About Amanda
plate 01 — the principal. as shot.
I started in media. At Harpo, Oprah Winfrey's company, I worked in media relations across her businesses — The Oprah Winfrey Show, O magazine, everything that carried her name. At Lifetime and with Rachael Ray, the work was translation: taking brands built in one medium into many, through marketing and partnerships. That was my education in how a person becomes a brand. lululemon would be my education in how a brand becomes a community.
I joined lululemon in 2009 as a community manager and left twelve years later having built its Asia business from a standing start — through the years the company grew from $452 million to $6.3 billion. That growth story is famous. I was inside it, and for the Asia chapter, responsible for it.
The lesson from those years wasn't a playbook. Culture, brand, and community aren't three departments — they're one thing seen from three angles, and companies perform when the three agree.
The decade since taught me where the one thing starts. A culture is a leader's patterns, scaled. How you run under pressure becomes how the company runs under pressure — and sooner or later, the market feels it. I kept getting hired to fix brands and finding the real work upstream, in the person running the place. Eventually I stopped calling that a detour. It's the work. It's why there are two studios — one for the person, one for the company — and why they're the same practice.
the training
Underneath the commercial work: twenty years of somatic and contemplative practice in the conscious-leadership tradition. Less mystical than it sounds — no incense, no mountain. I'm a student of it, not a master of it: I use the same tools I hand to clients on myself first, and I still catch my own patterns weekly. The qualification isn't mastery. It's practice.
fig. 03 — sightline study. the structure decides what you can't see. we draw the line around it.
clients have called her a blindspot assassin.
I grew up in the Midwest, learned to walk and talk fast in New York, and grew up again in London, Hong Kong, and Vancouver. Now: Seattle, with my partner Erich, our kids Claudia and Edie, and our dog Greg.