Gerdi with Jennifer Walsh on Nature Connection In The City
25 Years ago Jennifer Walsh of ‘Walking With Walsh’ started her career in the beauty and wellness industry. She has since branched out significantly and is now on a mission that is two-fold:
to help the beauty industry understand how deeply connected to Nature it is and always has been. How it is so much more than just being sustainable – which is all the buzz in beauty these days. Jennifer is working towards putting Nature at the centre of those conversations vs. sustainability.
to get more people outdoors, understand the power of walking in nature, and the impact and importance of green spaces in our offices, homes, hospitals, schools, and cities.
Though this is a very concise and accurate description of Jennifer’s career it doesn’t begin to cover what I found out about her when I started reading up on her. Google Jennifer and you can go down a rabbit hole of websites and articles that are either about her or written by her.
So let’s go beyond the concise description and give you a little more background on today’s guest.
She was working as a celebrity make-up artist when a friend who worked in television had a guest suddenly cancel on them. They talked Jennifer into taking their place to talk about beauty products in what would ultimately become a weekly segment called ‘Beauty Buzz’.
It was during this time that she created Beauty Bar, the very first omni-channel beauty brand in the United States. Beauty and wellness shoppers could see and experience niche and independent beauty products in her brick and mortar stores, on her e-commerce website, and on that weekly TV show.
In 2010 she sold Beauty Bar and moved on to new things. She created multiple beauty and wellness brands and has worked with corporations to roll out products, help open stores and create a footprint for global brands in the US market.
Jennifer intuitively knew that her relationship with the beauty industry was deeply rooted in the natural world and how we connect to nature.
Always curious about how Nature affected our wellbeing, began spending time with neuroscientists around the country to learn more about this link to Nature and its effects on the brain.
Being someone who like to do things thoroughly she wrote and then presented a paper ‘Prescribing Nature’ with the findings of her extensive Nature research at the Global Wellness Institute in 2019.
As she was doing all this research Jennifer also began working with companies that wanted to infuse Nature into their corporate wellness programs, into their business practices, and as part of employee education.
This not only meant creating the now sought after Wellness Walks with Walsh program but also the Nature GreenPrint Plan (NGP) educating on the impact and importance of integrating biophilic, Nature-based solutions into cities, corporate campuses, retailers and homes.
The Walk with Walsh video series was created after her 20 years in front of the camera, where Jennifer tells stories not only in a new way (by hosting walking interviews) but to drive home the importance of what makes healthy leaders.
She knew that by interviewing national leaders who are making an impact, while walking in nature, those leaders would open up more, feel better and take back the importance of being in Nature to their teams and their communities.
You can find Jennifer walking or running, she’s a longtime triathlete, in Central Park every day. Unless — that is — she’s spending the summer in her family’s glamping beach tent.
You will also find her snapping pics of Nature everywhere she travels, don’t miss her Instagram to see what landscapes are inspiring her today.
Since Jennifer is a consummate serial entrepreneur and lover of nature, we can be sure there is a lot more to come.
