial. Taking supplement creatine before or after workouts can also boost muscle recovery from exercise.
If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of wellness to the most amount of people, what would that be?
Empowering every individual to take control of their aging journey. I’d love to educate people on the options they have to age the way they want to, and that it is never too soon to start.
What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why?
Most people are fairly risk averse. So, when you are hiring a team to build something that doesn’t yet exist, you have to paint a very clear vision and have a strong mission that they relate to.
Starting something new is a bit like kayaking in the ocean on heavy seas — you will have lots of ups and downs that are often unpredictable and not within your control.
It’s really easy to get caught up in the day-to-day, so it is important to be intentional about spending time with people who can share diverse perspectives on whatever challenges you are facing.
Set interim goals that you can celebrate with your team–building a large sustainable business is something that takes years, so you need to find joy in the steps in between.
Remote work allows you to hire great talent wherever you find it but it also requires an extra and deliberate level of effort to keep everyone engaged and excited about what you are building.
Sustainability, veganism, mental health and environmental changes are big topics at the moment. Which one of these causes is dearest to you, and why?
I do think these are all important topics, but to me, mental health really stands out. As a society, we have collectively been through so much in the past few years and I think it has taken its toll on our mental health in ways many of us may not even realize. I know from my research on aging that things such as optimism about the future and feeling a sense of purpose have real measurable impacts on your physical health. Personally, I observed how my mother’s health rapidly degraded as her optimism and sense of purpose declined. Therefore, I believe it is critical to provide resources and support for improving mental health for every individual.
What is the best way for our readers to further follow your work online?
www.modern-age.com and @hellomodernage
This was very meaningful, thank you so much. We wish you only continued success on your great work!
Women In Wellness: Melissa Eamer of Modern Age on the Five Lifestyle Tweaks That Will Help Support… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.