April Gargiulo is not a morning person. “I wish I was,” she admits. “I think that’s a superpower.” She rises early nonetheless, starting each day with her customary pot of tea, a bespoke brew sourced from single-plot growers in Taiwan and Japan. After sending her two adolescent daughters off to school, she meets friends at nearby San Francisco Bay for an exhilarating dip in the frigid, windy, choppy Pacific Ocean.
“It’s one of those very joyful moments, eight or nine grown women jumping in the waves like little kids. It sounds crazy, but I get incredible energy for the rest of the day,” says the Naples native, who practices the invigorating ritual three times a week. It’s a far cry from the warm Gulf waters she was accustomed to growing up. Still, she advises, “If you’ve never cold-plunged, I highly recommend it.”
Gargiulo draws on that post-plunge energy as she heads to the offices of Vintner’s Daughter, the California-based luxury skin-care company she founded 12 years ago. The idea for the enterprise came to her when she was pregnant and realized the products she was using included mostly synthetic fillers.
“It’s a familiar refrain for first-time moms, where you start looking at the ingredients of everything,” says Gargiulo, who was forever in search of—and paying a fortune for—the miracle face cream to help her acne-prone skin. “I wasn’t expecting these so-called luxury creams to be clean, but I was shocked to find out how inexpensively made they were.”
For inspiration, she turned to the uncompromising standards of her family’s Napa Valley winery, Gargiulo Vineyards, where she oversaw sales and marketing. “Coming from the world of wine making, there is a very clear understanding that if you want to make the finest of something you cannot cut corners. You start with the finest raw materials and honor them with meticulous craftsmanship,” she explains. “I started wondering, what would it look like if I created skin care that sat on those same philosophical foundations?”
Formula for Success
From there, Gargiulo mined the expertise of scientists, growers, and other specialists to formulate and test a nontoxic face serum consisting of 22 nutrient-rich whole plants, including grape seed, avocado, lavender, hazelnut, bergamot, cypress, and nettle. A proprietary technology called Phyto Radiance Infusion—which, she says, “sits at the heart of every product we make”—was developed to extract the nutrients from the florae over 21 days.
Dozens of iterations later, Active Botanical Serum was introduced. That happened a year after Gargiulo and her husband, entrepreneur Mitch Lowe, welcomed their first girl, for whom Vintner’s Daughter was named. A spare room in their San Francisco home initially served as the base of operations, where Gargiulo took orders and handled packing, shipping, and correspondence. The following year, another “vintner’s daughter” arrived.
Success came progressively for the flourishing company, notably when internet beauty magazine Into the Gloss declared Active Botanical Serum “the face oil to end all face oils.” The product immediately sold out and, soon after, online retailers were stocking it. It wasn’t long before the serum became a top seller and cult classic in the luxury cosmetics space.
Another milestone occurred when buzz for the skin-care brand began to spread among beauty industry cognoscenti. “Celebrity makeup artists started to find us, and they loved the serum. They loved that it plumped the skin and gave it a lift and a radiance because it allowed them to have this perfect canvas to work off,” Gargiulo says.
Then, the A-listers themselves began singing its praises. Actress and Goop founder Gwyneth Paltrow calls it “an unbelievable serum.” Tracee Ellis Ross, Rachel Brosnahan, Naomi Watts, Alexandra Daddario, Hailey Bieber, and Kendall Jenner are other famous faces who have hyped the naturally fragrant elixir.
“Most skin-care companies pay celebrities to talk about them. We’re a small company, and it’s all organic,” says Gargiulo. She adds that about 10 percent of the Vintner’s Daughter clientele are male, with actors Daniel Levy and Mahershala Ali among the brand’s star-studded fan base.
The celebrity ripple for Active Botanical Serum led to a wave of awards and accolades from national fashion and lifestyle magazines, including Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, Allure, InStyle, Marie Claire, Glamour, Town & Country, and Vanity Fair.
Timeless Beauty
Six years after the brand’s initial product launch, it introduced its second offering, Active Treatment Essence, adding a two-week fermentation step to the three-week extraction process. The new formula was created to deliver hydrating benefits to complement Active Botanical Serum’s moisturizing properties. “Think of them as yin and yang,” Gargiulo says. “Water is hydration and oil is moisture; they are often spoken of as the same thing, but they’re not.”
It took another four years for the company to release its third product, Active Renewal Cleanser, further distinguishing Vintner’s Daughter from other brands. As Gargiulo explains, “Traditional skin-care companies introduce a huge line of products, typically one every quarter, and are continually asking their customers to buy more. We don’t believe that serves the skin; it serves revenue.” She adds, “That’s not to say we will never have another product, but anything we do has to live up to my standards of quality, craftsmanship, and efficacy.”
Cosmetics industry insider Jean Godfrey-June, former beauty editor at Goop, Lucky, and Elle, backs Gargiulo’s statement. “What’s amazing and totally singular and unique about April is that her company reflects her vision and nothing else,” explains Godfrey-June. “The fact that she only has three products says a lot because she’s not going to keep making products she doesn’t believe in. She makes what she thinks is the very best in that category, and in the beauty industry, that’s unbelievably rare.”
Vintner’s Daughter has offered non-skin-care products on occasion, including two limited-edition collaborations—Understory perfume oil and Oolong Radiance Tea Blend—both of which sold out. The skin-care line, packaged in the brand’s signature black glass bottles, can be found in Naples at Marissa Collections on Third Street South. It can also be ordered on Vintner’s Daughter’s website, as well as the websites of other retailers.
In addition to environmentally conscious practices, from cruelty-free testing to sustainable packaging, Vintner’s Daughter maintains high social standards. Gargiulo donates 2 percent of top-line revenue to organizations that benefit women and children, influenced by her parents’ support of charities at home and abroad. “They made giving back a family value,” she says. Her dad, Jeff Gargiulo, and mom, Valerie Boyd, are founders and trustees of the Naples Winter Wine Festival, which this year raised more than $34 million for the Naples Children & Education Foundation.
Whenever Gargiulo and her family can take a break from their busy lives in the Bay Area, they love to bask in the laid-back Naples ethos. “My parents have a house downtown, so we never even get in the car; we walk to restaurants and the beach,” she says. “They’re incredible entertainers, so every time we visit, no one wants to leave—for good reason.”
Also for good reason, this family woman, winemaker, skin-care mogul, charity benefactor, tea aficionado, and cold plunger appears to live her life the same way she signs her correspondence: “With gratitude.”
April Gargiulo’s Skin-Care Tips
• Less is more. “Use fewer, better-made products.”
• Packaging is paramount. “Don’t buy skin-care in a clear bottle; light degrades the product inside.”
• First things first. “Have a hydration step and then a moisture step versus a combined step.”
• Love the skin you’re in. “Focus on gratitude for your most beautiful skin at every age.”
Facebook Comments