From Wall Street to wellness: My Neighbor’s TallowFrom Wall Street to wellness: My Neighbor’s Tallow

Two years ago, Harri Magaldi was logging long hours on Wall Street, helping Morgan Stanley’s pension fund clients hedge their interest rate derivative and foreign exchange risk. “Today, I render beef fat for a living,” she says, laughing. Instead of working in the blue light of a Bloomberg terminal, eyes on the bull market, she can be found wrist deep in actual cow carcass, cutting the kidneys out of hunks of suet.

Magaldi renders the suet into the tallow at the core of My Neighbor’s Tallow, the regenerative skincare brand she launched in May 2024. Less than two years later, the soaps, balms and serums are sold in nearly 200 stores across the U.S., including boutiques, cafes and national retailers Raleys, Anthropologie and Terrain. She’s gone from home kitchen to warehouse and is moving into an even bigger one. In August, she attended Newtopia Now as part of Startup CPG’s cohort. Newtopia Now VIPs chose her brand’s Rose Sea Buckthorn Tallow Face Balm as one of eight finalists for the first-ever Newtopia Now NEXTY Award category. The winner will be announced at Natural Products Expo West 2026 in March.

Sporting power suit armor, on Wall Street, Magaldi, was the lone woman on a team of 13 men. “I had to be a big voice to be taken seriously,” she says. “I had to be kind of mean.” They called her The Pitbull.

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Today, she’s pictured on the My Neighbor’s website in front of a soft-focus wheat field background wearing a loose plaid dress, cradling a chicken.

What happened?

A baby.

The day Magaldi gave birth to her daughter, Wilhelmina, she decided spending time with her was the priority. She and her husband moved from Connecticut to their Hudson Valley home. She left Wall Street, while her husband continued to commute once a week to his tech startup in New York. When Wilhelmina was about seven months old, she developed eczema. Magaldi didn’t want to use a product with steroids on her newborn. She searched for a natural alternative, couldn’t find one, so set out to make her own. Inspired by homesteading Facebook groups, she got tallow from nearby Kinderhook Farms, a grass-fed/grass-finish operation, and experimented rendering it in her kitchen. After tinkering with recipes and technique, she created a tallow balm that worked “amazingly well,” she says. She packaged the balm in mason jars and gave them to other Hudson Valley mothers, who used it on their babies—and their own skin—and loved it. Then, she gave it to her “bougie mama friends in Connecticut, and they were like ‘Wow! It makes my skin dewy! I can remove makeup with it! My husband steals it!’” At her friends’ encouragement, she began selling it.

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Prioritizing time with her daughter, Magaldi and her family moved to Hudson Valley, which would eventually inspire My Neighbor's Tallow.

Neighborhood sourcing

Along the way, she learned more about the value and methods of regenerative agriculture, especially from the farmers’ wives she befriended in the local library’s new mother classes. She sources her tallow from a dozen regenerative Hudson Valley farms where she knows the farmers and their practices (down to the female farmer who wears only pink and knits pink sweaters to keep the early lambs snuggly in frosty weather).

Her commitment to not only regenerative, but highly transparent sourcing, is the main thing that sets her tallow products apart from others riding the TikTok tallow wave. “There’s a lot of green-washing and grass-washing in the tallow market,” says Magaldi. “We make everything in house.” As they’ve grown, she’s gotten calls from labs asking if she’d like them to supply her tallow. “They say it’s grass-fed and grass-finished in the U.S.,” she says, “but I ask them ‘Which farms does it come from?’ and they have no idea.”

Unlike many tallow skincare lines, Magaldi uses only vitamin E from sunflowers as a preservative. That fits with the brand’s mission of “community-focused skincare brand that really cares about the earth and is just as beautiful as it is good for the planet,” she says.

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Four months after Magaldi began selling her products, in a Hallmark Movie-for-founders kind of moment, she was selling at a Hudson Vally farmer’s market where she was discovered by Anthropologie and Terrain (Anthropologie’s sister home and garden store. Both are part of Urban Outfitters.). Now, she says, it’s the best-selling item in Terrain’s beauty section.

What's NEXTY? 

The business and mathematical chops she honed on Wall Street help her scale up. Last year, My Neighbor’s became a cohort of Startup CPG. The organization encouraged her to exhibit at Newtopia Now as part of their group. A CPG newbie with a newborn on her hip and pregnant with her next child, she was nervous. “But it was great,” she says. “It was really great to have in-person interaction with accounts we were already talking to, and we could solidify orders and we met other new potential customers. We also met some really cool distributors.”

Magaldi spoke on a Newtopia Now panel and competed at the Conscious Beauty & Wellness Pitch event. She was in the audience there when her employee texted her from the booth to tell her that a NEXTY Award finalist recognition had been delivered. So new to CPG, neither knew exactly what it was. But when she learned, she became “super-super excited and honored to be chosen.”

Magaldi will bring My Neighbors to Expo West with an expanded team, which will include new employees—and her soon-to-be born baby. She needs to expand her team to, among other things, help solve her current biggest challenge: order fulfillment, “a really great problem to have,” she says.

Magaldi is loving her new life running a small business. “I’m excited to go to work every day and not be rotting behind a Bloomberg terminal!” she says with a laugh. She’s grateful that the savings from her nine years on Wall Street enabled her to “be able to do this. There’s some beauty in that, that maybe the capitalistic regime I was in has actually allowed me to do something that’s helping regenerative farms. And helping moms.” It’s the 4 a.m. emails she gets from mothers about how her Bambino Balm helped their baby’s diaper rash that had been resistant to everything else that “make it all really worthwhile,” she says. And although she misses the high-paced banter with her Wall Street team, The Pitbull is sticking upstate with tallow. In fact, the Wall Street bros would do well with some Blue Moon Face Balm, she says. “They really need that extra hydration during long days under the fluorescent lights and screens. And,” she laughs, “they would definitely smell better.”