Tag Archives: Jacklyn Greenberg

Helen Nurse’s Parlour of Style – TracyChambers Vintage

Posted on by

Words by Molly Hays
Photography by Jacklyn Greenberg

Many a woman working from home soon finds her professional life elbowing in on her dining room. Rare, though, is the entrepreneur that converts her dining room into a retail space, sets regular business hours, and opens up her home to the public. Meet Helen Nurse, founder and proprietress of New York’s TracyChambers Vintage: determined, creative, and—yes—rare.

In early 2012, Nurse spied a market gap in affordable vintage clothing and so set out to rent a storefront, only to learn that rents in her Brooklyn neighborhood were sky-high. Beyond-reach sky-high. Most aspiring entrepreneurs would have shelved their idea as unfeasible and moved on. But not Helen. She redoubled her efforts, revisited her options, and arrived at an elegant, if unconventional, solution.

In March of that year, she opened a vintage clothing boutique very close to home. In her home, actually.

Impeccable

Helen credits her grandmother with her lifelong love of vintage. “My grandmother didn’t have very much money; she had just a few things. But the quality of her clothing was amazing. Every time she went out, she looked impeccable.”

Fast forward a few decades, and here is Helen Nurse, mom to three young kids, former Event Planner, fashion-aficionado, and enterprising eye which sees both the value in that storied craftsmanship, and the demand for vintage that fits Everywoman. “I choose vintage based on real women’s bodies,” she explains, an exercise in editorial purchasing that yields styles women can actually wear.

She started small, testing the waters, selling her collection at street fairs on weekends. The response was good, but with young children in tow, ages 3, 2 and 1, the hours and impact weren’t worth it. The seed, however, had been sown. And the concept, proven.

And so, caught between prohibitive rents and family demands, Nurse paved herself a third way. Noting how many brownstones in her neighborhood already sported ground floor businesses, she pitched the idea of transforming their little-used, street-level dining room into retail space. Her executive board—a.k.a., her family—assented. TracyChambers Vintage, named after Diana Ross’s enterprising, ambitious, impeccably dressed character in Mahogany, was off and running.

To read more about TracyChambers Vintage, subscribe to CAKE&WHISKEY magazine or purchase the single issue here.

Soccket To Me

Posted on by

Words by Robbie Clark
Photography by Jacklyn Greenberg

Kicking an Idea Around

As a very recent graduate from Harvard Business School, where she had the daunting challenge of running an innovative socio-tech company she founded while also keeping up with her obviously challenging course work, one would assume Jessica Matthews didn’t know squat about (let alone have time for) play.

But “play”–we’ll call it the pursuit of doing an activity just for the sake of having fun–was the crux of Matthews’ studies while in school (no, we’re not talking about Beer Pong or sorority formals) and it is the core concept behind her business.

On the surface, Uncharted Play, which now has its office in the Tribeca neighborhood of Manhattan, makes play things that in turn generate energy after they’ve been played with, such as the Soccket, a soccer ball that can power an accompanying LED lamp, and Pulse, a jump rope with an accompanying adaptor that can charge small appliances like cellphones. But the philosophy and mission behind Uncharted Play has more gravitas than producing a few volts from a lithion-ion battery: Matthews wants her company to inspire children to be the next generation of social inventors to challenge the status quo.

To read more about Uncharted Play and Soccket, subscribe to CAKE&WHISKEY magazine or purchase the single issue here.

Soar: The Misty Copeland Story

Featured

Posted on by

Words by Molly Hays
Photography by Jacklyn Greenberg

“I’ll bet you didn’t know that I could fly,” Misty Copeland writes in Life in Motion, her recently released memoir. “I can bounce into the air, then float there a little while before lighting, softly, on the stage.”

Simple, no?

But, of course, we all know that ballet is the art of rendering the excruciating, effortless; the utterly grueling, exquisitely graceful. And this for the ordinary ballerina. Misty Copeland, described by many accounts as the first African American female soloist for the American Ballet Theatre, is anything but ordinary, even in the extraordinary world of classical ballet.

Packing, Scrambling, Leaving
In the rarefied world of classical ballet, there’s no one path to the top. Still, Copeland’s road stands among the least traveled.

The fourth of six children, Misty Copeland was born into a family as tight-knit as it was itinerant. From age two, Copeland writes, when “my mom squeezed our lives onto a bus headed west, our family began a pattern that would define my siblings’ and my childhood: packing, scrambling, leaving—often barely surviving.” Dramatic? Yes. Though the next sixteen years would only prove more so.

To read more about Misty Copeland, subscribe to CAKE&WHISKEY magazine or purchase the single issue here.

Artist Profile: Jacklyn Greenberg

Posted on by

Jacklyn’s edge lies in her unique ability to engage and connect with people on a level that delves beyond the surface and into the deeper realm of energy and emotion. This comes, in part, from her extensive travels and immersion in foreign cultures with extended stays overseas in Italy and Australia. After earning degrees in both fine arts and environmental chemistry, she decided to follow her passion and add her intense voice with her inherent air of hyper-realism to the photography world.

To read more about Jacklyn Greenberg, subscribe to CAKE&WHISKEY magazine or purchase the single issue here.

Mad Success: Lucinda Scala Quinn on Management, Martha, Motherhood, Men, and Improvising a Life

Posted on by

Words by Molly Hays
Photography by Jacklyn Greenberg

If a proper success story should read like a résumé, all steady build and single-minded trajectory, don’t tell Lucinda Scala Quinn. In 2000, she was home full-time with her three young sons, “fully immersed in motherhood.” Today, she’s a four-time author, entrepreneur, television host, and Executive Food Editor at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. “My life has really been an improvisation,” she says. Clearly, this hasn’t been an issue.
In the Beginning
Looking back, it’s easy to see the underpinnings of Scala Quinn’s success. Growing up, good homemade food was the norm, and the glue that gathered extended family together. “I was in an environment that felt good. I felt safe and secure and nourished.” Add to that the “social interactions with multiple relatives, and it just felt amazing to be IN it.”
Small surprise, then, that she began cooking professionally as a teenager. She enjoyed it, excelled at it, moved to New York to pursue it, and then? Walked away. When her sons were born—she has three, Calder (26), Miles (22), and Luca (19)—she switched gears. “I just had this gut sense that I really needed to be rooted where I was.” Freelance writing and odd catering gigs aside, she left the fast track to be home with her boys.

It wasn’t easy.

To read the rest of the article, subscribe to CAKE&WHISKEY magazine or purchase the single issue here

Salt of the Earth: Sarah Sproule and her Rooftop Salt Garden

Image

Words by Megan Smith
Photography by Jacklyn Greenberg

For a seemingly unending rainy streak in NYC, even the gloomy skies can’t keep Sarah Sproule from smiling ear to ear as she climbs into the booth of the crowded midtown Starbucks to meet me for an afternoon coffee and chat. She’s due to bartend around the corner in a couple of hours (job #1) and she’s just come from checking on her salt (job #2).

That’s right. Salt.

This wide-eyed beauty with her pixie haircut and girl-next-door charm makes salt. From Atlantic seawater. On a music school rooftop in Chelsea. Go figure.

This is not the umbrella girl on blue cylinder kind of salt your mom bought for a few cents in the spice aisle. Urban Sproule salt is the good stuff. The chunky, fancy salt that Food Network chef wanna-bes swoon over in Williams-Sonoma catalogs and try to justify purchase of in their Thanksgiving spending budget.

In an unregulated segment of the US food industry, Salt Monger Sarah is making the rules up as she goes. A chef by trade, she worked in the kitchen of famed Colicchio & Sons, later moving out West to manage an elite country club kitchen before settling back in NYC to teach cooking classes at Union Square Greenmarket and moonlight as a bartender.

The notion of salt-making came about rather experimentally, actually. With an idea, a plastic bucket and an outing to the nearby shoreline, Sarah wondered if a recent story she’d heard about Dead Sea salt was possible in her own backyard Atlantic. With childlike curiosity, she waded into the water, filled her bucket with the murky saline liquid and headed home. Days turned into weeks where the bucket of ocean water, left outside her tiny NYC apartment, sat.

And sat.

And sat.

Slowly evaporating until the water was gone. And when peering into the bottom of the bucket, Sarah found what she was hoping for: salt. “It really was just a bunch of commonsense,” she said matter-of-factly. This, coming from a 20-something-year-old who has created, quite possibly, the first rooftop salt garden in the world. Her excitement is contagious as she recounts the details of her discovery.

For Sarah, the journey hasn’t been so much about a sodium curiosity but rather a passion for locavorism. She preached and promoted local farmers and growers in the New York area during her cooking demonstrations and, as most chefs do, finished each dish with a sprinkling of salt. Salt from somewhere else.

Once the solo bucket salt experiment proved successful, Sarah’s gears started turning; wanting to make more. For herself and (was it possible?) enough to sell at her Greenmarket class each weekend. “I knew I needed sun and wind for evaporation and, more than anything, space.” Space in midtown Manhattan? A contradiction if there ever was one. As chance would have it (in one of those Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon sort of ways), Sarah found space to make her salt on the rooftop of a music school in Chelsea, and in the summer of 2012 began construction of an 8×12 greenhouse, hauling several hundred evaporation bins, water barrels, shelving and supplies up to her own Big Apple Shangri-La.

But beyond sun and wind and space, the most crucial element is seawater. Local fishermen Charlie and Glen have that covered. Each Saturday they bring 125 gallons from the purest waters 30 miles east of Montauk, NY to the Brooklyn Borough Hall farmers market where Sarah and her husband lug it back to Chelsea and up 13 floors to the greenhouse.

Clearly, Sarah Sproule is no slouch. This girl has got some gumption and drive. After building that greenhouse, she went on to source handmade glass jars with cork lids and design labels for her company, aptly named “Urban Sproule.” And in spite of her trailblazing ways, she desperately wanted the A-OK from someone….anyone before presenting her product to the public. “Because salt-making isn’t really regulated, no one really seemed to care what I was doing.” Weeks of phone calls and attempts to get a food related government agency’s seal of approval, failed. No one came. Undeterred, she went a little unorthodox (pardon the pun). “I figured, what could be better than being declared kosher? I called the Orthodox Union and asked if they would come. I think they thought I was crazy; they had never heard of, let alone approved, rooftop salt before. I was so nervous about that inspection. The OU is a world renowned and respected agency!”

Sarah passed inspection that day and received Kosher Certification from the Orthodox Union in April 2013.

Today, Urban Sproule boasts of eight salt flavors in its flight. With infusions like celery, Thai chili, grilled ramps and black squid ink, Sarah is bringing her impressive Atlantic amalgamates (of a Michelin starred restaurant quality) to the everyday cook.

There have been many lessons learned along the way, none more valuable than that of patience. Sarah’s business relies most heavily on something there is no control over: the weather. For this girl that never sits still, “making salt is definitely a test of my patience. Salt is telling me to chill the hell out.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Model Activist: Summer Rayne Oakes

Posted on by

Words by Pamela Sutton
Photography by Jacklyn Greenberg

“I’m the person who likes to take the machete to clear the path so other people can walk it.”
Summer Rayne Oakes

Our altruistic passions can become our career.  And while we may not understand the path to create this, it is possible to use ingenious ideas and passionate activism to impact the world. Because where integrity and inspiration meet is the key to successful social entrepreneurship, and a business, without a doubt, can be built around a passion when one puts a value on principles and knowledge. Summer Rayne Oakes has proved just that, finding her niche in the sphere of environmental sustainability and creating a profession without losing the soul of convictions.

As a child, Summer Rayne’s backyard in Northeastern Pennsylvania sparked her curiosity for the natural world. No one could have known that this budding brown-haired scientist, with her nose perpetually in a brightly-bound yellow National Geographic, would eventually become a modern-day ethical bohemian, honored as the World’s First Eco Model, and create an environmental social platform through a most unlikely avenue: the fashion industry. And yet, she did.

Read the full article: Subscribe or purchase an issue here~!