How one family blends operational clarity, conscious leadership, and community-driven values to grow their business — together.

In this episode of UrbanEbb, host Rico Figliolini chats with Vandana Aggarwal, VP of Operations at Aggarwal Real Estate, about the winding road from global consulting to family-run commercial real estate in Norcross, Georgia. With honesty, warmth and insight, V shares how she went from working 80-hour weeks in corporate strategy to rediscovering clarity in the mountains of India — ultimately helping transform her family’s business into a community-driven real estate firm managing over 50 shopping centers.

The conversation weaves together themes of leadership, legacy, operational excellence and the transformative power of both AI and yoga. It’s a story about clarity, courage and conscious growth — both in business and in life. This is another episode you won’t want to miss.

Episode Highlights

• Why Vandana left a high-powered consulting career to join her family business
• How hiking Kilimanjaro and studying yoga in the Himalayas changed her leadership mindset
• The operational overhaul she brought to Aggarwal Real Estate to support growth
• What it’s like working side-by-side with your dad, siblings, and 700+ tenants
• How the company rebranded with intention and built a mission around “building communities as a community”
• Where AI is reshaping real estate—from lease drafting to property management—and where it still can’t compete with people
• Leadership succession planning with siblings at the helm
• The importance of clarity, calm, and conscious growth in both business and life

About Vandana Aggarwal

Vandana Aggarwal is the Vice President of Operations at Aggarwal Real Estate, her family’s commercial real estate investment and management firm. She brings a unique blend of strategic insight and operational excellence, shaped by her early career as a consultant at A.T. Kearney, where she advised Fortune 100 to 500 companies. A graduate of Georgia Tech, she also took a transformative detour from the corporate world to spend a year in India teaching yoga—an experience that continues to influence her leadership style today. At the core of her work is a deep commitment to family and a passion for building strong, connected communities.

Timestamp:

00:00:00 – Introduction and sponsors: Vox Pop Uli & EV Remodeling
00:03:12 – From Georgia Tech to global consulting
00:04:23 – Leading strategy for Fortune 500 companies
00:06:11 – The role of vision alignment at the C-suite
00:08:01 – Sabbatical becomes family business overhaul
00:09:35 – Bringing operational excellence to a growing real estate firm
00:12:02 – A year of yoga, nature, and healing in India
00:17:03 – Hiking Kilimanjaro, testing limits, and expanding self-trust
00:18:52 – Navigating family dynamics inside a business
00:21:56 – Planning for leadership transition: siblings, strategy, succession
00:24:06 – Rebranding the business: from American Management to Aggarwal Real Estate
00:26:33 – Where AI fits (and doesn’t) in real estate operations
00:30:04 – Legal, leasing, HR, and marketing efficiency with tech
00:31:01 – Community-focused retail and experiential shopping centers
00:32:00 – Reflections on AI, journalism, and digital trust
00:32:57 – Closing thoughts

Podcast Transcript

00:00:00 – Rico Figliolini

Hi, everyone. This is Rico Figliolini, host of UrbanEbb. This podcast comes out of the city of Peachtree Corners, and we have a special guest today. And if I don’t mess up the name, it’s Vandana Aggarwal.

00:00:15 – Vandana Aggarwal

Absolutely. You can call me V, Rico.

00:00:15 – Rico Figliolini

I’m going to call you V, trust me. And I’m Rico Figliolini, so a bit of a long name there. But V is VP of Operations of Aggarwal Real Estate here, based in Peachtree Corners? No, Norcross.

00:00:30 – Vandana Aggarwal

In Norcross, yeah. Norcross, Georgia.

00:00:32 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah, yeah. Just off 85, and?

00:00:34 – Vandana Aggarwal

Jimmy Carter.

00:00:35 – Rico Figliolini

And Jimmy Carter.

00:00:36 – Vandana Aggarwal

We’re completing each other’s sentences already.

00:00:39 – Rico Figliolini

But where are we doing this? We’re doing this from one of our great sponsors, one of our two great sponsors, Vox Pop Uli. Was this tastefully obnoxious? Let me tell you, I asked them to do a corner cut for us, and this is perfect. So they have the Moxie logo and stuff. So they’re branding, right? Same way they can brand your stuff. They’ll put your logo on anything. They’ve done, I think, 6,000 vehicle wraps. They’ve done garments, obviously. They could do one-offs or they could do 1,000. They do trade show booths, wraps, everything. So anything you need a logo on, think of what object you want it on. They’ll figure it out for you. And if you’re doing, let’s say, 5,000 mailers and you want that database customized for each postcard, they could do that also. It’s called data. I forget what it’s called, but they can do that. They can work the data into the printing as well. So all customizable. Check them out, voxpopuli.com. Now, getting to something we were talking about, hands-on stuff, which is this also. This can’t just be done by machines, right? Although machines, you still need people. But EV Remodeling Inc., they are a remodeling company. They can do design to build. They can do whole house renovation. They can create your deck, your backyard gazebo. They can put a bathroom, kitchen, anything you want. EV Remodeling Inc. is owned by Eli and his family. Lives in Peachtree Corners. It’s based out of our city. They’ve done, I think, over 250 homes recently. So check them out, evremodelinginc.com. And I want to thank both of them for being great sponsors of ours. So, it’s always a long stretch doing that, but I’m glad to have you, V.

00:02:22 – Vandana Aggarwal

I’m happy to be here. Thank you for inviting me onto your podcast. Excited to chat with you.

00:02:25 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah, no, this is cool. Well, you know, I met you, where did I meet you at? I think it was the chamber.

00:02:30 – Vandana Aggarwal

Yeah, the Southwest Gwinnett Chamber event.

00:02:32 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah, and we were talking a bit, and I was like, damn, you know, I had my father owned a business, and he wanted his kids to be in it. None of us, none of us could go into that business. It’s a little difficult, different industry. It was a hard industry, plus my father was very patriarchal, very over-demanding. God bless him. He mellowed in age. But when you were telling me about your family, I mean, your father, your mother, your sister, your brother, and you, I mean, all in it. It’s amazing.

00:02:55 – Vandana Aggarwal

We’re all together. We’re the modern-day Brady Bunch.

00:03:03 – Rico Figliolini

I love it. Yes, that’s exactly it. But, let’s start a little bit. I mean, you were telling me, I mean, you came from a consulting world. You came where you were actually being paid a lot more than you’re being paid right now, actually.

00:03:12 – Vandana Aggarwal

I told my father he couldn’t afford me when he recruited me out. So I graduated from Georgia Tech in 2007. I actually did join his company right out of college for two years, learned a lot about the company. He actually had me go through a rotation in every department of the company to learn more about what we did, how we operated. And I think very quickly, it was also 2008-9 with a recession. But I was also very interested to learn how big companies operate. How can you take a small company at that time? We were much smaller than we are today and really understand how do you go from this, which is where everyone starts, right? As a new company to get to be one of the largest in the nation, in the world and see how they operate, how they grew it from, you know, a mom and pop business to this global enterprise. Consulting was a natural transition to learn about multiple companies, multiple industries. So transitioned into AT Kearney, which has now been rebranded as Kearney, and out of their Chicago office. So I was there for seven to eight years, almost eight years.

00:04:23 – Rico Figliolini

Entry-level position you got in?

00:04:24 – Vandana Aggarwal

Yeah, I went in as an analyst. The good thing with that experience was by the time I left, I was a senior manager with Kearney. I worked across 17 different companies in those eight years. So I got to experience how CPG companies, retail companies, transportation, IT, you name it, I’ve done it. In terms of the different types of industries I got to work with, worked with a lot of Fortune 100 to 500 companies at the C-suite level. So we were coming up with all kinds of strategy projects such as new market entries, mergers and acquisitions. A lot of what I ended up specializing in in those seven years was operational efficiency and growth strategy. So it was an amazing, I’m grateful for that learning experience, the you know the caliber of minds that you work with. You also get to experience what the C-suite looks like. How does the very top operate and then it goes from the top down right? So it is very much led at this very top leadership and you see how companies change in their culture the way they operate based on how the top is designed.

00:05:38 – Rico Figliolini

So did you see good and bad at the top?

00:05:41 – Vandana Aggarwal

Absolutely. And I’m not going to name names. But you learn a lot when you see how your CEO and your C-suite right below them, the culture they’re bringing into a company and their vision and their goals if they’re aligned, unaligned. Anyone that at the very top have different viewpoints of where the company has had it is where companies start to break apart, lose revenue, lose their you know people, which is very important.

00:06:11 – Rico Figliolini

Where did you see the pain point then? What was the common denominator I guess of those?

00:06:18 – Vandana Aggarwal

There’s no one common denominator, but if I had to kind of narrow in, it comes down to what is our five-year, ten-year trajectory? Where are we headed? As large companies grow, you’re not just in one industry. You’re not just doing retail shopping centers. You’re investing in all kinds of properties just to bring it back to our company. Similarly, a CPG company can make all kinds of products, so they have to decide what it is because you have to be concentrated on the right places. If you have a leadership team that is in alignment of what that ultimate goal is, right, then you have clear strategies and, you know, metrics you’re measuring your success against. So that was a big thing that I learned. Also just, you know, seeing how great leaders operate, right? Some of the best in the nation today, I got to be in the room with them and just to see how they lead is very important.

00:07:14 – Rico Figliolini

Did you see any family dynamics in any of those businesses?

00:07:20 – Vandana Aggarwal

No. You know, there may have been like a father-son duo, but when you’re looking at the very top, I won’t say it was like all in the family, right? You know, and it also becomes the size of a company, right? You know, when you get to an international scale, you’re not always blessed that every person in your family has the right skill set and experience to fill each role on that C-suite.

00:07:46 – Rico Figliolini

I’m just thinking Trump for some reason. Every kid has a job.

00:07:51 – Vandana Aggarwal

Every kid has a job.

00:07:52 – Vandana Aggarwal

You had the accent, right?

00:07:54 – Rico Figliolini

Pretty much, I guess. So after the C-suite or expansion, you traveled a lot too, I think, right?

00:08:01 – Vandana Aggarwal

I did, yeah. So after my seven, eight years in consulting, I was reaching 30. And Shiv, my father, came to me and he said, you know, you’re doing this for a lot of outside companies. Why don’t you help us grow and bring your expertise home? And I said, look, I’ll take a sabbatical. Let me assess the company. And after that period where I took a short sabbatical to come look at how we were operating, I said, I can give you three years. I said, you can’t afford me, but I’ll give you three years of my time. And I said, I think it’ll be the right, it was the right time in the company. We were investing very heavily. We were bringing in a lot of new square footage into the company, and we weren’t designed to manage it. So we as a company, as you know, we are the investors. We have an in-house management company, an in-house leasing company. So as we acquire new properties, our team does the management for those properties in-house. We don’t provide third-party services today. And we do the leasing in-house. But at that time, when he, you know Shiv started we had one or two and now we’re at 50 shopping centers plus and other investments that we have. And there’s a very different way you operate you know and how do you how does the CEO go from being an operator to where he’s overseeing it, but he’s not into the weeds right? So he has create a system for that to happen right? You have to have standard operating processes for your property managers, your accounting team, your marketing team.

00:09:35 – Rico Figliolini

And you quite didn’t have that before.

00:09:37 – Vandana Aggarwal

We didn’t, no. And, you know, and I think that’s why he wanted to bring me in is because my strength is operations and I love it. I love going into messy places and cleaning them up.

00:09:49 – Rico Figliolini

Is that what you did when you were a consultant?

00:09:51 – Vandana Aggarwal

A lot of what I was concentrating on at the end of my consulting career, yes. So I did a lot of operational efficiency work. So we’d go in, assess the way companies were designed. And we’d interview hundreds of team members to understand what their role is. You know, what are they responsible for? How are they delivering? What are they measuring for success? And then we’d redesign the way they did that based on, again, bottom line, what are your ultimate goals for the company?

00:10:21 – Rico Figliolini

So you had to understand that before you got to that point. And you’re not making the decisions, the C-level.

00:10:29 – Vandana Aggarwal

Present, right? And similarly even with Shiv, when I first joined, I said, look, this is how I think we need to redesign the company from a bottoms-up perspective based on ultimately our goal of growth, doubling, tripling in size over the next ten years. And I think this is where the father dynamic came in. I guess he trusted me. And he said, do it. He just said, do it. And it was beautiful because right when you’re with large companies, it’s a lot of time before you get. Those decisions made and that trust, right? And so it was great. And he said, yeah, just put it into place.

00:11:07 – Rico Figliolini

See, that’s a great dad, actually. Some dads would be like, I don’t know about that daughter or son or whatever.

00:11:16 – Vandana Aggarwal

It did take time, though, like to ultimately, he was in the operation so heavily. And, you know, until today, I’m still like, step up, step up. Like, I need you to not get into the weeds. Like I think at that time we had tenants calling him, maintenance guys calling him. Like every little and big problem would go through his cell phone. I said, you’re too smart and you’re such a good investor. This is not your skill set. You shouldn’t be managing this. You need to bring people on who are expertise in this area. And I said, you need to be focused on like the larger plan.

00:11:51 – Rico Figliolini

This way you can grow it better.

00:11:51 – Vandana Aggarwal

Which I think has been very successful over the last eight years I’ve been with him now.

00:11:57 – Rico Figliolini

So before you got to him, though, you were traveling a bit internationally as well?

00:12:02 – Vandana Aggarwal

Yeah, yeah. So this is an amazing year. I was very burnt out. By the time I left consulting, I was working 70 to 80-hour weeks, traveling Monday through Thursday, if not more than that, of the week. So I told Shiv, I was like, I’m going to take a month. I’m going to go to India, get my yoga certification. No intention to teach at the time. I just said it’d be a great one-month retreat. And I was up in the mountains like Himalayas and India in a city called Dharamshala. Beautiful place. One of my favorites in the world. And I just, I think I needed it for myself emotionally, mentally to take that break. So I turned one month into one year. I didn’t know it was going to be a year.

00:12:49 – Rico Figliolini

In that same city? In that same town?

00:12:50 – Vandana Aggarwal

Yeah, so I ended up the school that I had gotten my certification with. I asked them, I was like, do you mind if I hang around for a little while? Like very casually, I’m like, you know, I’ll pay for my room and board, but I just want to be around this group and this energy. And they said, well, if you’re going to be here, why don’t you intern? And they’re like, room and board is free if you intern. I was like, sure. You know, not thinking what it was leading to. This is like that beauty of the universe coming into play. Yeah, so I started teaching, ended up loving teaching. So then I ended up teaching the 200-hour yoga training course. And I was in Dharamshala for four months. And then I moved down to Goa, their Goa campus for another six.

00:13:30 – Rico Figliolini

Where is that? Goa?

00:13:32 – Vandana Aggarwal

Goa? It’s in southern India on their west coast. It’s a beach town. Yeah. So I had the mountains and the beach. But I’m a mountain girl. I’m a hiker. But no, it was a beautiful experience. Very different from anything I’ve done with my career, right? But I became a yoga teacher for a year.

00:13:52 – Rico Figliolini

Did that clear your head? Yoga, they say, can do that, right?

00:13:53 – Vandana Aggarwal

Yeah, it’s all the tools of yoga, right? The meditation, the breath work, really getting internal, going in, right? Just going inwards, being quiet, which we don’t have. We have a lot of noise in our life today, you know? And naturally, right? Between family life, work life, social, and then just all of the noise from everything else right? Like we’re sitting here and I can hear the cars right? So you know that difference was when I was sitting there, I could hear the ocean waves and so there’s something very healing in nature naturally. So it was the tools mixed with nature and I still think nature has a very strong healing power on us. So whenever I can, I try to get out on a mountain and by the ocean. But yeah no it was it was a beautiful experience but it did bring a level of calmness into the way I approach things. It changes your perspective of you know at the end everything’s okay. No matter what you’re going through it’s temporary you’re, and everything that’s happening to us is happening to us for the good. We don’t know it, sometimes it seems like a bad situation in the moment, but ultimately you know, universe, God, whatever you believe in is at play to bring you something better in your life. And you just have to step back to understand what is it delivering us.

00:15:19 – Rico Figliolini

I like the way you think. My wife every once in a while would say, aren’t you upset about that? I’m like, I think come tomorrow, it won’t mean anything. There’s no point in, just relax. Not everything, two days later, it’s not as important as it seemed at that moment.

00:15:37 – Vandana Aggarwal

Yeah. And it’s not just that it’s not as important. It’s also like…

00:15:41 – Rico Figliolini

In perspective?

00:15:42 – Vandana Aggarwal

It’s, what am I gaining from this? Like, what can I gain from this? Oftentimes when, you know, a lot of things happen, yeah, like you get hurt or, you know, it’s like in relationships, right? Or if you have a bad business deal, right? It’s like, hey, how am I growing, right? And I think that’s what makes life very exciting, right? Otherwise, if you’re always living on a high, is it a high?

00:16:06 – Rico Figliolini

Yes. So I’m thinking you were a consultant for seven or eight years. 80 hours a week. And all of a sudden you’re doing yoga on the mountains of India. It’s just like, it’s almost like a movie. It’s almost like…

00:16:18 – Vandana Aggarwal

Eat, pray, love?

00:16:19 – Rico Figliolini

Yes.

00:16:20 – Vandana Aggarwal

It was my eat, pray, love moment for a year.

00:16:23 – Rico Figliolini

That’s amazing.

00:16:24 – Vandana Aggarwal

No, you meet amazing people, but I think we were meant to meet everyone that we come in interaction with on a daily basis. You naturally have a connection. There’s a universe at play, and we were meant to cross paths and learn something from each other, gain something from one another, give to the other person. And I think you just have to look at life that way.

00:16:48 – Rico Figliolini

I definitely think along that way. I mean, I definitely think each of us nudges each other in a crowd a little bit. That one nudge can set you off going in a different direction. So I totally believe in that. So you joined your dad. Yes. And you’re, so actually, even before we get there, so yoga, but what other interests have you been?

00:17:03 – Vandana Aggarwal

Yeah. So, I mean, I’m an avid hiker. I’ve done recently in the last few years, I’ve climbed Kilimanjaro. I did the Machu Picchu trail. I’ve done a few 14ers out in Colorado, but I like to test myself physically. You know, just, again, it comes down to how do we find that push within us past our comfort zone? So is this a physical inability or is it a mental constraint? So to get past that mental constraint of discomfort and then really push yourself to the next level and say, I can achieve something. It’s not going to be easy. So to me, if I’m on a hike and it’s not hard, I’m like, well, was it a hike? Like it didn’t test me, but no I think, you know.

00:17:55 – Rico Figliolini

You should do the Appalachian Trail. That’s like 2000 plus miles.

00:18:03 – Vandana Aggarwal

I know. And it is, you know, it’s not just like the hiking part. It is like living out in nature and, you know, sleeping in uncomfortable conditions. Yeah. Walking in the rain. It’s cold. I think the last day of our Kilimanjaro hike, it was negative 20 degrees up in the mountain and my eyelashes were frozen and I couldn’t feel any part of my body. And, you know, and it tested my breathing. And there is that element of push yourself to the point that it’s not your ego anymore. Like if your body’s saying stop, you have to stop as well and respect your body. But yeah, to really test yourself.

00:18:38 – Rico Figliolini

To circle all that back now, you’re back home. You’re working with your father and your family. A lot of businesses grow or die because of family. If it’s a family business, right?

00:18:52 – Vandana Aggarwal

Absolutely, yeah.

00:18:53 – Rico Figliolini

So you have your highs, your lows, your, sometimes you don’t get along. Sometimes decisions are split. People get upset with each other. So you’ve been at your highs and lows physically and mentally doing other things. Has that helped you in some ways? Not that you’re having a bad time with family. Because it sounds like you all fit just fine, like the Brady Bunch.

00:19:15 – Vandana Aggarwal

Let’s keep it that way. No, I mean, there’s multiple dynamics at play. It is a family business. My father is also my boss. My siblings are also my friends and my coworkers. And it’s about no matter how hard you try, you cannot separate those relationships. There is an interplay of all of it when you spend eight to nine hours a day together. But we all have, again, a common goal for the company. And then a common goal for our personal relationship. So when we sit down, we keep in mind that we like each other and we want to keep it that way. Like very simply put, that’s first and foremost for me especially. Even when Shiv had brought me in, he said, oh, can you manage everyone? And I said, I’ll manage everyone but my brother and sister. I said, you know, like I won’t jeopardize the relationship I have with them as a sibling by being their manager. Especially because I said that’s your job like good luck. But not just that it’s you know we all have different skill sets so I said how do I manage my brother who is a genius he’s a CPA by trade you know like I can’t tell him how to run the financials of this company like he’s supposed to teach me that right? And same way I teach him that. My sister has a master’s in marketing right? She is by far the most social, likable person you’re going to meet, and she knows how to work with people. I said, she needs to teach us that. So I think we’re lucky that each of us, and this is, I think, rare, where you have three kids and each one of them has their own skill set. That, I think, helps us stay in business and we see ourselves foreseeably into the long-term future being in business together is because we each bring something very unique to the table. Ultimately we value the relationships that we have on a personal level as a family above all else right? And then you know the element of like, how does the yoga experience a hiking experience teach us. That’s, it’s not specific to anyone’s situation, I think it’s a baseline of who you become right? The foundation. Like it teaches you patience, it teaches you again, everything is temporary so let’s not get overly attached emotionally or get upset or too joyful, even like, let’s just stay neutralized on any situation because it will end. And then the next one will come up and kind of flow with the ebbs and flows of the ocean. You, you flow with everything that comes with you, comes your way at work, at home. But yeah, I mean, we do sit down as a leadership team. I, my father and my siblings and I, and we talk about, hey, we separately do the exercise. Where are we going to be in five years? What role do we play in that journey? And thankfully, all of ours are very similar in what our goals are. And then we have different skill sets that we bring. So even as we design the future of the company in a moment where my father is not at the head of the table, we’re working on that redesign work. But it’s very conscious. It’s very intentional. Again, we all step back and say, hey, look, how do we maintain, how do we solve problems? Because like, you know, we were talking about how tomorrow we may not agree on something, a big decision. What are we investing in? Come back to, you know, right now Shiv gets to make an ultimate decision because he’s the one leader at the top. Tomorrow it’s going to be three people at the top. How do you deal?

00:23:04 – Rico Figliolini

So is there an exit plan for your dad? Well, not an exit plan.

00:23:09 – Vandana Aggarwal

Not an exit plan. He already has. I think he, you know, he’s gone from, he’s the hardest working person I know. I get that from him. We’re addicted to work.

00:23:18 – Rico Figliolini

80 hours a week.

00:23:21 – Vandana Aggarwal

We love working. You know, this company is his baby. I think I’ve adopted it at this point and we all have. But, to stay mentally sharp, to stay alive, you have to keep working. You have to keep doing something. You have to be working towards something that brings you joy and purpose. And I think, you know, he stepped back to take time towards a lot of his nonprofit work, community work that he’s very much engaged with. But he’s still at the top. He’s still running, you know, his, you know, he’s, you know, not slowing down. You know, we’re constantly growing. We’re growing this year in a large scale, which is amazing, and he’s leading that charge.

00:23:59 – Rico Figliolini

How many properties do you own?

00:24:02 – Vandana Aggarwall

Today we have 50 shopping centers and then a few other assets. 

00:24:06 – Rico Figliolini

Is that like 3 million square feet or something? 4 million?

00:24:10 – Vandana Aggarwal

Yeah, over 700 tenants. But, you know, when we sat down a few years ago, we rebranded. Aggarwal Real Estate didn’t exist until two years ago. It was American Management Services. And we had a rebranding effort because we said we want the company’s name and the brand to represent who we are.

00:24:33 – Rico Figliolini

I like that, by the way.

00:24:35 – Vandana Aggarwal

Yeah, it needs to mean something. And we were also proud of what our father has achieved, right? He’s given us this beautiful life that we get to help grow upon. So we said it needs to pay homage to him. So we said, let’s make it Aggarwal Real Estate, ARE. And then as we were deciding what that vision is, we’re a family. In the company, we are a family, not just the four of us, but all of our staff, our team. We don’t, you know, we don’t look at them separate from who we are. And so we said our mission as a company is building communities as a community. And it talks about, hey, in all of the real estate work we’re doing, we try to make sure all of our properties are beautiful. Our tenants are happy. They have direct access to each of us in the company. And on top of that, as a company, we are a community within ourselves because we can’t create them until we are one. So it was very intentional to who we already were, but putting it into brand terms.

00:25:37 – Rico Figliolini

It’s amazing. All that property, tenants. Can’t imagine father tech can send text messages on all their problems, if they have any.

00:25:45 – Vandana Aggarwal

He’s a brilliant man.

00:25:45 – Rico Figliolini

You could be too possessed on that stuff. We want to be cognizant of our time together.

00:25:55 – Vandana Aggarwal

Absolutely.

00:25:57 – Rico Figliolini

So the next subject really was going to be about also AI, because everyone’s talking about AI. We were talking about that before the show started, before we started recording, which was kind of funny because V was asking me if we edit anything. And I was like, no, straight through.

00:26:11 – Vandana Aggarwal

I wanted to see if I could say a few things and then have it taken out of this conversation.

00:26:13 – Rico Figliolini

Nope. Nope. Doesn’t work that way. So, but ChatGPT, AI, that’s all. I mean, you know, could I create a bot to edit this? Probably. But there’s so many things we use in our lives. And you’ve been talking about how it would affect your business. Nevermind the consulting work you did.

00:26:33 – Vandana Aggarwal

Yeah. I mean, the consulting world is, I mean, it depends on the industry, the type of work you’re doing. In real estate, I’ve put a lot of thought behind this. There’s a lot of conversations happening across every industry, every sector, whether it’s education, automotives, real estate, et cetera. Everything’s being discussed. How is that changing the future? How do we incorporate it to be more efficient, right? Be the best in the industry that we can be or operate better. And so for me it’s again comes down to that operations element that I think about like, how do I incorporate it for a company that’s a medium-sized real estate firm today as we become a large company, a bigger player in the market. And people are very important in real estate right?

00:27:17 – Rico Figliolini

Talk about editing?

00:27:20 – Vandana Aggarwal

I was telling you, we should bring them into the podcast.

00:27:27 – Rico Figliolini

We’re going to run a little longer on this.

00:27:36 – Vandana Aggarwal

But let’s take retail shopping centers. This is brick and mortar. I did a paper actually for a large mall retailer back in my consulting days on how the title of the paper was, is brick and mortar dead? And, you know, full circle, I am fully dedicated to brick and mortar, retail, office, multifamily now. But you still need people to clean up your properties, fix your maintenance issues. We were talking about roofing, plumbing, electrical. That is hands-on work. You know, today there is, it’s going to be a long time before there’s a robot that comes in to do that. There will be. I don’t know. I do not see that in 10 years to say we’ve got roofers that are robotic drones that are going to come fix my roof problems.

00:28:24 – Rico Figliolini

Zumbas, they’re going to run around the roof or something.

00:28:26 – Vandana Aggarwal

That’s actually genius. A Zumba for my roof.

00:28:31 – Rico Figliolini

Why not? Attach it to the right thing.

00:28:33 – Vandana Aggarwal

But so those are very people-oriented roles today. Technology will advance how quickly it’s done or how well it’s done. But you’ll still need someone to operate the machinery of it and everything.

00:28:49 – Rico Figliolini

Just not as many.

00:28:50 – Vandana Aggarwal

Yeah. Construction, similarly, right?

00:28:54 – Rico Figliolini

Unless you 3D print a house. I’m sorry.

00:28:56 – Vandana Aggarwal

No, it’s true. It’s true. There’s so many options. I’m thinking 10 years now. I’m not going to have a 3D printer making the metal framing for my new construction project. You know, or installing the sheetrock, it does probably speed up the process, right? There will be machinery to help with that, a lot of AI development in that way. It’s a lot at an office administrative level, right? The speed in which you’re processing invoices, the speed in which you are, you know, getting payments taken in. Today, I would say as far back as right before COVID, we were still accepting checks for money. Now it’s all online. Like we do not accept money coming into the office, or it’s very limited to what we do, right? So that’s AI, if you think about it, right? The ability to pay online.

00:29:42 – Rico Figliolini

QuickBooks Online uses AI now, you can enable it.

00:29:47 – Vandana Aggarwal

So we’ve been using it for many years. The advancement of it has been a little bit slower, and now it’s sped up. Marketing, we were just talking about how you created a flyer on ChatGPT, was it? 

00:30:00 – Rico Figliolini

I won’t talk about the student that’s helping us out here and how they use AI.

00:30:04 – Vandana Aggarwal

No, AI in school, right? But yeah, it’s an AI processor for my HR roles, right? Instead of reading 100 resumes, it’s going through the system to filter them out. Whether it’s writing contracts, I won’t lie. Legal jargon is coming out of ChatGPT today. And so it’s speeding up the way we’re doing work. But my legal team probably, and they won’t say it, should be using AI if they’re not. To help create some of this work right? So it’s like these companies are still going to be needed, but the way that they’re able to respond to us at a quicker, everything would just happen faster right? From typewriters to computers, everything.

00:30:49 – Rico Figliolini

Especially if they know that they just did a lease from you for this property in Texas, that we need three more leases done for three other places, it’s not going to be that much different, right? It’s a template.

00:31:01 – Vandana Aggarwal

It’s coming out a lot faster. Yeah, I mean the negotiations, that’s a people-to-people thing right? So I think thankfully in the real estate world we’re still going to need people. We’re still going to need buildings right? The way built, we were just talking about how a retail shopping center is no longer just for shopping. It has to be for entertainment. It has to be for bringing families in and giving them more than just, hey, go into a TJ Maxx and buy something, right? It’s like, what else are you getting when you’re at that center? Whether it’s a play space or events, we’re starting to do more events at our shopping centers. So it’s, again, serving the community.

00:31:39 – Rico Figliolini

We’re seeing that more. More of that happening. We could go on and on here.

00:31:46 – Vandana Aggarwal

Chatting with you.

00:31:46 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah, and we should probably do one on either AI in the marketplace. Or maybe a panel discussion on something similar. 

00:31:51 – Vandana Aggarwal

Yeah, overall, yeah. That would be exciting.

00:31:55 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah, I think that would be cool.

00:31:56 – Vandana Aggarwal

I think it’s interesting to learn about kind of where every industry is heading. It impacts all of us.

00:32:00 – Rico Figliolini

For sure. I mean, the magazine business, I mean, it’s all like we have certain, we have AI rules. But, you know, AI is still being used to degree to research things. And to do certain things like that. You know, hopefully journalism isn’t just handed over. They do say 40% of the internet is AI written. So, which is kind of incestuous almost because it’ll just feed on itself at some point.

00:32:27 – Vandana Aggarwal

There’s a whole discussion about the validity and the trust behind digital content. In the next few years. I think it’s going to diminish.

00:32:35 – Rico Figliolini

Oh, yeah. I mean, I’m seeing videos now and it’s just like, it just looks so real. And you could not tell the difference, even voice-wise.

00:32:42 –  Vandana Aggarwal

And that’s scary to think. It’s like, how do you trust what you see?

00:32:47 – Rico Figliolini

So on that note, and since this is not edited, so this is right from the beginning. So this is all true. But I want to thank everyone. I want to thank you, V, for being with me.

00:32:57 – Vandana Aggarwal

Thank you so much for having me. This was a great conversation.

00:33:01 – Rico Figliolini

It went by way faster than some of these go. So this is a great discussion. Thank you, everyone. I appreciate you for joining us. Thank you for Vox Pop Uli for the studio look and for letting us do it here, for being a sponsor and for EV Remodeling. Also, I want to thank Jeremy Pruitt behind the camera who has taken care. He’s a Paul Duke student. And it wasn’t him that I was talking about before, by the way. But all the work he’s done on the back end on this. So thank you, Jeremy. So thank you all. Thanks for being with us.

The life-threatening diagnosis that changed everything

In this deeply moving episode of UrbanEbb, host Rico Figliolini sits down with Katherine Lafourcade, executive director of the French-American Chamber of Commerce Atlanta, to talk about life, leadership and the power of giving back.

Katherine shares her unexpected journey from Europe to Georgia, her role in connecting French businesses to Atlanta’s thriving innovation scene and a powerful personal story of her son Theo’s battle with leukemia that inspired her mission to promote blood donation.

With candor, insight and heart, this conversation reminds us of the value of community — and how even a small act, like donating blood, can change lives.

Resources:

• French-American Chamber of Commerce – Atlanta: https://www.facc-atlanta.com
• Blood Drive Registration (June 14, 2025): https://www.facc-atlanta.com/events/upcoming-events/e/event/blood-drive-june.html
• American Red Cross: https://www.redcrossblood.org

Takeaways:

• Why the French-American Chamber of Commerce relocated to Curiosity Lab in Peachtree Corners
• How Katherine transitioned from a global business background to nonprofit leadership
• The life-threatening diagnosis that changed everything for her family
• How her son Theo’s recovery from leukemia — and over 50 blood transfusions — inspired her to launch a community blood drive initiative
• Why World Blood Donor Day (June 14, 2025) is a meaningful opportunity for new and returning donors
• What it takes to host a Red Cross blood drive — and how you can help
• How giving blood could save up to three lives in under 15 minutes

Timestamp:

00:01:42 – Why the French-American Chamber relocated to Peachtree Corners
00:02:14 – Katherine’s transatlantic journey from England to France, Switzerland, and Georgia
00:06:02 – The chamber’s mission: helping French businesses land and grow in the U.S.
00:07:38 – Why French, British, and Irish nationals were banned from donating blood until 2023
00:10:01 – Katherine shares her son Theo’s leukemia diagnosis and critical care experience
00:13:03 – The severity of Theo’s condition and the ECMO machine that saved his life
00:16:00 – The frustration of being unable to donate blood as a parent
00:20:19 – The family’s move to the U.S. and continued treatment during COVID
00:21:44 – Theo’s dream of becoming a pediatric oncologist
00:22:21 – Launching local blood drives and how to get involved
00:24:09 – What it’s really like to donate blood: time, process, and tracking where it goes
00:28:05 – Tracking donations via the Red Cross app and building a culture of giving
00:29:19 – Where to sign up and what to expect on June 14, 2025

Podcast Transcript

00:00:00 – Rico Figliolini

Hi, everyone. This is Rico Figliolini, host of UrbanEbb, a podcast that we do here north of Atlanta, smart city of Peachtree Corners. And we are in Curiosity Lab with a special guest today, Katherine Lafourcade, who’s the executive director of the French-American Chamber of Commerce here in Peachtree Corners. Welcome.

00:00:18 – Katherine Lafourcade

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

00:00:21 – Rico Figliolini

No, I appreciate it. This is going to be a great conversation, I’m sure. But before we get into that, I just want to say thank you to our two sponsors, both here located in Peachtree Corners also. Vox Pop Uli is one. Do you have a brand? Do you have a business? Do you have an organization? Do you need that brand to add on something? Whether it’s clothing or vehicle wrap, and you go to a trade show, or you want your logo on that unusual object that you came up with? They can do it. They can almost do anything. So check them out at Vox Pop Uli. Also, EV Remodeling, Inc. Eli is the owner. They’re based here in Peachtree Corners. Eli lives here with his family as well. They have done, I think, over 258 home renovations from design to build, your bathroom, your kitchen. You need an extension on the house. You need to close in your deck. They could do anything. So check them out at evremodelinginc.com. And both of those sponsors are great sponsors. We appreciate them supporting these podcasts and the magazines and the journalism that we do. So thanks there. Now let’s get into the conversation because Katherine has a great story and a challenging story to a degree, right? But let’s start with first that you’re the executive director for the French American Chamber of Commerce, newly located to Peachtree Corners, right?

00:01:42 – Katherine Lafourcade

Yeah, I mean, actually since 2021. So going back a little bit, but before that it was in Buckhead in the consulate building. And there was a decision to bring us out to Peachtree Corners to be located in the heart of Curiosity Lab, which I think was an amazing decision. It makes a lot of sense for us to be here.

00:01:48 – Rico Figliolini

Sure. There’s so many, I mean, we get countries that are coming from Ukraine to visit this place, Israel and startups from all over the world.

00:02:05 – Katherine Lafourcade

There’s a lot of international partnerships, so it made a lot of sense for the Chamber to be here. 

00:02:05 – Rico Figliolini

So how did you get to the Chamber? What brought you there? What brought you here?

00:02:14 – Katherine Lafourcade

So yeah, despite my very British accent, it’s one of the first questions always, but French American, you don’t sound either. The truth is I’m not either, but I have strong links to France. I started learning French as a school kid in England and we all had to learn French, French and German. And I particularly, something about the French language just clicked with me and I was like, this is it. I need to learn French. I wanted to become bilingual. I knew my life was going to be, there was going to be involvement with French on some level. And so I did a bachelor’s degree in England, international business in French. I got to do a year in Paris as an intern, which just confirmed everything. I think I already knew that I definitely wanted to do something with French in my life. And so after graduation, I moved to France, worked a bit in France, and then France became Switzerland. And then we relocated to the US six years ago now. Yeah, yeah. And then I arrived in this role, kind of in a roundabout way. When we moved here, my husband is French and we decided we wanted to connect with the French community in and around Atlanta. And we thought maybe the chamber was a good place to start. And so we joined as members. And then the end of 2021, the past executive director was leaving. And so there was an opening and had a lot of fingers pointed at me. A lot of people saying, this is a job for you. To which my response was a little bit, I don’t know. I’m not entirely sure of what Chambers of Commerce do. It’s a nonprofit organization as well. So there were a lot of questions I had, but I decided to give it a go. And so since January of 2022, I’ve been the leadership role. Thoroughly enjoy it.

00:03:57 – Rico Figliolini

Good. Well, you know, coming from Europe, I mean, I think any American that would look at that and say, oh, you know, in Europe, you’ve got like all those countries, you could go all over the place and not be hindered, really, except for maybe from Britain to Europe.

00:04:12 – Katherine Lafourcade

Yeah, a little bit different since Brexit, unfortunately, yes. But anyway, yes.

00:04:16 – Rico Figliolini

But, you know, very different culture too, very different way of looking at life. How does it feel being here in the States?

00:04:24 – Katherine Lafourcade

This is my first experience of living in the US. So I had no prior experience in anywhere else. We came to Atlanta. This is my benchmark. I didn’t know what to expect, to be perfectly honest. I wasn’t familiar with Georgia, wasn’t familiar with anything to what we were getting into and the proof is six years on we absolutely love it here. There’s something about the people, there’s something just about the the environment here. There’s such a vibrant international community. There’s a, I don’t know there’s just a very welcoming feeling. And we really are surprised I think on some level I think we don’t mind saying that. I think we’ve really felt like this is a new home for us. We came here with kids as well and they’re also doing well. But yeah I think people are a bit like but why would you have moved here from from Switzerland which is actually where we were and the answer is there’s a big wide world out there and sometimes it’s good to see something different and you don’t know until you’ve tried it so.

00:05:24 – Rico Figliolini

And I’m thinking she came to the south, which is good because this is like America light in a way. Because if you went to the northeast where I came from, Brooklyn, New York, or up in New York, you might have a different feel for it.

00:05:37 – Katherine Lafourcade

I think so. Southern hospitality does seem like it’s a thing. I mean, I don’t know. There’s good and bad everywhere. That’s the bottom line. You can choose the bits you want to see, and there’s always going to be things that are less good. But honestly, yeah, you’ve got to make the best of where you’re living, and that’s the way we see it.

00:05:53 – Rico Figliolini

For sure. So you’ve been here six years, working in the chamber and stuff. Do you find working businesses locally? You’re trying to bring business from France to the states.

00:06:02 – Katherine Lafourcade

Yeah, yeah. That’s part of the mission. So we kind of have a twofold mission. It is to bring French companies over. If they’re thinking about starting up business in Georgia, we are very much there to help them with that. We have a wonderful network of members, have all sorts of skills, all sorts of different sectors of activity. So, you know, if somebody just rolls up and says, I want to start my business here. We can help them with every aspect, legally, financially, recruiting, all of those things. So it’s a nice soft landing. We’ve got a lot of people that speak French. That will also help them because most of them might speak English, but sometimes it’s nice to speak your mother tongue language. And then the second fold is those who are already here to help them develop. So they might have already started their activity, but they do want to expand. They want to get a better network. They want to connect with people, partners, collaborators.

00:06:49 – Rico Figliolini

What type of businesses are you seeing wanting to come here?

00:06:52 – Katherine Lafourcade

It’s a bit of everything. It’s not, we don’t have one sector that really dominates. I mean, we have a lot of businesses, we have some manufacturing, all sorts of sectors. I mean, it’s good and it’s difficult because then we can’t say, well, you know, we’re particularly good at this one thing. So we’re kind of a bit of everything. So everyone has a space really.

00:07:15 – Rico Figliolini

So, dealing with businesses but you’re also dealing with the community and outreach and stuff. So you started, I believe a blood drive some time ago. And part of it came out of, I guess during COVID the banning of, we were talking about this before, of blood from any French, UK or Irish person. Tell us a little bit about that because I didn’t even realize that.

00:07:38 – Katherine Lafourcade

And that wasn’t even just because of COVID. That was a blanket exclusion that was in place for many, many years. So anybody that had lived in France, the UK or Ireland during, I think it was the late 90s at the time of what was called the mad cow epidemic. It was an unfortunate time where cattle got sick and there was some question over the fact that it could go into people as well. So by default, people who had been in those countries were not allowed to give blood. So I was excluded in Switzerland. I wasn’t allowed to give blood there. And then arriving in the US, same exclusion. It was not possible just by default to give blood. And those rules changed in 2023. I think they decided maybe there’s a lack of donors, always. And so maybe opening up to another category, they still screen the blood. I mean, there’s no safety issues, but it’s just making it less strict. And the epidemic was over 30 years ago at this point. Anything that was going to happen would have happened, I think, in that time frame. 

00:08:39 – Rico Figliolini

I think so. I remember the craze about that. It’s all about, oh, my God, if you eat the wrong meat, you can catch, you know, mad cow disease.

00:08:46 – Katherine Lafourcade

I don’t know how many people actually ever got infected. I don’t know. I mean, personally, it was something that happened, and then it kind of was no longer a thing. But, you know, for whatever reasons, out of an abundance of precaution, they wanted to keep it under control.

00:09:01 – Rico Figliolini

And most people, I don’t think, know that blood isn’t, when blood’s donated, it’s sort of remanufactured into other, I mean, there’s multiple blood donations within even one pack.

00:09:12 – Katherine Lafourcade

Yes, absolutely. So there’s whole blood, which is, you know, just giving the whole blood, you can donate plasma, you can donate platelets as well. Different blood groups are in more or less demand because there’s a universal donor. So if you’re a group O negative, that’s the golden, that’s everyone wants that blood because everyone can receive that blood. They want all the blood groups, obviously. But there’s always a lack of donors, always, because people don’t think about donating. It’s not something that’s in your everyday life, unless you’ve had a personal reason to get involved. Quite often it’s something that, you know, you might know someone who does it, but it’s never necessarily number one on your to-do list.

00:09:56 – Rico Figliolini

So let’s go there for a minute.

00:09:58 – Katherine Lafourcade

So yeah, that’s.

00:09:59 – Rico Figliolini

You had a real personal reason.

00:10:01 – Katherine Lafourcade

I did. Absolutely. So after, so even before we moved to the US, my son at the age of 12 and a half got very, very sick. He was diagnosed with leukemia and it came out of the blue. We were in Switzerland at the time. He was a healthy, happy kid. Nothing predisposed this happening. You know, there were no forewarnings. It just was a shock out of the blue. Leukemia starts in the bone marrow. It’s a white blood cell that mutates and becomes cancerous. And that’s kind of it. It then snowballs into a pretty devastating diagnosis. Leukemia is not like a lot of other cancers. There’s no tumor. You can’t have radiotherapy. It’s in the bloodstream, so it’s everywhere. And it’s treated with a very, very, very large number of chemotherapy doses intravenously. So within the first year alone, he had over 100 intravenous injections of chemotherapy.So some days some weeks it was four days out of five at the hospital. Sometimes he was in overnight we had to pre-hydrate and post-hydrate because of toxicity. He had a chest port because they can’t go in regular veins. Yeah it’s too toxic, so you had a chest port that stays in place. I mean it’s brutal. It’s very, very devastating you know you imagine a child a 12 year old not understanding why this is happening, all the horrific side effects from the chemo you know hair loss, nausea. It’s just shocking. He missed a lot of school a lot of time in hospital. And so we plowed through all of that and normally at the end of nine months of treatment we’d get to a different phase of the the protocol which would have been slightly easier, a bit less chemo, a bit less time in hospital called the maintenance phase. And very unfortunately for poor Theo when we were ending the intensive phase and getting towards this part that should be better, everything took a turn for the worse. We didn’t know why again, there was a lot of confusion, a lot of unknown. He had contracted an intestinal parasite.

00:12:00 – Rico Figliolini

At the hospital?

00:12:01 – Katherine Lafourcade

At home or at the hospital, we don’t know where. I mean we weren’t going anywhere or doing anything, so it’s very improbable that would even happen but his immune system which was pretty much non-existent at that point. This thing had obviously got in there and any normal person you’d get rid of it, but his body wasn’t able to do that and it set up a horrible situation. He was losing weight almost by the day. When they found this parasite, they treated it, couldn’t get rid of it, and things just kept going downhill. And we ended up with an absolutely critical situation just before Christmas 2017. It was an emergency situation. Everything was crashing. It turned into septicemia, so septic shock, an infection everywhere in his body, which can kill in a matter of hours so it was a case of emergency surgery. They had to operate on him in his hospital bed, they didn’t even have time to get him to the operating block. And they put him on a machine called ecmo, which was actually used during COVID. COVID patients.

00:13:03 – Rico Figliolini

Was that the ventilation?

00:13:04 – Katherine Lafourcade

So kind of. It’s not actually ventilation it does the job of the heart and lungs outside of the body.

00:13:10 – Rico Figliolini

Yes, that’s right. I think it was misnamed ventilation when it really wasn’t.

00:13:15 – Katherine Lafourcade

And his lungs were what got completely infected. So there was no oxygen exchange between his blood and the lungs that were just not functioning. So they had to put him on this machine which in itself is brutal surgery. It’s open heart surgery. And it’s two big tubes that are fixed onto the body that come out. The machine’s on the floor next to the bed. It takes out the carbon dioxide. It puts back in the oxygen. And he was on dialysis because his kidneys weren’t doing well as well. He was on a ventilator to breathe.

00:13:42 – Rico Figliolini

He was 12 years old at the time?

00:13:44 – Katherine Lafourcade

He was, yes, 12, 13. Sorry, he had turned 13. Yeah.

00:13:46 – Rico Figliolini

How was he?

00:13:50 – Katherine Lafourcade

He was in an artificially induced coma at that point because he just needed to be on life support. He was totally unaware of what was going on. We were watching him, we had no concept of what was happening. It was so beyond the realms of anything you’ve ever seen or take a moment because it was a lot. It was very, very, very difficult.

00:14:11 – Rico Figliolini

And he has siblings too right?

00:14:13 – Katherine Lafourcade

He has an older sister, yeah and she…

00:14:15 – Rico Figliolini

How’d she take that?

00:14:17 – Katherine Lafourcade

She just watched him like we did, you know, in a coma with his body attached to tubes and, you know, with the machine breathing for him. And it was just a case of hoping. And sometimes it was minute by minute. It was very much, you know, there is nothing but what’s happening right now. You know, and you look at the doctors, a bit like the movies, and you just say to them, do everything you can. But you can see that they’re not sure. You know, there was…

00:14:41 – Rico Figliolini

Which, do you mind me asking which hospital this was?

00:14:44 – Katherine Lafourcade

It was in Lausanne. It was near to the, it was the hospital, the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Lausanne, which is the hospital, the University Hospital of Lausanne. Luckily, they’re super well equipped. They have staff that are amazing. And without a shadow of a doubt, those people saved his life. He’s still in contact with some of them. I’m still in contact with some of them. Yes. I mean, there’s a bond there that goes beyond sort of parent, sorry the patient caregiver.

00:15:05 – Rico Figliolini

It’s almost like savior or something.

00:15:12 – Katherine Lafourcade

Oh yeah. I mean, I clearly and we’re still in contact because, so I mean his story was, I mean it’s difficult to do it chronologically. But he was in a very, very bad space. He received a ton of blood transfusions. That surgery in itself he hemorrhaged. There were times when he was on the machine, the machine kind of, it keeps you alive but it also destroys the blood. Blood doesn’t like going into anything sort of machine based. So he was, one time he was lacking so much in volume that they pressed the panic switch. The alarms were blaring and everybody rushed in and they were, they got syringes of blood that were this fat and they were pushing it into his system to try and get the volume of his blood up. I’ve never seen anything like it. I mean, it really felt like it was an out of body experience.

00:15:58 – Rico Figliolini

Well, you were learning also quite a bit.

00:16:00 – Katherine Lafourcade

Learning a lot about what happens behind the scenes, you know, most people never get, and I’m glad most people will never see that. But honestly, the perspective, I was just, I was sad at that point because all I wanted to do was give blood, not to my son directly, but my husband and I, we thought, let’s do something to help someone else who might be in this situation. And we couldn’t. So it felt, it felt rough. You’re already helpless. Then the one thing you think that you might be able to do, you can’t just because of these rules that are in place. So it was frustrating. He, by some miracle or other, came through. We stopped treating the leukemia. I mean, we were just kind of getting him through the infection.

00:16:36 – Rico Figliolini

How old was he at that point?

00:16:38 – Katherine Lafourcade

So he was in the coma for, I think, just over a month. He missed Christmas, New Year, woke up in January the next year, had a tracheotomy at that point, so he didn’t have a voice, woke up not knowing what had happened during this whole blacked out period. So I’d taken photos which was weird but then it was actually good to be able to show him what he’d been through. You know that whole blank space. For me also I think I needed to somehow document what was going on, make sense of it. And then he had to start with physical therapy because he was just a skinny body. The muscle wastage is crazy, in a matter of weeks he was just a tiny little frail thing and he could just sit up. And then he had to learn how to stand up again and then he had to learn how to walk again and get some muscle strength and very, very long process, but he came through it. And again, it was down to his willpower because as a parent, the one thing you want to do is take all of that. Even the cancer, I said to him, you know, I want to do, I would do this for you. There’s not a part of me that doesn’t want to swap places right now, but I can’t. Unfortunately, you’ve got to do this and we’re a team and I will help you in any way I can, but the strength has got to come from inside of you. So he’s, he’s.

00:17:48 – Rico Figliolini

So you were there quite a bit of time.

00:17:50 – Katherine Lafourcade

I didn’t leave the hospital for lots and lots of months. I slept upstairs in a consultation room because I just couldn’t bear to not be there. And when they’re in the ICU, there’s no space for a parent to have a bed there. It’s not made for that. So I would just go upstairs, my little suitcase and come back. I used to read to him when he was in the coma, just read because I didn’t know what to do. And apparently people can hear you when they’re in a coma. So I don’t know. Sometimes his blood rate, his heart rate would go up a little bit. And when I would read, it would go back down. And the nurses said, it’s because your voice is calming. He’s heard it from before he was born. And I was like, I don’t know, but I’m going to go with that because I felt like I was doing something, you know, and at that time that was all I could do, so.

00:18:31 – Rico Figliolini

Did you, you had people supporting you too?

00:18:33 – Katherine Lafourcade

Yes, I was, yeah. I mean, I didn’t, my family came over from England because all my family was in England, but. We had friends, we had people in the community that helped. And the staff at the hospital are also, you know, they’re the angels because they do this for a living. And I was lucky my employer, even at the time I didn’t lose my employment, they were just more concerned about me and my son. So, and, you know, it just, my husband and I, it just really sort of soldered us together and in an even tighter bond to have to go through something as quite as crazy as that.

00:19:03 – Rico Figliolini

And I would imagine European healthcare is a little different.

00:19:06 – Katherine Lafourcade

It is different, yes. And I think had it have happened here, I’m not quite sure the costs that would have been involved because this healthcare system is quite different. Switzerland’s also private, but a lot of it was taken care of. There were some financial burdens, but there are also charities that try and help with that kind of thing because it’s a lot for families to have to go through.

00:19:24 – Rico Figliolini

So once he came out of the coma, once he came into remission. He’s been in remission for five years?

00:19:29 – Katherine Lafourcade

He’s been in remission for five years, yeah.

00:19:31 – Rico Figliolini

That’s a key mark.

00:19:32 – Katherine Lafourcade

It is. Absolutely. So after he came out of the coma, that was when we were entertaining the coming to the US and we had to make sure that was all going to be okay that the treatment, because the treatment was going to continue. So we did. We went through all the stages. Were the doctors okay with us moving here? The answer was yes. Did the insurance cover the move here? The answer was yes. So then we had the, do we do it or do we not do it? And when we asked both children. Theo was absolutely, yes, I want to go there right now. He needed to kind of turn the page. And I think the move here was so great for all of us, actually. And we didn’t know at the time. It was kind of a leap of faith because we didn’t know what we were getting into. It was a big change at quite a critical time. But we decided to make it happen. And he was still having treatments that when we got here, still having chemotherapy.

00:20:19 – Rico Figliolini

Do you, which, if you don’t mind me asking again, which hospital are you doing?

00:20:22 – Katherine Lafourcade

So it was the Children’s Right. Yeah. Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, Scottish Right Hospital. Amazing.

00:20:30 – Rico Figliolini

You felt really good with them too?

00:20:32 – Katherine Lafourcade

They were phenomenal. They’d read his file that was not a normal file and they knew things that were so, such detail. I was like, these people have read everything. So I trusted them blindly. There were no complications in the last part of his treatment. He did, he was still having treatment though when COVID hit. So that was scary.

00:20:53 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah, I would imagine infection or something like that.

00:20:54 – Katherine Lafourcade

Exactly. Lungs, I was just, I had visions of the ECMO and the coma and I was like, I just, I don’t know if I can, I don’t know if I can cope going back there. He had the vaccine very early. He caught COVID, but a long time afterwards and it was fine. And so in May of 2020, you were referring to the milestone. So he finished his treatment, May 2020. Had lots of checkups. It’s not something you just finish and you’re good. They still want to make sure that you’re okay. And they get less and less frequent. And then May of 2025, so next month, the biggest milestone yet, five years. Five years after the last chemo, five years of remission, still doing well. Now at college. So he did his high school. He arrived here as a freshman at high school. He did his four years. And now he’s a freshman at college at UGA.

00:21:42 – Rico Figliolini

What does he want to be?

00:21:44 – Katherine Lafourcade

He wants to be a pediatric oncologist.

00:21:47 – Rico Figliolini

Inspiration from the weirdest places.

00:21:49 – Katherine Lafourcade

Yes, yeah. I mean, clearly it changed him fundamentally. It changed all of us. I mean, there’s no way that life is the same.

00:21:56 – Rico Figliolini

I can’t even imagine that. I can’t imagine a child. I mean, I have three kids. I cannot imagine what you went through.

00:22:03 – Katherine Lafourcade

Yeah, it was a lot. And it’s still just under the surface, even if it’s five years. And the diagnosis was even before that. But some of it is just so, yeah, it will never not be an emotional subject. And that’s why I want to do things to give back, things to help. And that’s where we get back into the blood drive.

00:22:21 – Rico Figliolini

That’s right. So you started wanting to do that through the chamber.

00:22:25 – Katherine Lafourcade

Exactly. 2023, we realize we can give blood. My husband and I are like, this is amazing. We have wanted to do this since 2017. We finally can. We both give blood. And then I’m like, you know what? I think that most people in the French, also British and Irish, I’m working for the French chamber. I am convinced that most people don’t know the rules have changed. There will be people that have given blood in France or given blood in various parts of their lives, but feel that, well, have been told that they can’t. This is huge. We need to get the message out.

00:22:55 – Rico Figliolini

So that’s what you’re doing.

00:22:56 – Katherine Lafourcade

So I’m like, now I can use my professional role as the executive director of the chamber. I can talk to the French population of Atlanta with the consulate, the consul general of France, with all the other French entities and just get the word out there. You guys can give blood. I think blood donating also dipped during COVID. Obviously it was a very strange world. And I think maybe people that used to give haven’t got back into it. I have seen firsthand blood donating saves lives. My son would not be here today without people, strangers that gave their blood that he got. Now I can’t find them personally, a lot of blood. I mean, I think he had over 50 transfusions. And I’m throwing that number out there a little bit randomly because I can’t remember, but a lot of transfusions. So for me personally, this is huge. And I just want to inspire people to think about it. Think if you’ve never given, give it a go. If you have given and it’s been a long time, revisit it. One blood donation can save up to three lives, which is, you know.

00:24:00 – Rico Figliolini

So tell people, because some people that don’t know what it takes to donate blood. How long does it take? How much are they donating?

00:24:09 – Katherine Lafourcade

Yeah, it’s really not hard. So the blood drives that we do here at the Curiosity Lab, they’re run by the Red Cross, the American Red Cross. So I offered myself up as a blood leader. So I put together the place, the location, we figure out all the logistics and I invite everyone. And then the blood cross come with all of their staff, with the beds, all the material they set up here. I just basically get as many appointments as I can because we have a goal of units that we want to collect during the drive. The regular blood donating is pretty quick. Funny things, it depends on how quickly it drips out. Some people it’s super fast. Some people it’s a bit slower. It’s going to be like 10, 15 minutes around that. Nothing more. It’s not long, no. And it’s no worse than just having the needle stick that you have when you go to the doctor once a year. Realistically, I know the needle stays in there, but it’s the. It’s not worse. You know, you’re just sitting there and then afterwards you get snacks, you get drinks, you get, we get, we have a company that sponsor Werfen give us donuts to eat afterwards. So, and it’s a real sense of community. And I know a lot of people don’t like needles. A lot of people, it’s like a horrible idea to have this thing in your arm and see blood. I would advise just don’t look. I used to hate blood, but honestly, after I went, what I went through with my son. You kind of just get hardened to it. And you know what you think to yourself? I don’t like this, but what if I’m saving someone’s life?

00:25:35 – Rico Figliolini

For sure.

00:25:36 – Katherine Lafourcade

What if it was my child? What if it was my parent? What if it was someone in my family? Wouldn’t I just hope that other people have gone beyond to give it the best shot they can to donate? So this is, you know.

00:25:49 – Rico Figliolini

So for those, I’m bad about it. I mean, I’m just, I can faint after a needle unfortunately. They have to put a butterfly needle, I think it’s called and maybe because it’s just smaller and easier. But you’ve just gotta fast the night before, this is the normal thing the blood test that you have at your normal physical but otherwise you don’t have to fast.

00:26:09 – Katherine Lafourcade

No, no fasting at all. No you need to eat well, drink well. There’s lots of advice that they will give you beforehand to set yourself up for success.

00:26:16 – Rico Figliolini

For the ones that don’t want to roll up their sleeves and donate blood, what can they do?

00:26:21 – Katherine Lafourcade

They can spread the word. They can talk to their colleagues, their family, their neighbors, their communities, their clubs, whatever it is. Spreading the word is the hardest thing. We don’t have big means to go publicly telling everybody about this blood drive, but it’s going to be on World Blood Donor Day, the next one, June 14th, exactly. It’s a Saturday, 11:30 to 4:30. You can book your slot.

00:26:46 – Rico Figliolini

It’s going to be here?

00:26:47 – Katherine Lafourcade

It’s going to be here, in this room, yeah. You can book your appointment. They will take walk-ins, but if you want to be taken at a specific time, better to take that appointment option because then you’ll have more of a chance of knowing when you’re going to be taken. If you don’t know your blood group, you’ll find out.

00:27:01 – Rico Figliolini

Will they tell you on the spot?

00:27:02 – Katherine Lafourcade

Not on the spot. Afterwards, they will tell you what blood group you are, which could be useful.

00:27:06 – Rico Figliolini

It’s kind of funny because most people might not know that. Because when you do your blood test at the hospitals, they don’t do that. Unless you ask them specifically to test for it.

00:27:10 – Katherine Lafourcade

Yeah, exactly. A lot of people won’t ever know their blood group. They will also do screening for pre-diabetes at the moment for free. So that’s also an additional thing, which is kind of cool. You know, you can figure out if you’re maybe heading towards something a bit less healthy and you can maybe take, you know the steps to correct it.And they have an app, you will know which hospital your blood was used at. Yes, they track it and you get a little alert and then you get a little heart. And I have a map where all the, and I, so I tend to give platelets but that’s a, we’re not going to get into. That it’s a bit more, it’s longer, a bit more complicated but similar process. My platelets have gone to Savannah. They’ve gone down to Mobile, Alabama, to Birmingham, to all kinds of places. And you can track that on a map.

00:28:05 – Rico Figliolini

It’s almost like you’re gamifying the whole thing.

00:28:07 – Katherine Lafourcade

Well, I mean, a little bit, but isn’t it nice to know that someone in that hospital has received something that I gave? You know, that’s the whole point. It makes it more real.

00:28:16 – Rico Figliolini

Yes, it does.

00:28:16 – Katherine Lafourcade

I know where it’s gone. Yeah. Exactly. It’s just gone into the ether and you don’t know. Whereas I think to have that follow up and then there’s points and they’ve kind of really, sometimes they give you t-shirts. I should have been wearing a t-shirt today. I didn’t think about it. I went with the French shirt, the French logo. But no, there’s little giveaways and it’s just about community. And it’s about, you know, what you can do on a very personal, small level to help somebody that’s in need. Because if you’re getting a blood transfusion. There’s something not great. Surgery, childbirth, accidents, cancer patients. You know, there’s a whole host of people that need blood. And honestly, if they need blood, they’re not in a great way. So we all rely on other people, strangers, to help in that scenario.

00:29:01 – Rico Figliolini

And there’s not enough blood out there.

00:29:02 – Katherine Lafourcade

Never enough. No, there’s always a shortage. Bad weather can affect it. You know, environments, holidays, all sorts of things can really affect the supply. And they need a, you know, a flow of donors and people to give regularly.

00:29:17 – Rico Figliolini

So where can they go to?

00:29:19 – Katherine Lafourcade

They can basically, I’m trying to think the easiest way would be to look on the events page of our website.

00:29:25 – Rico Figliolini

Of the chamber website?

00:29:27 – Katherine Lafourcade

Yes. So our website is FACC. So French American Chamber of Commerce. The letters FACC-Atlanta.com. And then there’s an events section. And in that event section, there is a link to the blood drive.

00:29:41 – Rico Figliolini

Excellent. And we’ll have the link in the podcast notes as well. So they should do it as soon as possible.

00:29:47 – Katherine Lafourcade

Yes. Yes. Enrollment is from now. I’m just going to be pushing it out. And, you know, yeah, just spread the word. That’s my ask.

00:29:53 – Rico Figliolini

And I almost don’t want to say this, but there’s also another date a little further away.

00:29:57 – Katherine Lafourcade

Yes, in September.

00:29:58 – Rico Figliolini

In September. So if you’re on vacation. You could do the September date.

00:29:59 – Katherine Lafourcade

We’re doing three this year. We set the target of three drives this year. We might do it quarterly next year. But yeah, that’s the aim is just to keep spreading the word.

00:30:09 – Rico Figliolini

Right. And it’s going to be done here at Curiosity Lab. And the 14th is what? What day is it?

00:30:15 – Katherine Lafourcade

Saturday.

00:30:15 – Rico Figliolini

It’s Saturday. There’s no excuse.

00:30:15 – Katherine Lafourcade

Exactly. Yes.

00:30:18 – Rico Figliolini

Okay. Eat your fill. Eat a good breakfast. Come on down and give some blood.

00:30:22 – Katherine Lafourcade

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Make a difference.

00:30:24 – Rico Figliolini

Yes, for sure. So we’ve been here talking with Katherine Lafourcade, if I’m pronouncing that. Thanks. My last name’s Figliolini, and I mess that up sometimes. But I appreciate you spending time with me and talking about your son, Theo, and the experience that you went through.

00:30:41 – Katherine Lafourcade

You’re welcome.

00:30:41 – Rico Figliolini

Thank you, guys.

00:30:42 – Katherine Lafourcade

Thanks for having me.

00:30:43 – Rico Figliolini

No, no. Thanks, Katherine. Thank you, everyone.

In this episode of Peachtree Corners Life, host Rico Figliolini spotlights three remarkable student artists featured in this year’s Wesleyan Artist Market. Eighth graders Kimberly Wang and Nika Jensen, along with sixth grader Carter Jensen, share their creative journeys—ranging from edible art like fruit jellies and peppermint bark to handmade jewelry and custom-designed bags.

Kimberly talks about her love for food art and balancing sweetness with fruity freshness, while Nika and Carter discuss building a jewelry business that also gives back—donating proceeds to families in the Philippines. This isn’t just an artist market; it’s a showcase of purpose-driven, globally inspired young talent. The event runs April 25–26 at Wesleyan School and is open to the public.

Podcast Takeaways:

• Kimberly Wang creates handmade edible treats, balancing flavor and freshness for the show.
• Nika and Carter Jensen co-run a jewelry and fashion accessory business, inspired by global travel and cultural experiences.
• Nika donates part of her proceeds to support families in the Philippines.
• All three students are deeply involved in extracurriculars—from musicals, marching band, math club, and academic bowl.
• The Wesleyan Artist Market features 24 student artists and over 70 professionals—open to the public April 25–26.

Timestamp: 

00:02:19 – Student intros and extracurriculars 
00:03:06 – First-time participants and motivations for joining 
00:04:13 – Kimberly’s edible art and recipe testing process 
00:05:16 – Nika and Carter’s jewelry and bag design business 
00:07:06 – The reward of watching people enjoy your creations 
00:08:20 – Donating art profits to support families in the Philippines 
00:10:39 – Future aspirations in medicine and law, with art as a passion 
00:12:06 – Behind-the-scenes logistics of preparing for the market 
00:13:25 – Global travel inspiration: 73 countries and counting
00:17:19 – Where the students draw artistic inspiration 
00:20:04 – Custom requests: From peppermint bark to Lego earrings 
00:21:16 – Anticipation and excitement for this year’s market 

00:22:29 – Reflections on Wesleyan and the artist experience 

Transcript: 

00:00:01 – Rico Figliolini 

Hey, everyone. This is Rico Figliolini, host of Peachtree Corners Life. We have a great set of guests today. Because of the upcoming Wesleyan Artist Market, we thought we’d do some interviews with student artists. Three of the 24 that are going to be at Wesleyan Artist Market. So they’re with me here today. So we’re going to get right into that shortly. I just want to say thank you to our corporate sponsors. So I want to say thank you to EV Remodeling, Inc., based here in Peachtree Corners. The owner is Eli. Him and his family live here. They’re great. They do a lot of design work, design your space. Essentially, any home remodeling you need from whether it’s your kitchen, your bathroom, or a whole house remodel, or even an addition to your home, think about it, whatever you need, Eli can handle. So check them out. Go to evremodelinginc.com and find out how they can design your space and your life. Our next sponsor just came on, and they’re Vox Pop Uli. I want to thank them for joining us as well. They deal with all sorts of things you can imagine putting your logo on, similar to a little bit about what these kids do, right? They’re creating artwork. They’re creating a brand for themselves. And so this is what Vox Pop Uli does, right? They’ll take your brand and bring it to life. Essentially, anything that you can think of that would go on apparel, whether it’s sweaters or T-shirts or wherever you want to put your brand engraving, your logo, what object you want to put it on, even vehicle wraps. So if you’ve got a truck, you want to put a whole wrap around it, check them out because they can do that. They’re here in Peachtree Corners and they’re called Vox Pop Uli. So visit their website. I’ll have the links in the show notes as well. So thank you guys. I appreciate your support. So now let’s get right into it. Let me introduce our three artists, great Wesleyan students. Can’t wait to start talking to them. We have Kimberly Wang first on your left, on my left, and Nika and her brother Carter Jensen, who work together creating the artwork they do. So I’m going to ask you guys just to, you know, give me a little background. Tell me who you are, your grade, what you do, extracurricular, stuff like that. This way our audience can get to know a little bit more about you. So let’s start with Kimberly Wang. Hey, Kimberly. 

00:02:19 – Kimberly Wang 

My name is Kimberly Wang. I’m in eighth grade this year, and outside of Artist Market, I do marching band, and I also do the musical production this year, which is Matilda. 

00:02:31 – Rico Figliolini 

Excellent. What about Nika? How about you? 

00:02:34 – Nika Jensen 

I’m also in eighth grade. My name is Nika Jensen, and apart from doing the Artist Market, I do cross country. I’m also in Matilda this year, and I also do math counts, which is a math club.

00:02:47 – Rico Figliolini 

Okay, cool. And Carter? 

00:02:49 – Carter Jensen 

Hello, my name is Carter Jensen. I’m in the sixth grade. And outside of the artist market, I do academic pool and I also do basketball. 

00:03:00 – Rico Figliolini 

Excellent. Alright, cool. So have you guys ever done the artist market before? Is this the first time? 

00:03:06 – Kimberly Wang 

This is my second year doing it this year. 

00:03:08 – Rico Figliolini 

Second? 

00:03:10 – Nika Jensen 

Yeah, this is our first year because we’re new students this year. 

00:03:13 – Rico Figliolini 

Alright, cool. What inspired you to get into it, Nika? 

00:03:17 – Kimberly Wang 

Well, I had my own business before we came to Wesleyan and so I thought that the artist market is a good way to like show my business to other people in our community. So yeah. 

00:03:30 – Rico Figliolini 

And you brought in your brother Carter to help you with? 

00:03:35 – Nika Jensen 

Yes, sir. He’s also part of the business. 

00:03:39 – Rico Figliolini 

Alright cool. Okay so, Kimberly. Food. Food is art, right? I’m sure your mom would probably say, it’s food, just eat it. But you’re playing with your food, essentially. What they used to tell you not to do, right? So when you create your food art, what do you think about? How do you go through this? How do you choose what you do and what do you exactly do? 

00:04:13 – Kimberly Wang 

So this year, I am making fruit jellies and peppermint bark. And when I think about what creations I want to make for the artist market, I go online and I look through like, what are some popular desserts that a lot of people like? And once I like choose my items, then I go through

the recipe and then I do a lot of trial and errors to make sure that like the products are like healthy and they taste well. 

00:04:42 – Rico Figliolini 

So they have to be edible, right? Because this is edible art? 

00:04:45 – Kimberly Wang 

Definitely, yes. 

00:04:46 – Rico Figliolini 

So are you eating a lot of the edible art before you get to what you need? 

00:04:50 – Kimberly Wang 

Not really. I don’t usually taste a lot of the food. I let my family taste it. 

00:04:56 – Rico Figliolini 

Ah, good. I like that. Yes. Get them to participate. Cool. So edible art, that’s one way of doing it. Jewelry, that’s something else, right? Wearable. How do you guys, Nika, Carter, how do you get to the place of what you do? 

00:05:16 – Nika Jensen 

So I started my business when I was 11 years old and it started like I got my first jewelry making kit and I kind of just expanded from there. So like I usually use Amazon to search and find like the prettiest designs like of earrings and pendants and get opinions from other people like my mom and my family to see like if they think it’s like wearable and if they like it. So I browse on Amazon for a while and I find like the best and high quality products and then I hand make them at home usually like every day after I come home from school so and my brother he does something else and he can tell you about that. 

00:06:01 – Carter Jensen 

I, my sister, she got a Cricut machine for, like, her 12th birthday, I think. And started making these, like, iron-on bags with the Cricut machine and, like, making them based on, like, Georgia and, like, Wesleyan and designing it based on fashion. 

00:06:19 – Rico Figliolini 

Alright. Cool. So let’s get back to Kimberly. The food that you do. Do you have particular flavors you like? Do you have particular areas that you stay in? 

00:06:33 – Kimberly Wang 

So this year I’m trying out like something more sweet with chocolate. But last year I definitely went for more of like the fruity side. And I think I like to keep it like a balance. So that way one is not overpowering the other. My personal favorite will probably be fruit because it’s healthy. And I mean, it just tastes good in general.

00:06:56 – Rico Figliolini 

Okay. Alright cool. What’s the most rewarding part that you can think of, of making edible art? 

00:07:06 – Kimberly Wang 

Well, I mean definitely like you said before you get to eat a lot of food. I mean, I did say before that I don’t eat a lot of the creations I make, but sometimes I still do eat it. And so I think it’s also really rewarding to see like people try out your creations and see like their reactions to what they think of it. 

00:07:27 – Rico Figliolini 

So when, I know I’ve spoken to other artists when they sell their artwork like paintings or stuff like that they get a chance to see it sometimes when the fan that bought it if you will, would send them a picture of where they hung it right? Yours disappears right? 

00:07:45 – Kimberly Wang 

Yeah, exactly. 

00:07:47 – Rico Figliolini 

Yeah I guess, there’s no way to, short of doing a selfie with it or taking pictures of it, there’s no there’s no permanency to it so how does that feel? 

00:07:57 – Kimberly Wang 

I mean well as long as the people enjoy it that’s good. And I mean I think mainly it’s about like the memory that you have of having the food and if you like it then it stays as a good memory for you and if you don’t then I mean you can always try out different things. 

00:08:20 – Rico Figliolini 

Okay. Nika, Carter, as far as the jewelry goes the, you’ve used it to raise money to support children in the philippines? yes 

00:08:29 – Nika Jensen 

Yes sir. 

00:08:31 – Rico Figliolini 

Is that, is that how you started this when you were 11? Is that the reason? 

00:08:35 – Kimberly Wang 

No, so I was like 11 during the pandemic. So I was always looking for a way to express my creativity. And so that’s how I started my own business. And so I was selling at my uncle’s pharmacy and I was saving up the money to use for like college or for like other events later on in my life. But this last year and a half before this school year, we were living in the Philippines. And so I was really touched by all of the families there. And we even did something similar where we gave out food and canned goods over Christmas to poor families there. So that just

really touched me. And so ever since we got back to America, I’ve been donating part of my profits to other families in the Philippines. 

00:09:24 – Rico Figliolini 

Carter, did you end up going on that trip as well? 

00:09:28 – Carter Jensen 

Yeah, I was with her. We stayed there for about a year and a half. We also did schooling there. 

00:09:36 – Rico Figliolini 

It’s interesting brothers and sisters, I have three kids and you know growing up brothers and sisters always there could be dynamics there. So how do you get along? Do you ever say to your sister, I don’t know about that. You know that might not look as good, that might not sell. Do you give good feedback? I mean how do you praise her or how do you work together? 

00:09:58 – Carter Jensen 

She’s more of the leader of the business so like I usually just like try to like agree with her and like yeah. 

00:10:12 – Rico Figliolini 

Alright that’s cool well you need a leader of the pack sometimes right? So Nika the artwork that you do, you know this is part of what you do you’ve mentioned other things you do right? I know you’re young, you all are, you know you’re not old enough to really think well maybe you are to really think what you want to do with your life right? Is art something that you want to keep as part of what you’re doing in your life? 

00:10:39 – Nika Jensen 

It’s definitely something that’s of great value to me, but I kind of want to pursue the medical field, but art is also really important to me. 

00:10:49 – Rico Figliolini 

Okay. Sounds good. Same question to Kimberly. What about you? How do you feel about the work you do? 

00:10:57 – Kimberly Wang 

I definitely enjoy making food, but like Nika said, I was also really interested in the medical field. And so like I’m not really sure if I’m going to continue pursuing this. But I mean it’s definitely brought me a lot of joy while doing food art. 

00:11:15 – Rico Figliolini 

Okay. Medical field both of you, that’s cool. What about Carter? How about you? 00:11:19 – Carter Jensen

I kind of like, I like doing art it’s one way to like express your creativity as my sister said. But I also kind of, I’m not really sure what I want to do when I grow up, maybe be a lawyer. 

00:11:33 – Rico Figliolini 

Okay. Well, artwork gives you a chance, right, to play a little bit, to be able to also see how people, like Kimberly, like you said about how when people see your food or taste your food and your food art, if you will, and it gives you a chance to see how people appreciate what you’re doing, I think, right? The challenges of making food art and keeping it fresh and making sure you’re going to deliver it on the right way I guess at the Wesleyan artist market, how do you how do you handle that part of it? 

00:12:06 – Kimberly Wang 

So for me the night before each day of the selling I would stay up really late and I make all my products so they’re all fresh and they’re all new. Because I want the best for the people that are eating the food because I don’t want anything to go bad overnight and so I make sure that it’s always new products and I make it, yeah. 

00:12:32 – Rico Figliolini 

We don’t have the same issue with the jewelry that you do, Nika. So that could last forever, right? But putting it together, sourcing the supplies, right, of what you do, the logistics of it, I guess. How do you handle that? Like getting all the materials together? Do you order it all on Amazon? 

00:12:52 – Nika Jensen 

Yeah, I order like 99% of all of my things from Amazon. And then since I already have the materials shipped to me, then all I have to do is just create them from my house. So it’s easier for me than having to go out and buy supplies at stores. 

00:13:11 – Rico Figliolini 

Sounds good. What inspires you as far as jewelry goes? I know that you said you look online to see other things and what the trend is. So where do you find most of your trends? Is it just on Amazon or is it social media, other places? 

00:13:25 – Nika Jensen 

I kind of observe other people and like what they wear and also social media. And I get a lot of inspiration also from like nature and from like my travels. We’ve been to a lot of countries in the past five years, 173 countries. 

00:13:44 – Rico Figliolini 

How many? 

00:13:45 – Nika Jensen 

I’m sorry, not 173, 73 countries.

00:13:49 – Rico Figliolini 

73 countries? 

00:13:50 – Nika Jensen 

Yes, sir. 

00:13:51 – Rico Figliolini 

That you’ve been to in how many years? I can’t even wrap my head around that. How did you even do that? Teleport? I mean, how did you do that? Wow. What is your heritage, if you don’t mind me asking? 

00:14:12 – Nika Jensen 

I’m half Filipino. My brother and I are half Filipino. And then my father is part Danish and then also American. 

00:14:21 – Rico Figliolini 

Do you speak any languages? 

00:14:23 – Nika Jensen 

I speak the language of the Philippines called Tagalog and then English. And I’m learning Spanish. 

00:14:30 – Rico Figliolini 

Really? Okay. Kimberly, how about you? 

00:14:33 – Kimberly Wang 

So my mom is Taiwanese and my dad is Chinese. So I speak Chinese, English. I’m learning French and I’m learning Korean. 

00:14:43 – Rico Figliolini 

Really? Wow. Okay. Speak Mandarin, is it? Okay. My son was learning that for a year and he was, it’s a tough language to learn. But I’m sure being able to travel for example Nika, to be able to see other other countries and inspiration from those countries. What of the 73, 75 countries you visited what would you say the top five would be for that type of inspiration? Can you pick that up? 

00:15:16 – Nika Jensen 

I think so. I really like Argentina just because it’s so unique and the culture is just so strong there. Like you really feel so immersed just when you like step into the country. I like Italy, not only because of the food, but that’s also where I got a lot of inspiration for my jewelry. Just like the glass in Venice, like the Murano glass, like that’s also a really big inspiration. In Turkey, that’s when I first like found my interest in jewelry because there was, we went to this bead store and there was like thousands of different beads and I got to like choose different charms and like experiment with creating jewelry. So Turkey, Argentina, Italy, and then I have to give it to the

Philippines, obviously, because we lived there for so long. And then that’s hard. What do you think, Carter? 

00:16:12 – Carter Jensen 

I like India because I really like butter chicken. Also like Italy because I like pizza and pasta. 

00:16:27 – Rico Figliolini 

Yes, can’t get any better pizza than Italy, that’s for sure. 

00:16:30 – Carter Jensen 

Yeah, it’s really good there. And I also like Japan because it’s very futuristic and it’s like… 

00:16:38 – Rico Figliolini 

Is it? 

00:16:39 – Carter Jensen 

Yeah, it’s like a new environment and it’s like… 

00:16:45 – Rico Figliolini 

Yeah, cool. I can’t wait I think where, I think we may be heading there in July so that would be fun. I’ve never been so that would be interesting. Cool so with the artwork, with the inspiration, with the journey that you guys have been on, do you think that, are there any artists it’s hard and food maybe unless it’s Gordon Ramsay or something, but do you draw any inspiration? Who do you draw inspiration from for the work for what you do? Let’s start with Kimberly. 

00:17:19 – Kimberly Wang 

I don’t really have a specific artist that I look up to but I do watch some cooking shows and some like dessert making shows and they always really inspire me so I feel like that’s what really led me into like starting food art. And so I was like, whoa, this is really cool. And so I was like, okay, let me try this. And so now I’m here and then I’m like, this is pretty fun. 

00:17:49 – Rico Figliolini 

Oh, okay. Carter, I know you’re not the main person doing the artwork, but what do you see when you’re working with your sister? How does that feel working with her, doing the stuff with her, the artwork? Whatever you’re doing with her, how you know what’s that journey feel like for a brother and his sister? 

00:18:13 – Carter Jensen 

It’s kind of relaxing doing artwork and like peeling off like the stickers on the bags 

00:18:26 – Rico Figliolini 

Okay, alright, that’s cool. Sister, how do you feel? 

00:18:30 – Nika Jensen

Yeah I just enjoy anytime I’m like I get to make jewelry because I feel like it’s such like an important thing to me. And it also like my brother said it’s really relaxing and just like sitting in our home and just like making jewelry it’s like, it’s really fun for me. 

00:18:48 – Rico Figliolini 

Do you wear? I’m assuming you wear some of the stuff you make? 

00:18:51 – Nika Jensen 

No actually I don’t have my ears pierced. And so I just like making it and seeing my creations on other people. 

00:19:00 – Rico Figliolini 

Okay, cool. Kimberly, do you ever decide, I’ve got to make something, I want to eat something, do you ever decide to do that, or is it always just for the art? 

00:19:10 – Kimberly Wang 

I think mainly just for the art. Because, I mean, I do piano outside of school, and so most of my time is sucked into that. But, I mean, sometimes if I do want to make something, yeah, I’ll go for it. And I’ll try my best, but it might not be successful. 

00:19:31 – Rico Figliolini 

Have you ever been, have you ever designed anything custom design? Because someone requested it from you? Like has anyone ever asked Kimberly, has any anyone ever asked yeah can you make that for me? Like aside from the artwork you sell. 

00:19:50 – Kimberly Wang 

I don’t think so. I did get one request by a high schooler to make peppermint bark for him for his art and science class. But like other than that, no. 

00:20:00 – Rico Figliolini 

Okay. How about Nika? Have you ever had a request for jewelry? 

00:20:04 – Nika Jensen 

Yes, I have. So my mom was posting some of my creations on social media and someone reached out to me and she wanted lego earrings like so little like lego figurines as earrings. So I used some of my own legos and then we also bought some but I drilled a hole on top of their head and I had to stick a screw inside. I had to mail it to them. And then they sent me a picture of them wearing it. 

00:20:42 – Rico Figliolini 

It’s just the way you were describing it, drilling the hole in the head. It’s like, all right, well, that’s good. So there’s the art. You do anything for art, I guess. That’s good. Great. We’ve been showcasing and talking a lot about art here and food and stuff. What are you looking forward to this year’s Wesleyan Artist Market? What is it that’s looking forward? I mean, you have there’s

three of you out of 24 other students. Have you seen or talked to other students and what they’re doing for the show, for the market? What are you looking forward to? 

00:21:16 – Nika Jensen 

To me? 

00:21:17 – Rico Figliolini 

Yeah, sure. Let’s go with it. 

00:21:18 – Nika Jensen 

Okay. Yes. Kimberly and I are actually really good friends so we’ve been like talking with our other friends that are doing the artist market and we’re like you know what they’re selling and yeah. I’m just really excited because we’ve never my brother and I have never done something like this before so I think it’ll be a really good opportunity and it’ll be fun so. 

00:21:39 – Rico Figliolini 

Something wholly new. That’s good, a good experience. How about you Kimberly? 

00:21:45 – Kimberly Wang 

Ever since last year, I was really astonished by everything I saw, even if it was like the adult artists, but like the student artists, they were all so talented. I know like a few other people are making food art and people like Nika are making jewelry. And so I’m honestly really inspired and just really blown away by all the effort that everyone puts in. 

00:22:13 – Rico Figliolini 

Cool. Anything that I’ve not touched on, guys, that you want to share about, individually about what it takes to do what you’re doing or your experience at Wesleyan? Why don’t we start with Kimberly? 

00:22:29 – Kimberly Wang 

I don’t really have much. I feel like this was a really nice opportunity to be able to share what Wesleyan Artist Market is about and how students have been able to participate in it. 

00:22:42 – Rico Figliolini 

Cool. Nika? 

00:22:43 – Nika Jensen 

Yeah so my mom printed out pictures of our time in the philippines so this first one it’s all the bags of food that my old school donated to families in the philippines. 

00:23:01 – Rico Figliolini 

Excellent. Glad you printed those out. 

00:23:03 – Nika Jensen

This is my old class. This was this year when I sent my profits back to the Philippines. And those are all the boxes of food and clothes that they get with that money. 

00:23:16 – Rico Figliolini 

Wow, you really did make a lot of money. 

00:23:18 – Nika Jensen 

Yes, sir. 

00:23:19 – Rico Figliolini 

That’s good. That’s great. And maybe at some point I’ll ask Camille on this, getting some pictures from you all of some of the artwork that you’ve done. I’d love to include that when we post the podcast as well. And if you have any social media where you post your artwork on, if it’s public, feel free. We’re going to be sharing this and we’ll be taking you all as well. I think we got everything covered. I mean, you’re all just unbelievable kids. You’re just doing great work. And I’m just like, it’s always great to talk to you, to Wesleyan students, just like, or to students that are motivated, put it that way, to do things. So glad to see that you’re doing all sorts of things and I still can’t wrap my head around 75 countries, I’m just still trying to think that just like in five years, I can’t even see doing that. But I want to thank you all for for joining me so this is Wesleyan Artist Market you all will be at and that’s April Friday the 25th from 10:00 – 7:00 pm and Saturday April 26 from 10:00 to 3:00 pm. We’ve been talking with Kimberly Wang, who does food art, edible food art, and Nika and her brother Carter Jensen, who do jewelry. Appreciate you guys being with me and being so talkative and just being good guests. So thank you all. Hang in there with me for a second. Everyone else, I want to say thank you again for joining us. You can find out more about Wesleyan Artist Market from just going to wesleyanschool.org or just Googling Wesleyan Artist Market it’ll pop up for you. And it’s open to the public, Friday and Saturday in April. So check them out. Visit the 24 students that are displaying their artwork as well, along with the over, I think it’s over 70 professional artists there. And thank you all from, I guess you’re in Wesleyan Wolf TV station too. So appreciate you doing that with me. So thank you everyone. Stay well.