Laura Slatkin

After a 13-year career as a successful Wall Street executive, Laura Slatkin left the world of finance in 1992 to pursue a very different business venture: Slatkin & Co., a luxury home fragrance brand she founded with her husband, Harry Slatkin. Its high-quality, smartly designed collections established it as the most successful luxury home fragrance brand to-date, blazing a trail to a now-multi-billion dollar category in the beauty industry. In 2005, the couple sold the popular brand, even as Laura’s interest in fragrance continued to grow. That same year, Laura founded her own company, NEST Fragrances, initially focusing on the production of private-label and licensed home fragrance collections for the world’s most important luxury brands including Christian Dior, Ralph Lauren, Tory Burch, Jonathan Adler and NARS. In 2008, after three years of meticulous development, she launched a more personal collection of luxe home scents by the same name, the NEST Fragrances Collection. Laura is committed to various causes, most notably autism, as her son was diagnosed with this life-altering disorder. Along with her husband and closest colleagues, she co-founded New York Collaborates for Autism (NYCA), an organization dedicated to creating replicable programs that immediately address the needs of individuals and families living with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). To date, it has created the first charter school dedicated to autism; a training institute with Hunter College; a clinical research institute- the Center for Autism and the Developing Brain in collaboration with New York Presbyterian Hospital, Weil Cornell and Columbia University.