Lola Viggi

By the time we reach the San Rafael Transit Center in Marin County, the driver and I are the only people left on the bus. It’s an image that seemed unlikely just forty-five minutes ago when I boarded the same bus in San Francisco on Lombard and Fillmore and found myself wedged between tourists. But already at the Golden Gate Bridge Toll Plaza, a big group scattered to presumably see the bridge. Then in Sausalito, the cheerful Spaniards disembarked to presumably see the quaint city. Then at Lucky Drive Bus Pad, the two French girls in sweatpants got off to do whatever it is that one does around Lucky Drive Bus Pad. Left therefore are the driver and I, left for the final stretch to San Rafael, where my friend Lola is waiting at the main bus stop. 

It is here in San Rafael that Lola and her husband Calvin planted roots a year ago—a milestone that came nearly one year after their son was born in London, which happened a year and a half after they had relocated to London for work, a move that followed shortly after they got married and left California, which all unfolded just one year after everyone’s lives had been upended by the COVID-19 pandemic, the stretched-out armageddon which arrived right on the heels of Lola completing the two-year Master’s in Organizational Development that she finished while working a full-time corporate job. In other words, six years flew by and Lola had not taken a beat. 

“You’re really catching me at a unique moment in life,” she tells me when I see her. “When you told me to think about the things I like doing and the places I like to go, I seriously had trouble coming up with a list.”

“How come?”

“Well,” she continues, “lately, life just hasn’t been about me.”

“I hear that’s what happens when you become a mom.”

Lola laughs. 

“It’s hard to explain,” she continues. “The days are long, but the years are fast. You feel like you're in this very service-oriented role in which you're always doing something for someone and you never get a break. So, the entire time since we’ve been back here, I think I didn’t have the time to reexperience what I have always loved about California. The nature, the food, the particular way the beach smells in California. I haven’t had the time to acknowledge that I am home.”

California has been Lola’s home for decades but it wasn’t always that way. She was born in Milan to parents deeply entrenched in the Italian fashion industry. When she was three—just after her parents had split up—Lola, her sister, and her mother moved to the family’s multi-generation house in Gubbio, a small medieval town in the country’s Umbria region. Their stay in this baronial haven didn’t last long, however. By the age of six, Lola was back in Milan, and only two years later, after her stepdad came into the picture, the family followed his footsteps to Woodside, a venture-capital mecca in the San Mateo County in northern California. And just like that, the eight-year-old Lola became a California girl. 

“So,” she adds, “I figured we first drive to Hook Fish in Mill Valley to grab food. I was there recently with a few girlfriends and it gave me that feeling that I needed: the feeling of loving California, the feeling of knowing I was home.”

She starts the car and we make our way over to Mill Valley. On this cloudy spring day, the highway is wet, almost fantastical under the veil of tender marine mist enveloping the peninsula and its lush hills. Even at Hook Fish, away from the bucolic highway magic, we find the same overcast, fairy-tale-like charm. This is what Lola means when she says California feels a particular way: tall surfer guys in flannel and women in soft wool sweaters eating fish and chips, briny and damp earthy notes of the Pacific and the surrounding preserves wafting through, an impression of a refuge. 

“Did you speak any English when you moved to Woodside?” I ask her after we order food. 

“I could only say colors and numbers back then,” she says. “I still remember that, at my going-away party in Italy, I told the other kids that I was excited to finally understand what Britney was saying in her songs.”   

“How was that? The move, I mean. Was it hard adjusting to Woodside after Italy?”

“Honestly, no. Life in Woodside was much easier and nicer than in Italy. The US schooling system was warmer and gentler and people weren’t constrained by the city lifestyle. Had I stayed in Milan, I probably would have ended up working in fashion, chain-smoking every day, and twenty pounds lighter. I think I had a healthier childhood and adolescence here in California. But don’t get me wrong, I still lived in the fast lane, even in Woodside.”

What Lola is referencing is a certain cosmic intensity with which her destiny had been anointed, one that led to a life of many experiences happening either in rapid succession or all at once. By the time she was eighteen, she had experienced more life than most teenagers—she moved cities, she moved continents, she left friends, she gained friends, she partied, she studied, she dated. It was, and still is, a hunger for life. 

“I always believed that life should be experienced,” she notes. “I felt like I didn’t want to leave any stone unturned. A part of it may have come from my innate desire to understand human behavior and states of being. I was curious about people and I was curious about what it meant to be human, in all its beauty and ugliness.”

This itch to understand the significance of human behavior propelled Lola to major in psychology at UCLA and to grow professionally into the role she plays today: a Human Resource Business Partner, more commonly known in the corporate world as HRBP. In this strategic role, Lola has a broad mandate to partner closely with organizational leaders and ensure their teams’ goals are aligned with business objectives. In practice, this means she is a trusted advisor for these leaders. She helps them optimize team performance, which requires her to have close relationships with each individual in the organization while also having a pulse on the collective needs of the organization.

“I don’t think I ever asked you this,” I say, “but when did it become clear to you that your interest in human behavior could be applied to this type of work?”

“It’s funny because it wasn’t immediate. I didn’t even know this role existed because it’s not something that you can be hired for fresh out of school. So, for the first five years after college, I worked in the advertising industry. That was an eye-opening experience for me—I really thought that adults at work, especially at big companies, would be rational and emotionally mature and knowledgeable. But then I found myself, five years out of college, realizing that people were just faking it. We were all irrational and emotionally immature and had no idea what we were doing."

“Sounds like you realized that people at work were still… people?”

"Yes,” she says. “It hit me that the workplace is actually a wild concept. We take a bunch of people, who are all very emotional, and we put them in the same place to do something while acting like those emotions don't exist. It’s sort of an absurd expectation."

“Right, and everyone has their own baggage they bring to the table.”

“Totally,” she continues. “That’s the tension I realized I was interested in: being keenly aware of the ways in which an emotion can make a person thrive or suffer at work. And if I know that, how can I use it to help create a high-performing, rewarding, and enjoyable workplace?”

In early 2019, Lola came across a job opening for an operations role at BetterUp, a tech company that was spearheading the workplace-transformation industry. She submitted her application online that same day and right after pressing the submit button, she printed her resume and got on her Vespa. She rode to BetterUp’s office in downtown San Francisco, rang the doorbell, and told the employee who was manning the front desk that she was there because she really wanted the job. 

"The girl had no idea what to do with me,” Lola adds and laughs. “She grabbed the guy who led recruiting and the next thing you know, I was being interviewed. I remember thinking, ‘It doesn't matter what I do here. I could mop the floors as long as it's this mission. The only thing I want is to be part of building a culture in which more people care about how we work and how we bring out the best in people.’”

A few weeks later, Lola was officially a new employee at BetterUp and part of the same team I joined only six weeks earlier. Her first day of work, she walked into our weekly team meeting and sat next to me. I acknowledged her with a smile, not knowing whether she was new or whether I had done a poor job of meeting everyone on the team during my first six weeks. Lola, on the other hand, just went for it—she smiled back and said she saw in the employee book that I was European too and that we should go for a cappuccino. And that’s how our friendship began. 

Over the past six years, I’ve watched Lola seamlessly shift from one role to another, charting a nonlinear path to the HRBP role, a path that many people in the HR industry would find too unpredictable and too unsafe. But it’s a path that made sense for Lola, a path of intensity and variety; one that left her ultimately with strategy, operations, communications, and project management skills all under her belt.  

The curious thing about all these knotty paths in Lola’s life is that they wind in opposition to how she presents herself to the world, a contrast that perhaps explains why I was drawn to her in the first place. For all the intensity which had always been her astral companion, Lola is remarkably uncomplicated and down-to-earth, someone with a grounding presence. Certainly, there is the extroverted, athletic, and direct Lola who fits this intensity, but then there is the Lola with the curatorial instinct, the thinker who gets lost in books, the designer who is invested in slow fashion, the photographer who observes the world in search of beauty. Photography, in particular, has been the creative outlet through which she found a way to eternalize the moments experienced in the fast lane. 

“Were you always into photography?” I ask her. 

“Well,” she says, “the thing is I initially saw myself as the non-creative kid in the family, and I say that because I genuinely thought there was no way I was anything close to an artist. My sister was the creative prodigy: an artist from day one, the youngest person in her program at the ArtCenter School in Pasadena. So, whenever I compared myself to her, my conclusion naturally was that I was just not made to be creative.”

Something persevered in Lola, however—a desire to express in spite of the self-doubt. In high school, she started organizing photoshoots with her girlfriends, though initially she didn’t think of what she was doing as art. She knew she had a vision, which was to see her friends dressed up and photographed against unexpected, almost stylized landscapes. 

But an expression it certainly was. Stilettos on the rocks, white dresses in barns, unpaid Woodside High models in the South Bay meadows, unpretentious creative direction from an untrained but discerning eye—it was DIY fashion editorial at its best. It was also what made Lola realize she harnessed a very particular talent. She could envision a perfect image and knew what she had to do to create it and to capture it.  

When she was twenty-three, her mom and sister and Calvin gave her a Sony camera. Her interest started narrowing down to portrait photography, in part by her own fascination with people and in part by organic, word-of-mouth demand from friends and family who heard Lola was doing professional shots. She took a brief pause from photography during her time in London and, upon her return to California, announced a soft relaunch. 

“I like photographing people,” she adds. “The process of finding someone’s beautiful side or angle, that’s something I really enjoy. Which is probably why I don’t like being photographed by other people because whenever someone takes a photo of me, I look at it and just go, ‘Woah, that is not how I see myself.’”

An amusing remark given both of us know—though neither is addressing the insight explicitly–that I will have the Herculean task today of photographing the photographer.  

“Would you do it full-time professionally?” 

"I think about that all the time,” she continues, “but I think the moment I start to see photography as a moneymaker and not a passion, I will not enjoy it anymore. It would take away all the beauty in it for me."

We finish our food at Hook Fish and walk over to a café nearby. The oceanic mist we saw from the highway has descended here as well, and the café’s red wood exterior looks perfect in its hazy embrace. I tell Lola to stand in front of it. She hands me her espresso and leans on the wall, visibly bemused by the reversed role she has found herself in. 

“This is weird for me, by the way,” she says. “I am never the one being photographed. Is it like that for you? When is someone going to write something about you?” 

“We are not doing that, Lola. Today is about you.” 

“Okay,” she whispers and cracks up, “I’m sorry.” 

𐫱

In the afternoon, Lola drives us to her house in San Rafael where we say hi to Calvin, who has just put their son Cassian to bed for an afternoon nap, and we pick up Kilo, their five-year-old Greater Swiss Mountain Dog. Our plan is to go to Terra Linda Sleepy Hollow Ridge, a vast preserve that overlooks the San Francisco Bay and the scenic cities of Marin County. It’s one of Lola’s favorite places here, in large part because Kilo gets to roam free across the rolling hills.

When we get to the preserve’s entrance, Kilo leaps up the hill and dives into the shrubs while Lola and I make our way through trails strewn with bark, both spellbound by the ozonic scent of the soaring eucalyptuses. I ask Lola to tell me about The Italian Collective, a clothing line that she launched together with her sister and mom, dedicated exclusively to producing the perfect white collared shirt for women. 

“I remember from our pre-pandemic office days,” I add, “you were rocking a white shirt even in the midst of winter.”

“It’s something that’s been a part of our family,” Lola says. “My mom tells this story of discovering one of her grandpa’s white shirts tucked away in a trunk. She put it on and fell in love with how it looked and felt—the fabric, the cut, the crispness. She said she never found another one like it, and that search became an obsession with white collared shirts, one she passed down to my sister and me. That’s how the idea for the brand was born.”

“It’s interesting because in America, I see men wearing white shirts. Like, I love wearing them. But it’s not really a thing with women, unless it’s someone in the fashion industry?”  

“So, that’s the thing,” Lola continues, “especially in the American market, wearing a white collared shirt on its own is seen as masculine, something that guys do. But, for me, a good white shirt is an essential part of a woman’s wardrobe. If I had to wear only one item of clothing for the rest of my life, it would be a white shirt.”

Another issue Lola sees is that people often have the wrong perception of what it means to care for a white shirt. 

“People think a white shirt is something that you need to bring to the dry cleaner if you need it washed. That’s true if you only have dress white shirts, but the right high-quality versatile white shirt, you can just throw it in the dryer, put it on, and have this beautiful soft white collared shirt that’s both elevated and casual.”

The mother-sisters trio partnered with seamstresses in Italy, promoted the shirts on Instagram—Lola and her sister often were the models in the photos—and evangelized the women’s white shirt for five years, from 2014 up through late 2019, when the COVID-19 pandemic started to disrupt every aspect of global supply chains. The timing was inopportune not least because it took them precisely those five years to figure out their operating model.  

“Our biggest mistake,” Lola explains, “was that we were trying to make custom women’s shirts. It wasn’t until the very last year that we actually figured out the scalable pattern and the right fabric and how we could make the same shirt in different sizes while still maintaining the quality. Sometimes I think: had we started with that instead of doing custom design, we probably would have had five very interesting, profitable years before the pandemic.” 

Even with this setback, Lola’s entrepreneurial spirit persevered and was reincarnated, another five years later, as the In a State Collective—a concept brand centered on catchy phrases that signal invisible states of being, all with the aim to create conversation and community around them. It wasn’t something she was planning to do until she was asked one day how she was doing, to which she replied, “Mostly moody.” 

“It just went from there,” she tells me. “The first phrases were ‘mostly moody’ and ‘slightly anxious.’ The phrases felt right; I thought they represented our generation so well in a humorous way. This low-grade constant angst that we all experience for one reason or another.”

A year after uttering the phrase “mostly moody” for the first time, Lola launched the In a State Collective shop on Etsy and decided to not worry about all the things that caused her headache while running the Italian Collective: the sourcing, the materials, the production process, the ads on Instagram. She now has a vendor who provides crew-nick sweatshirts and prints the many states Lola’s mind conjures, like “seasonally affected” or “generally oversubscribed” or “mildly OCD.”    

I have the slightly-anxious sweatshirt and I tell Lola that people definitely notice it when I wear it, usually with a sense of amused curiosity.

"I mean, it’s funny, right?” she adds. “There is obviously something serious behind the words, but I think that’s the point, to make light of it and to find a way to laugh at yourself. We all feel it. I’ve had a few people come up to me and say, ‘Oh my god, I need that sweatshirt.’”

At first glance, this venture presents itself as levity through self-deprecation but, upon closer inspection, it emerges as something deeper; perhaps a mirror of Lola’s central trait—of her soul, in a way—best described as feminine ruggedness, this visible ability to withstand the changing currents of life with style and vigor. It’s the polarity which strikes in each memory I have of Lola: her in a long breezy summer dress driving through the serpentine mountain roads in Gubbio, her grabbing a surf board and catching the waves on a late October afternoon in San Francisco, her rocking Cassian in her arms while cooking dinner in Palo Alto, her in a Prince-of-Wales-check trench coat and battered Timberlands now in Terra Linda Ridge.       

Resilience and grace burgeon as skills from this polarity, so it should come as no surprise that Lola leveraged them to help others by becoming an accredited coach herself. She got her coaching certification from the International Coaching Federation and became an Associate Certified Coach (ACC) one month before her son was born. To put the timeline in context, this means she had passed the ACC exam, completed sixty hours of coaching education, put in at least a hundred hours of coaching experience with clients, and received ten hours of mentor coaching—all while moving her life from California to London, doing a full-time corporate job, and getting ready to become a first-time mom. 

“Lola, I guess my question is: how? You finish work, you do mom stuff, and then you coach other people. I feel like I would implode from absorbing other people’s emotions.”

“Coaching doesn’t really feel like a job to me,” she says. “When I have a session with a client, it's a very protected hour during which the conversation has nothing to do with me. Usually, when you hear other people talk about their problems, it’s natural to want to jump to solutioning, but a coach actually doesn’t do that. A coach has to listen and not jump to problem-solving, and operating in that space has really taught me how to be fully present for someone else."

“So, you never provide your opinion on how the client needs to think about something?”

“Well,” she answers, “I’m not a purist coach. It’s not my style. I would say that ninety percent of the time, my focus is on helping the person come to their own conclusions and solutions, but maybe ten percent of the time, I’ll take my coaching hat off and be more of a mentor and I’ll provide a very direct opinion. For now, that’s the mix that feels most genuine to me.”

“And people like that approach?”

“I think so. Several clients have told me they appreciate that I can be direct and that I can push them without breaking them. I think people want that space, where they feel challenged and maybe slightly uncomfortable, but never to the point where they break apart or feel down after the session.”

A soft breeze rolls in through the ridge, billowing the fields of hairy vetches. Kilo, who’s been in her own universe this entire time, rummaging the trails for any sight of moles, trots toward us and nuzzles her face against my legs. Lola points toward the nearly indiscernible Mount Tamalpais, veiled by the fog, and tells me that on a clear sunny day the mountaintop is a sight to be seen. She wishes we could stay at the preserve longer and wait for the fog to clear up, but it’s time to head back to the house because Cassian will soon be done with his afternoon nap.

“I imagine you’re always thinking about Cassian these days?”

“Oh,” Lola says, “people do not talk about this enough. I don’t think women understand how biological a mother’s connection with her kid is until the kid is born. If I heard an ambient child’s cry while out and about before, I simply blocked it out. Now, my brain immediately goes into emergency mode. I really feel that I have changed chemically, that my brain has reprogrammed itself for him.”

“He’s turning two soon, right?”

“Yeah, they’re called the terrible twos,” she says, chuckling. “He has really been such a friendly, happy child this entire time. But it’s a thing that when kids turn two, all of a sudden, they start to assert their will, which in practice means they are just shouting and crying a lot of the time. I get it though, imagine realizing that for two years of your life everyone was telling you what to do and how to exist and you suddenly want to claim your own agency but you don’t know how to talk yet. I really feel for the poor guy.”

“Well,” I add, “I guess I could say it all sounds intense, but it honestly just sounds like the usual pattern in your life.”

She smiles.

“Gonna get intense for some time,” I continue, “and, like always, you will figure it out, and probably successfully do a few other things along the way.”

"You know,” she says, “sometimes, I really think I don't have a plan for anything in life. Then occasionally, I get this moment of clarity and tell myself, ‘Wow, Lola, the plan has kind of been there all along.’"