A Kinder Future: Another Tomorrow's Vanessa Barboni Hallik on Vision, Intention, and Resilience
By Julia Gamolina
Vanessa Barboni Hallik is the founder and CEO of Another Tomorrow, a B Corp Certified sustainable luxury brand modeling the future of fashion. She is an active speaker on sustainability and innovation. She has been featured in The New York Times, Fast Company, Bloomberg, and Vogue — and is one of Wallpaper* Magazine’s USA300 and Worth Magazine’s Worthy100. She serves on the Advisory Board for Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy.
In her interview with Julia Gamolina, Vanessa talks about the decisions that propelled her towards a career in finance, and then a career focused on shifting paradigms and changing established models of operation. She advises those starting their careers to have faith in yourself and to build real relationships.
JG: You started your career in finance — a field probably even more male-dominated than architecture is. Tell me about your years in the field and what you've learned.
VBH: My finance career was almost as accidental as my foray into fashion. I grew up in a hippie, techy, academic, and artistic family in small college towns in the Midwest and Rust Belt without a business bone to be found among my close community. To say that Wall Street was a foreign environment is an understatement. I found my way there when I came to grips that my initial desire to become an architect was unlikely to be the road to happiness for me around the same time that I lost my mother to suicide, which abruptly that set off a subliminal hard pivot toward security.
Always curious, once I learned these jobs even existed in college, I was drawn toward the international aspects of finance and found my way into a derivatives trading role in foreign exchange and emerging markets at Morgan Stanley. The person who was to become my very first boss plucked me out of a summer research internship convinced I was born to be a trader. In hindsight, I was as inwardly overwhelmed as I was outwardly confident and ended up having a fifteen-year career there punctuated by pangs of conscience to dedicate myself to major societal issues — which led me to quit three times… they were very patient — and a headstrong desire to succeed there as a woman, which made for a lot of internal conflict. And I am fairly certain I was a real pain to manage as I was forever trying to do things differently.
Vanessa in the West Village.
Overall, finance was a remarkable training ground. Working in emerging markets, countries buffeted by so many forces both internal and external, taught me how to filter signal from noise. And the incredible opportunities I was granted to build businesses coming out of the financial crisis helped me to uncover an entrepreneurial passion I did not know I had in me and a confidence that I could create strong businesses, even in the most volatile of situations.
But above all, I learned a lot about myself and about people. I was equal parts eager to prove my worth and hyper assertive. In doing so I both overextended myself and could be a real overconfident pain in the neck — at times more intent on being right than getting to the right answer. But that same assertiveness helped me break down barriers and ask for the opportunities I would not otherwise have been given, which dramatically changed the course of my career.
In short, I really grew up there into adulthood and in doing so went through a whole lifecycle of personal discovery and evolution and met some of my closest female friends along the way. Together through our friendships, we learned how to be vulnerable and truly confide in and support each other through thick and thin and to support the generation coming up under us. These have been beautiful learnings I have taken with me.
What started the pivot that eventually led to you founding Another Tomorrow?
I was promoted to Managing Director during a really tough year for my division. It was a sobering rather than celebratory moment and at a time when my team was hurting and a lot of people were being let go. Having just achieved a major career milestone it was also a natural time to step back and reflect on my priorities and what I wanted the next phase of my career to be about.
It was clear to me then, in what seemed like black and white, that I had to make a choice — to take a risk and really hold myself accountable to the ideas I always talked about and finally dedicate my energy to creating the world I believed in, or to stay the course. I chose the former and when my company wasn’t yet ready to embark on the same mission that I was on, I took a sabbatical that led to the discoveries that initiated Another Tomorrow.
“Our goal is to both serve our customer with an exquisite, functional and sustainable wardrobe and to be a living case study for the industry that we can evolve fashion at large to align with human, animal and environmental welfare.”
Now tell me about Another Tomorrow — how the brand has evolved, what you have coming up with it, and what your goals for it are.
Another Tomorrow exists to model the future of fashion, an industry I barely knew anything about coming in. We sit in the luxury space, taking the position of “clothing as an asset” and have developed both “farm to closet” supply chains as well as the opportunity for our customers to use our digital IDs to see each garment’s provenance, and to resell it through our Authenticated Resale program when it no longer serves them.
Our goal is to both serve our customer with an exquisite, functional and sustainable wardrobe and to be a living case study for the industry that we can evolve fashion at large to align with human, animal and environmental welfare — and with good business results!
Looking back at it all, what have been the biggest challenges? How did you both manage through perceived disappointments or setbacks?
It’s funny what you do and don’t remember. It seems like a hundred years ago that I was first embarking on this business knowing nothing and almost no one in this sector, which should be at the top of my list of challenges, but oddly isn’t. Instead, there have been so many others that came up when I was certain of a particular course only to find a massive curve ball, however I have come to find that I have a choice — to recognize the patterns of problems or the patterns of resilience. I have chosen the latter.
There have been major shocks, from COVID (which hit six weeks after we launched) to the death of our first Creative Director, to navigating the wild waves of consumer behavior, and raising capital in one of the worst venture capital markets we’ve seen in fifteen years as a female founder (who still only get about two percent of venture funding).
I have lost immense amounts of sleep to anxiety over these years and while this still happens from time to time, I have now also learned to give myself some grace in that I can only do my best and commit to continuous learning. Vedic meditation has also been a salve by providing a grounding practice to find some peace and perspective on a regular basis.
Vanessa and White Gum founder, Nan.
What have you also learned in the last six months?
One is that intention matters. The universe seems to be a remarkable organizing force as when I have put my mind and energy to a vision amazing things happen.
What are you most excited about right now?
Partnership. For so much of my life I thought I had to walk through life, build and persevere as an individual. Now not only do I truly believe in our interconnectedness in a universal sense, as I walk into 2024 for the first time I have really allowed true partnership into my life and work; even the tone of my marriage has changed.
Who are you admiring now and why?
I take inspiration from all corners, but one of the women who always has my heart and my mind is Isolde Brielmaier, the Deputy Director of the New Museum. And the designer Mara Hoffman. No surprise, Isolde introduced me to Mara. Both are just the real deal. They show up with heart, curiosity, and excellence wherever they go and lift so many up as they walk through life, myself included.
“I have come to find that I have a choice — to recognize the patterns of problems or the patterns of resilience. I have chosen the latter.”
What is the impact you’d like to have on the world? What is your core mission? And, what does success in that look like to you?
I am a builder by nature and I like to create models that I believe can help lead to a more resilient, and perhaps also kinder, future. I also like to invite others to not just follow but to collaborate and elaborate on them. When I see evidence that my work is serving as a beacon, tangible evidence of what’s possible and perhaps a source of knowledge, that’s success.
Finally, what advice do you have for those starting their career? Would your advice be any different for women?
Have faith. Build real relationships and friendships of vulnerability and honesty within your industry. Ask for help. Offer the same. Find the courage to get yourself out of relationships and jobs as quickly as you responsibly can when you know they don’t serve you.
Show up, do your best, learn from your mistakes, give yourself and others grace, do better, and repeat — but do it with the knowledge that it’s all going to be ok if you have faith in yourself and in the universe. It has a way.
For women, the networks of support and the courage matter even more because the existing systems aren’t built to serve you. You have to find and create systems that do. The way women can show up for one another is a truly beautiful thing, so be a part of that constellation.