Revolutionizing Aging: Melissa Eamer's Inspirational Journey from Glossier to Amazon, Driven By Her Mom's Aging Journey, Unveils Modern Age

Join Debra as she connects with Mellisa Eamer, who takes us on her remarkable journey from restaurant owner to Amazon executive, and now the visionary founder of Modern Age—a groundbreaking company focused on empowering individuals to take charge of their aging process.
Drawing from her wealth of experience at Glossier and Amazon, Melissa unveils her passion for revolutionizing the way we approach aging. Discover how Modern Age is redefining aging by offering people greater control over the speed and quality of their aging journey.
Prepare to be inspired as Melissa shares her insights, challenges, and triumphs in navigating the corporate world and venturing into entrepreneurship. Don't miss this enlightening conversation with a true trailblazer who is shaping the future of how we look at ourselves. Tune in now to gain a fresh perspective on aging and unlocking your full potential with Melissa Eamer on "Sh*t I Wish I Knew In My Twenties."

Sh*t I Wish I Knew In My Twenties (SIWIKIMT) is a podcast dedicated to helping 20-somethings thrive in their twenties, not just survive.

This episode is part of SIWIKIMT's star-studded Season 2. 

Host Debra Alfarone knows how tough being in your twenties can be. As a high-school dropout turned-network-TV-correspondent, she learned most of life’s lessons the hard way. She overcame the odds and now covers the White House for CBS News nationally. She’s also a confidence coach for young women in the TV news industry.

Learn more about Modern Age at Modern Age

@hellomodernage

Transcript 

Debra Alfarone:
Thanks for listening to Beep I Wish I Knew In My Twenties,  hosted by a former high school dropout turn network TV correspondent who had no mentors, no big sister to show her the way. So now that I've got my life together, and that's kind of debatable anyway, I want to pour into you to help you not just survive, but thrive in your.

If you're a Glossier fan, or you order from Amazon maybe a little bit more than you think you should, and my hand is in the air. Then you may have Melissa Emer to thank. Melissa you are now the founder and CEO of Modern Age, which is a new wellness company really aimed at helping people take control of their aging journey. So 20 somethings, this is the time and this is the place you want to hear this. Melissa, thank you for being here.

Melissa Eamer:
Thanks for having me. I'm really excited to talk to you about what we're working on.

Debra Alfarone:
Before we get to that, I want to go back a little bit because your accomplishments in the past are very impressive, and I really just touched on those. I mean, I did the very slightest of intros and I also want to know about you in your 20s, because what happens is when we're in our 20s, we think about people who have these great accomplishments and, oh, my gosh, they're so different than me. And I don't know if I could ever do that. But you were probably just a 20 something at some point, too, trying to figure out life, right?

Melissa Eamer:
Oh, absolutely, and wish I had had a resource like this in my 20s because I clearly felt like I should have it all in order and know exactly what I wanted to do. And I had no idea. The truth is, and so many of the changes I made in my career, I never would have forecasted, especially when I was in my 20s.

Debra Alfarone:
That's a really good note for everyone who's listening right now. Listen, if you're in your haven't had your life figured out yet, you're not going to.

Melissa Eamer:
It's going to take a while. I keep waiting. Someday. Someday I'll have it figured out. Yeah. And I felt all this pressure, hey, this is what I want to be when I grow up, or this is the path that I need to be on. And looking back, I wish someone had said, hey, just take a breath. Figure out what you enjoy doing, try some different things, and you'll start to see patterns that emerge and it will help guide you as you go.

But, for example, I went to college thinking that I was going to be a doctor. I was premed, and I ended up running our restaurant in Vermont for ten years. So not exactly what I would have forecasted going in. I learned so much from that experience that I use every day today, but never really thought that was in the cards for me.

Debra Alfarone:
It's interesting, we talk about aging like it's a bad thing. And you know what? It's a good thing, because if you're aging, guess what? You're living. And so why did you want to take on aging and help people to do it better and just feel good about it?

Melissa Eamer:
Sure. Yeah. I think the spark of the idea really started for me in my, was watching my mother age and watching her age versus her peers and noticing that at some point after I left school, she really started to decline very rapidly. And so I was interested in understanding how much of that was genetic, how much could she have controlled, how much could I have impacted as her daughter and influencing on her lifestyle? And I came across some research on something called subjective age. And it was like this light bulb moment for me because it really helped explain sort of what I observe in her aging journey, as well as help me see that I have a lot more control than I originally thought. And everyone.

Debra Alfarone:
Does subjective age make us smart?

Melissa Eamer:
Well, subjective age is the idea that everyone has an age that they are, the age that's on your driver's license, but then an age that they feel, and that's your subjective age. And for most human beings, up until you're about 20, you tend to feel older than you are, and something happens in your flips and you start to feel younger. But the really interesting thing in the research is if you feel younger than your chronological age, you have more positive health outcomes. You can add seven, eight years of really healthy life expectancy to your lifespan by feeling younger than you are. And that, to me, was incredibly powerful.

Debra Alfarone:
You have something on your website. Am I right about this subjective age assessment, which I am dying to take? I'm hoping it will tell me. I'm like eleven. That'll explain a lot around here. The hot pink that I'm wearing, how I call my dogs, like all sorts of speak baby, talk to my dogs. But no, seriously, though, tell me about where we get that and what that's going to tell me and why is this important because everyone who's listening should know their subjective age.

Melissa Eamer:
They should and know that there are things they can do to change their subjective age, too, as opposed to your chronological age, which is predetermined. Subjective age is in your control. And so subjective age is really a combination of how you look and how you feel. And we have an assessment you can take on our website, atmodernaage.com, where we'll take pictures of you. We'll show you your visible age. We'll show you your lifestyle age based on the habits and things that you do and how you eat and things like that. And then we'll show you your psychological age, which is really about how optimistic you are about the future.

And we combine those three scores together to come up with your subjective age. And we'll say, hey, you're this many years older or younger than your chronological age. And here's the things we think you could do or change or tweak to continue to lower it.

Debra Alfarone:
What can people in their 20s do to change their subjective age? Or maybe like age better?

Melissa Eamer:
Really, the first step is understanding that only 20 or 30% of it is genetics. The vast majority of how you age, you can control. And the sooner you start, the better. So your perfect time, it's not in your right. So really understanding what's changing in your body. We love to start with something called bone health, which most people don't spend any time thinking about. But in your bone mass peaks and you start to decline. And there are things that you can do in terms of what you eat and what you do every day and how active you are to really build up bone strength.

Debra Alfarone:
What are a couple of tips that we can take in our. Hey, everybody, I don't know who's listening to this. This is important.

Melissa Eamer:
Yeah, I think some of them you've all heard before. So SPF can't say it enough. You should be wearing sunblock if you really care about how your skin ages. The sun is one of the biggest factors on that. So every day, put on some SPF. There's some great ones out there. We sell one called Alta MD, which is not greasy at all, which has always been my issue with sunscreens. Know, what's changing as you age, and so your hormone levels are really important and can impact everything from your energy level to your fertility to anxiety and depression.

So knowing what's going on with your hormones and how much control you have over those is really important, and we can help you with that, too. And then bone strength is another thing I would just get educated on what's changing, what's in your diet that can contribute to stronger bones, what's in your lifestyle, whether it's exercise, even just walking 10 minutes a day can help you build stronger bones.

Debra Alfarone:
Well, okay, then I have some strong bones because I try to at least do 10 minutes a day walking my dogs.

Melissa Eamer:
Yes. And it contributes to more than just bone strength. 10 minutes a day of walking actually gets you out in the community, which we know is important to subjective age, lower subjective age. The sunshine, the vitamin d you're getting from that, if you're wearing good SPF, it all is beneficial. So 10 minutes a day walking your dogs is perfect.

Debra Alfarone:
When you say getting out in the community, is that because you want to have interactions with other people?

Melissa Eamer:
Yes. And being a part of what's going on in the world around you. So those connections, whether it's friends or your community, are so important and contribute to having a sense of purpose. And that sense of purpose is a big component in your psychological age.

Debra Alfarone:
As you took your very interesting career from the Vermont restaurant to a business school, to Glossier, to Amazon, to all the different things that you've done, and now to Modern Age, looking back, what was the best advice anyone ever gave you?

Melissa Eamer:
Wow, that's hard. I think I've gotten. I've been fortunate to get a lot of really great advice over the years from a lot of different people. I think some of the most helpful has been, hey, think about what you're excited to get out of bed every day and do versus what might be sexy, right? So the hot jobs or the hot firms or whatever, if you don't enjoy going to work and doing that work every day, you're not going to really put your heart and soul into it, and you're not going to do your best work. And so that's what I've tried to do. And all of these sort of seemingly random roles that I've had is, what's the connective tissue and what's the part of the job that really gets me super excited? For me, it's understanding customers and the connection that you can have with customers and really help meeting their needs and so that was consistent at Amazon, at Glossier, and at Modern Age today.

Debra Alfarone:
People just die for Glossier. I know so many people who will screech the car to a halt if they see the Glossier store, et cetera. What do you think it was? You know what I do a lot of coaching to young women who are in TV news, and I tell them all, hey, you're a brand. So we can learn from these brands that people really gravitate towards.

Melissa Eamer:
Yes and it was something I never really got to experience at Amazon. I don't think Amazon is particularly strong on brand. They're strong on many other things, but at Glossier, it really was Emily's genius. Like, she is a brand genius, and she understood or understands that magic that goes into creating an experience that really resonates with her customer. Those Glossier stores have such a high attention to detail. They're so well architected, and every product package, every image on the website, she really just understands what it takes to create that magic. And so it was fantastic to have time in an environment like that where the whole organization is sort of geared towards creating that brand magic.

Debra Alfarone:
Interesting. So really coordinated and really intentional.

Melissa Eamer:
Very much so. And understanding the power of it. At Amazon, they're really good at measuring things and understanding what to measure and how to improve things that you measure. Brand is really hard to measure. There is this sparkle to it that you really want to understand. It's this magic element, and I tried to actually borrow some of that. When we built modern age, the architectural designer that created our flagship studio in Flatiron worked at Glossier and built some of their retail stores. So I think you'll see some of that attention to detail and some of that magic.

Debra Alfarone:
So going back to our 20 something listeners, what is one thing that you wish you knew in your.

Melissa Eamer:
It's okay not to have a plan, right? That it's okay not to say, hey, in ten years, I want to be the CEO of a healthcare startup. I never would have said that. I never would have said, hey, I want to work at an Internet company because they didn't really exist when I was graduating from school. So it's really okay to just focus on in my current job or role. What do I love? What do I love to do? And what are the different places I might find that don't necessarily restrict yourself to a specific industry because you may be in retail sales right now, but that same aspect can show up in healthcare, can show up in high tech. And so just really thinking about what are the times in the past that I've really been super excited to know.

Debra Alfarone:
I also think, Melissa, that when we are attached to the outcome, there's only one outcome that can be considered success, and everything else can be considered failure as a result of that. And so I try not to be attached to the outcome. But it took me a long time to learn that.

Melissa Eamer:
That's so true because it's simpler actually to have a very specific outcome and say, this is the point that I'm going to and this is the path that's going to lead me there. And the reality is I think you grow so much more if you're open to different paths and different endpoints, too.

Debra Alfarone:
Do you have a failure in your past that you learned from, that you can share with 20 somethings? One of mine is never stay in a job or a situation that doesn't fit you any longer. Fit is important. Don't hang on to a pair of jeans that doesn't fit, that stares at you from the closet. Don't stay in a job that doesn't fit that you've already outgrown as well. I've done that many times. 

Melissa Eamer:
Yeah, I've had a ton of failures for sure. I think one comes to mind, early one of my senior leaders came to me and asked me to do something that I sort of knew intuitively wasn't the right thing to do, was against kind of the rules that Amazon had set up. But I did it anyway because she was a senior leader and I thought I was supposed to. I was a very junior associate at the time, and it turns out my intuition was exactly correct. I shouldn't have done it. My direct boss was almost fired because of it. It was really a fantastic lesson in, hey, just because someone's more senior than you doesn't mean you have to not question the directions you're given.

It's really important to step back and say, is this the right thing to do? And if not, ask a bunch more questions. It's okay to do that. It's a really important lesson, I think.

Debra Alfarone:
We do think, oh, well, that person said it's okay. And again, a lot of this audience for this podcast are young journalists and people in their know, you do not have to say yes because some boss tells you to do something. If you just have to trust your gut, that's exactly right.

Melissa Eamer:
And they might not have all the same information that you have. So it's okay to say, hey, are you aware of X, Y and Z? I really wish that I had done that, but I'm glad I made that mistake early enough in my career that I can watch out for it in subsequent roles.

Debra Alfarone:
We're at the point in the podcast where I ask the same question to everybody. I ask to share the worst job, the worst date, or the worst outfit in your have all of those three. I still have some of those worst outfits, I think, in my closets here. Do you have one that you can share?

Melissa Eamer:
Oh, definitely. I think it's fair to say that every outfit was probably the worst outfit. Looking backwards now. But my worst job, hands down, was a babysitting job I took for three children, where I ended up losing one of them, setting off the house alarm, having the police show up. It was horrific. I'm glad that I survived it, and I never looked back.

Debra Alfarone:
This sounds like a plot of a movie. Actually, I think it is a plot of a movie. Isn't there, like the babysitters club or. I forget what it was, but there was some kind of movie about a really bad babysitting experience.

Melissa Eamer:
It was terrible. And I had the youngest one was screaming, and the police are on the phone. I'm like, please turn off the alarm. It was really a nightmare. So I am glad that I do not have to do that as an occupation anymore because clearly I was terrible at it. Oh, my gosh.

Debra Alfarone:
Okay, good. I'm glad you're not in that business any longer. 

Melissa Eamer:
And I try not to lose customers. Yes. I keep track of just keeping people young. 

Debra Alfarone:
That's all we're asking. People should follow you on Instagram at hellomodern age. Right. And I have one last thing I want to ask you. I read about you. That you enjoy spending time outdoors, racing and riding with an all women cycling team in your free time. That is super bad, girl. Tell me about what this is like.

Debra Alfarone:
This is incredible.

Melissa Eamer:
It's actually really fun. In my role at Amazon is when I first found the team. Most of the people I work with all day are men. So I was usually one of the only women in the room. And this was a chance to just surround myself with really smart, really capable women who were incredibly supportive. So my husband also likes to ride bikes. I tried riding with him. It was terrible for our relationship, terrible for my cycling.

Melissa Eamer:
But these women that I ride with, we ride mountain bikes. And so we'll stop and people will stand on either side of a log and help you get over it and go back and session things. And so just. I love these women. We talk about everything from our kids to our careers to cycling and competing. But it's been really one of the things that gives me a ton of energy outside of work.

Debra Alfarone:
That sounds wonderful. I think I need to find a group like this. Maybe not cycling, maybe all female dog walking group is what I'll look for.

Melissa Eamer:
That's something I like. Brilliant. Yeah. And I think that as female professionals, we sort of have to find that community and build that community where we can. I haven't had that in my workplace, unfortunately. So I found it outside of my workplace. I would say modern age is more balanced in terms of the gender mix of the employees. But they're there.

Melissa Eamer:
Those strong women are there. You just have to find a way to connect with them.

Debra Alfarone:
Yeah. It's really important to surround yourself with people who will speak your name in rooms you haven't walked into yet. Women that will support you and help you along the way. And by the way, everybody has some experience in one area that someone else needs. So you can always combine. And I've got a couple of women like that in my life. And I highly recommend if you don't have a mentor, listeners find and really it's not that hard to say, hey, would you be my mentor? I can't tell you how many people ask me and I never say no.

Melissa Eamer:
Similarly, and I'm actually usually very flattered that someone thinks that I have something that I can help them with. And so I have a group of people that I mentor from various points in my life and I really enjoy speaking with them and seeing them develop.

Debra Alfarone:
So if someone wants to know more about lowering their subjective age, what should they do?

Melissa Eamer:
That's great. We would love to see you either in person in our clinic in Flatiron, which is fifth and 15th in New York City, or you can come to us and visit us online at Modern Age and you'll see the subjective age assessment there.

Debra Alfarone:
And so I can figure out my subjective age and then what I can do to make it even younger. Not that younger is better. I'm just saying that I want to live fully every year of my life. That's exactly right.

Melissa Eamer:
And I'm going to guess that your subjective age is lower than your chronological age, just based on your energy and your attitude and the fact that you classify yourself as eleven. I think that's a positive sign, right?

Debra Alfarone:
If you're thinking that you're eleven, I don't know if that's a good thing.

Melissa Eamer:
Or a bad thing, but it's a great thing. It's a great thing for your longevity.