By ten, Katina Mountanos could negotiate a connection at Heathrow on her own. Her mother worked for an airline; her father came from Koroni, a fishing village in southern Greece. The distance between Long Island and the family table was considerable. Mountanos learned the route early. Years later, she would build a company around something waiting at the other end.
In Koroni, her grandfather brought home fish and her grandmother prepared it with olive oil and lemon. There was oil on bread, tomatoes and feta, too. Mountanos remembers making avgolemono, the Greek egg-and-lemon soup, with her grandmother. These were ordinary meals, repeated often enough to become a standard against which other meals would be measured. Nobody needed a positioning document to explain dinner.
The memories stayed unusually practical. When she began cooking more in New York, the Greek olive oil she bought at the supermarket tasted different from her family’s oil. She wanted to understand the gap. Eventually, she wanted to sell something that closed it. By then, she had accumulated a fairly substantial education in getting people to buy things.
A career with several shopping baskets
Mountanos studied at New York University’s Stern School of Business and began in investment banking at Citigroup, working in New York and London. After an MBA at Harvard Business School, she joined L’Oréal. Finance had given way to products, marketing and a workplace whose goals felt more personally engaging. In 2010, she moved to Quidsi, the ecommerce company that would become part of Amazon.
At Quidsi she worked in beauty merchandising and helped build BeautyBar.com. A career that had started with financial transactions was becoming an apprenticeship in consumer habits: what people wanted, how they discovered it, and how a business could put it within reach. She was also discovering that she liked the autonomy and pace of a young company.
The pattern matters because Kosterina can look deceptively simple from a distance. A Greek-American founder sells Greek olive oil. The résumé adds another explanation. Mountanos had spent years working on the commercial machinery around products before choosing a product that belonged so closely to her own life.
The conference room gets a manicure
In 2012, Mountanos and Elizabeth Whitman launched Manicube. Their customers were working professionals who could book online and have a manicure at the office. A conference room, briefly liberated from its meeting agenda, became a salon. Employers could offer the service as a perk; busy employees could fit an appointment into the day without a separate trip.
The company began in New York and expanded to Boston the following year. It also directed a dollar from each manicure to Kiva, supporting microloans. The premise was modest enough to explain in a sentence, and complicated enough to require a real organization behind it. Technicians, clients, appointments and supplies all had to arrive where they belonged.
By the time of its sale, Manicube had served more than 200 corporate clients and 30,000 customers across four US markets. Elizabeth Arden Red Door Spas acquired it in November 2015. Mountanos then helped lead the Red Door to Door division. She had built a company whose work happened inside other people’s workplaces. For her next venture, she would sell something customers could take home.
A wedding hashtag finds shelf space
She joined Jet.com as a general manager before Walmart acquired it, and later led Walmart’s ecommerce brand-incubation group. The team created consumer businesses, including Allswell, with products sold online and in stores. She was learning from both sides of the retail relationship: the new brand asking for attention and the large organization deciding how to provide it.
Kosterina developed alongside that career. It began with olive oil sold largely to friends and family, then spread through repeat orders and recommendations. She took an olive oil sommelier course during product development. The taste she remembered from Greece was acquiring a professional vocabulary, while a personal project was acquiring customers she did not already know.
The name was available for a particularly agreeable reason. Katerina and her husband, Kostas, had combined their names into Kosterina for their wedding hashtag. They married in Koroni in 2014, and friends kept calling them by the combined name afterward. When a Greek-sounding business name was needed, the couple already had one. Better still, they owned the web address. Romance had attended to procurement.
Mountanos made Kosterina her full-time work in early 2020. She had given the idea time to develop alongside a job she enjoyed. Her advice to aspiring founders reflects that experience: keep earning while the product takes shape, listen to customers, and improve what they actually receive. A company can begin quietly before requiring a dramatic career decision.
“Olive oil is literally my answer for everything. I’m such a Greek cliché.”
Katina Mountanos
The bottle still has to arrive
A good-looking package has two audiences. One encounters it on a shelf. The other encounters it after a delivery driver has carried it to the door. Kosterina’s white bottle helped distinguish the oil visually. Its early shipping boxes had a less enviable distinction: roughly one bottle in ten broke in transit.
Working with a packaging designer brought the breakage rate below half a percent. That is a substantial improvement in the customer’s first encounter with the product. A memorable bottle has limited value when the contents have escaped into the cardboard. The solution belongs to the unglamorous part of brand building, where a better box can accomplish more than another beautiful photograph.
Shipping also affected the arithmetic of selling online. Glass is heavy. Sending several bottles together can distribute the delivery cost across more products, which makes bundles and shipping thresholds consequential decisions. Mountanos’s account of this work is full of adjustments. The family story could explain why the company existed; packaging and order economics helped it continue existing.
Less oil on the doorstep
Some of the less visible work reaches back to Greece. Kosterina has used long-term agreements with farmers around Koroni, with purchase commitments that help lock in prices. For Mountanos, the relationship with the place is both personal and contractual. The founder remembering a family ingredient must also decide what the company will buy, on what terms, and how reliably it can turn those purchases into products. Familiarity supplies a reason to begin; agreements give the business something to plan around.
A bigger order, a smaller beginning
Whole Foods discovered Kosterina through Instagram. In the presentation for an early buyer meeting, a slide asked which members of her team would attend. At that point, the answer was Mountanos. The retailer’s interest was welcome; its proposed national rollout was more than her team and supply chain could handle. They began in three regions instead.
The appeal of a large order is easy to understand. So is the temptation to assume that the business will somehow catch up with it. Mountanos gave a more concrete answer about what she could supply. The smaller launch created room to build. In September 2024, Kosterina announced another expansion, bringing olive oils to more than 600 Target stores.
The products at that launch included Premium Reserve and Spicy Red Pepper oils in tins. Her ambitions were extending into new formats and retail settings while remaining attached to the same ingredient. The scale was different from selling to acquaintances. The task still included persuading somebody to choose her product from a crowded shelf, then giving them a reason to return.
Pen, paper, lipstick - and a screenplay?
There is a more mischievous Mountanos behind the chronology. Her team once suggested a memoir title, Pen, Paper, and Lipstick, for the things she brought to meetings. She has described her character as “Kindness laced with a little karaoke.” Her chosen entrance song is Snow’s Informer. An executive biography can only do so much with a detail like that.
Her working habits are more methodical. She sets longer-term goals and plans her week hour by hour, fitting company responsibilities around life with three children. A local coffee shop, a laptop and a large coffee make her preferred working setup. She has also said she would like to write a screenplay and see a film of hers at Sundance. There are ambitions outside the shopping basket.
Her Greek identity has a public life beyond the brand. In March 2023, she received the inaugural Spirit of Penelope Award from the Daughters of Penelope, recognizing women who inspire and empower others. In November 2024, she crossed the New York City Marathon finish line carrying the Greek flag. The connection to Greece travels with her, sometimes rather literally.
Something familiar, made again
Product development continues to supply new outlets. Kosterina’s assortment expanded beyond its original oil into vinegars, olives and skincare, connecting her earlier beauty career with her newer food business. In September 2026, a collaboration with B.T.R Nation produced a Lemon Olive Oil Cake bar. The familiar flavor of a cake had become another product to work on.
She has also begun writing Extra Virgin Everything on Substack, including a guide to where to go in Greece. The subject invites her to explain the place behind the bottles in her own voice. Customers can encounter the company in a store; readers can follow the founder back toward the country that gave her the original idea.
At home, the inheritance is taking another turn. Her children have learned to make waffles, drizzle oil on bread and pasta, and join in the kitchen. Mountanos’s childhood gave her a taste she could recognize years later in another country. Now she runs a business built around that recognition, while another generation acquires its own ordinary memories of dinner.