lifestyle-brand
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David Stoddard
David Stoddard is a co-founder of Brixton, the Oceanside, California lifestyle apparel brand he started in 2004 with two friends and a single vintage-inspired hat. He built the company out of a garage after a decade working his way up from a $6-an-hour warehouse job at TransWorld Magazine, and grew it into a globally distributed brand known for heritage headwear and clothing. He now serves as a marketing and creative leader for the company, and speaks locally about entrepreneurship and betting on where you come from.
Michael Diaz
Michael Diaz is the CEO of Palm Tree Crew Holdings, the diversified lifestyle, live-events, and investment company Kygo and Myles Shear founded in 2020. A former Duke undergrad who spent his early career in investment banking at UBS and as a Managing Director at LionTree, Diaz now runs a business that in 2025 raised a $20M Series B led by WME Group at a $215M valuation, opened four Palm Tree Club hospitality venues in under a year, and expanded its festival footprint from Oahu and West Palm Beach to Saint-Tropez and Sardinia.
Alicia Tulsee
Alicia Tulsee is the founder and CEO of Moxie Scrubs, the direct-to-consumer apparel brand for nurses she built out of the Harvard Innovation Labs, and now Moxie360, an AI workforce platform aimed at nurse burnout and retention. A daughter of Trinidadian immigrants raised in Queens, she sold costume jewelry at a flea market at 19, talked her way into marketing jobs in India, and stitched together an unconventional path that ended in an economics degree from Harvard. She is not a nurse herself; she built a brand for them because nurses cared for her dying father, and she designed Moxie 'for nurses, by nurses' by collaborating with the people who wear the clothes. She raised about $2.4M in pre-seed funding in 2022 and was named to the Forbes Next 1000.
Nell Diamond
Nell Diamond is the founder and CEO of Hill House Home, the New York lifestyle brand she launched in 2016 from her dorm at Yale School of Management. She built it on luxury bedding and turned it into a cultural phenomenon with the Nap Dress, a smocked, sleep-soft dress that went viral during the pandemic and once sold $1 million of inventory in 12 minutes. A Princeton English major and daughter of former Barclays CEO Bob Diamond, she traded a finance career for a brand built on community, drops, and her own waist-length-haired, ruffle-forward aesthetic. Hill House raised $20 million in 2022 at a reported $150 million valuation.
Anthony Vidergauz
Anthony Vidergauz is the former CEO of California Closets who turned a struggling $2 million acquisition into a $300 million-per-year national brand. A South African immigrant and trained lawyer who arrived in the US in 1986 with $5,000, he joined California Closets in 1987 as legal counsel, then acquired the company from Williams-Sonoma in 1994. Over the next 13 years, he transformed it through lifestyle marketing - including a magazine sold at Barnes & Noble - and franchise relationship-building, growing to over 100 locations across North America and six countries. After selling in 2007, he now runs The Paradise Group, a boutique consulting firm advising franchise businesses on strategy, culture, and leadership.