Salon Interview: Emily Kontos
TRAVEL & CULTURE SALON
in conversation with
EMILY KONTOS
DECEMBER 5, 2023
Emily Kontos is a mom of three, a wife, a daughter, a sister, a Ph.D. in public health, and someone who loves setting a well-dressed table with thrifted vintage finds. “In no particular order,” she jokes, “but I really do love tablescapes.”
Emily’s family of five lives on the north shore of Boston and couldn’t love it more. During the pandemic, her beautifully styled Instagram posts of tablescapes filled with vintage finds caught the attention of friends and locals. Just over a year later, her following shot up from a few hundred to over twenty-five thousand. Surprised and appreciative, Emily branded herself “The Thrifted Table” and opened an online marketplace to sell items she finds in local thrift stores and estate sales. Since then, she’s taken part in several high-profile collaborations and has been featured in several magazines such as Better Homes & Gardens, Country Living Magazine, Holiday Décor, Victoria Magazine, and Country Home Magazine.
She has a wonderful eye. Yet, Emily has a day job. A big one! One of the most intriguing aspects of her story is how she feeds both her analytic and creative minds.
Like most of us, her path has not been linear or without its ups and downs. I appreciate the way she has opened up, not just to me, but in a variety of public forums about living life as a family with cancer, undergoing fertility treatment, parenting a child with autism, and coping with anxiety and depression. While her Instagram account is glossy on the outside, Emily doesn’t shy away from revealing the reality of life behind it.
I recently made Emily’s acquaintance through a mutual friend and am so grateful she took a couple of hours out of her busy life to sit down with me. Read our conversation to learn more about Emily’s activism and how to get your hands on one of her unique finds.
Reduce, reuse, recycle!
Heather: Hi Emily. I’m delighted to chat with you today. The Thrifted Table is a relatively recent venture, and I’m curious about all the life chapters that came before your business took off. Can you share a little about your background and any early moments that proved influential in your life?
Emily: I grew up in Orchard Park, New York, a suburb of Buffalo, and went to Catholic school from kindergarten through my senior year of high school. Yes. Go Bills!
My love of vintage was handed down to me as most good things are. Between antiquing with my mother and learning everything there is to know about vintage toy trains and classic cars from my father, my own collections have grown over the years.
Being a scholar-athlete had a pronounced influence on my life. I started rowing in the eighth grade and kept rowing straight through my university years. Once I was in high school, practices were in the city, and I had to get up at 4:45 every day. Every single day of high school! I credit my parents for making it happen and joke that I don’t love my children as much as my parents—I mean, it was my dad waking up and driving me into the city, coming back, getting ready for work, and then going back into the city.
Rowing for Brown University, Emily was first-team all-ivy in 1998. While there, Brown won the National Championship in 1999 and 2000 and then again in 2002, 2004, 2007, 2008, and 2011 (the most titles in the sport with 7). Upon being inducted into her high school hall of fame and the Brown Sports Hall of Fame in 2022, Emily wrote: “The lessons I learned on the water and in the boathouse have made me the person I am today.”
In the sport of rowing, if you don’t show up, your boat doesn’t go out. It’s not like being on the soccer team where it’s like, “Well, okay we’re down a person.” In rowing, you have to show up. We literally can’t do our sport if there is a single seat empty. A serious commitment to others, plus the ability to multitask and juggle many different priorities, was, therefore, instilled in me early on through rowing.
Emily’s 1966 short bed Ford F100 in Caribbean Blue, named Lucille after her grandmother. Photo by Kindra Clineff
When it was time for college, I looked for schools that had strong academics and a rowing program. I was fortunate enough to get into Brown and planned to major in pre-med. You and I are similar ages, so you know. Growing up without the internet, you were only aware of certain kinds of careers. My parents were the first to go to college in their respective families, and so there was an inclination to take a traditional route. If you’re good at math and science, you become a doctor.
Only later, in my junior year at Brown, was I introduced to the field of public health, and it really spoke to me. Preventing illness at the population level versus treating someone once they were sick? That sounded amazing.
So, I got into public health. But I was a work-study student, so that meant two jobs, plus rowing.
Emily is obsessed with books, and we’re 💯 with her.
Heather: Juggling. Multitasking.
Emily: Yes. I tell people I started working at fourteen years old and never stopped. That’s my work ethic. While a full-time student at Brown, I worked at the Department of Public Health. And I also had a job as a rowing coach for an all-girls school in Providence. We were Division 1 national champions, so it was super intense. Total Type A personality.
By then, I was dating my now-husband, who had gotten a job in Boston. I knew I wanted to get a master’s in public health and knew I wanted to go to Harvard, so Boston was a great choice for us. We’ve been together for twenty-five years, which is insane to me! I took a job as the director of the genetics program at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health—my first job out of college. While there, I learned that Harvard offers a tuition assistance program where they pay 90% of your tuition if you’re an employee there. So, I took a second job working in health literacy at Harvard, while still at the Department of Public Health.
And I still couldn’t pay the rent!
I had to take a third job, working nights at the April Cornell Outlet in Faneuil Hall Marketplace.
Heather: I remember April Cornell! Are they still in business? Were the early seeds of The Thrifted Table sown at this time, by chance?
Emily: They’ve downsized but are still in business. I don’t even know how I got that job! Did I walk in and ask if they needed someone? Who knows. The store was a stone's throw away from the Department of Public Health, so it was pretty easy for me to get there at night. In Massachusetts, you get time-and-a-half if you work on Sunday, so I'd work Sundays. I joke that I probably spent most of my paycheck there. If you go to my mom’s or sister’s house—it’s amazing the amount of April Cornell that still exists in my family.
So, yes, this is where The Thrifted Table gets connected. I mean, that’s how I know how to fold! At the Gap, you can fold sweaters and stuff like that. I can fold table linens and pillowcases. Once I got into Harvard, I hung up the napkin folding, for the time being anyway. I quit April Cornell and the Department of Public Health but continued working full-time at Harvard while getting my master’s degree, which took just over two years.
Napkin folding à la Emily.
Heather: Did you specialize in a specific area of public health? What type of career did you hope for?
Emily: My niche is health communication, how to communicate different public health messages.
I really enjoyed my time working at the Department of Public Health, so after graduation, I returned—for a hot minute, anyway—as the director of social marketing for their obesity program. However, the state government has a strict graded tier system for pay, and they were not giving anything extra for a master’s degree. I was getting paid the same amount as before, though I now had a master’s from Harvard. I tried to fight it as long as I could. But I had just gotten married and was thinking about a family, so I needed something a little more stable.
Fortunately, one of my old professors was hiring research assistants and suggested I come back into the Harvard system. I received appointments as a research assistant at the Harvard School of Public Health and at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, both in the cancer prevention space.
Soon, though, I realized I was the only one without a Ph.D. If I wanted to stay in research, I needed to continue my education or eventually cap out. So, I applied and got into the Harvard Doctor of Science program with a fellowship to pay for it from the National Cancer Institute. Since the fellowship only paid tuition, I also continued to work, full-time at Dana-Farber.
Heather: It’s impressive, your energy, your stamina.
Emily: Well, yes. And get this: I was pregnant when I started school that September! I had to announce my pregnancy right after the dean of our department advised against anyone having children during the program. Of course, we had planned the pregnancy so that I could give birth over the summer, but the fellowship clock didn’t stop for babies. And Dana-Farber didn’t offer maternity leave, at least not back in 2007. I thought they had to be kidding—a hospital system with no maternity leave policy. So I returned to school and to work just six weeks after my first child was born. My family had to fly in to help because no daycare would take babies until they were eight weeks or older.
So, I was pregnant during the first year of my doctoral program. During the second year, I‘m taking care of an actual baby. Then, just as my baby turns one, my husband gets diagnosed with cancer.
Emily (in vintage Lilly Pulitzer) with her husband, Alex, for a night out celebrating her in-law’s 50th wedding anniversary in 2019
It was all very surreal. We were so young. I was only thirty, Alex thirty-two. I couldn't leave the doctoral program because I would have lost my fellowship. One day I’d be at Dana-Farber for work, and the next day I’d be in the infusion unit at Dana-Farber for his treatments. His chemo lasted seven to eight hours per day for seven days straight—on and off, in cycles. We don’t have local family, so they would fly in to help with the baby during treatment weeks.
“Overnight, I went from young wife, mom and graduate student to caregiver. Alex went from healthy husband, father and new employee to patient.”
The bonus was my professional space afforded me the best connection. I had several personal calls with Lance Armstrong’s doctor as my husband also had testicular cancer that had spread. So, in terms of treatment, I was on the phone with the person who had developed one of the key treatment protocols.
“In sickness and in health.” ~Emily’s 2020 Valentine’s Day post
Heather: You’ve written several articles for the Huffington Post in which you talk about cancer survivorship, how there are no rules, no textbooks, to help navigate the bumps that come when you must “check the "cancer" box on your medical history form at the age of 32.” Can you share your family’s post-cancer experience?
Emily: Yeah, it was after Alex's treatment ended, when the meal deliveries from friends, email messages, and daily support started to slip away when we found our real journey began.
There are, of course, the common survivorship concerns that we discuss and keep an eye out for, like the possibility of recurrence, increased risk of early heart disease, kidney damage, neuropathy, fatigue, and infertility to name a few. In fact, before chemo started, we were also making trips back and forth to the sperm bank since his treatments would likely leave him infertile. Banking sperm is expensive and insurance doesn’t cover it; we were fortunate our family could help us pay for it. Plus, at some point down the road, we would have to do IVF, which is also super expensive.
It was these emotional and logistical side effects of cancer that we really had to fumble our way through. You can’t even apply for a mortgage without explaining why you were on short-term disability. Luckily, my husband had life insurance because you can’t get it after having young adult cancer. And, luckily again, they can’t kick you off. I was very much in support of the Affordable Care Act, allowing for the portability of insurance and not being able to be denied coverage because of pre-existing conditions. Without it, my husband would have never been able to leave a job as he would have been denied coverage for having had cancer.
Then, there’s the emotional toll of worrying about every ache and pain and the inevitable shift from an optimistic view of life to a pessimistic one.
Cabbageware tablescape by Emily.
Heather: I appreciate your openness. Today, Alex is in complete remission, yes?
Emily: Yes. His oncologist has even sent him back to his primary care physician for annual checkups and blood work. I will share this, too. I am proud of this. Before he got sick, I had to sit for my qualifying exams. If I passed, I could go on to work on my dissertation. The exam is a two- to three-day full-day exam. No one wanted to study with me or my friend because we had babies. But I was very efficient. I mean, I had to be. And guess what? I was the only one in my class who passed with honors! I’m still friends with my classmates, many of whom now have kids, and they‘re like “How the hell did you do that?” It felt really good, to hear them say that.
Alex got better, I defended my dissertation, and got my Ph.D. I was offered a job as the associate director of a very big research center and worked with some amazing people at the Harvard School of Public Health, Dana-Farber, and Mass General Hospital. Our work was funded for five years, and when it ended I moved over to a director of research position at Brigham and Women's—a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School.
Things were moving along, and we decided it was time to do IVF and have more children. Harvard has incredible health benefits, so we didn’t pay a dime for our three cycles of IVF. It was fully covered.
Emily collects vintage tin chocolate molds.
Heather: Your life is so full, so rich. You are highly, highly accomplished. On paper, it seems like you roll up your sleeves and get work, no matter what life throws at you. Does the pace or your workload ever take its toll? Do you have moments of feeling overwhelmed?
Emily: Yes, of course. In fact, I have long dealt with general anxiety disorder and depression. My children also struggle with anxiety. I’ve learned that I have to keep myself really busy. I manage it by scheduling out pretty much every minute of every day. Procrastination is actually one of the hallmark traits of general anxiety disorder because you’re so anxious to begin something, and it can get bigger. My oldest has that. But I’m the opposite. I’m very productive, and I think my inner drive is a byproduct of the depression: Oh, look at what I can achieve if I set my mind to it. When I was younger, I was likely looking for external validation, but as I’ve explored it with therapists, it’s more about finding myself.
“I can’t even count the number of times I have thought about ending my life, that is what we in mental health call suicidal ideation. I toy with the idea, sometimes on a daily basis, and it gives me short-term relief and an end to my acute suffering and I move on.”
My second pregnancy with IVF was high-risk, and I was off the charts anxious. First, since I would turn thirty-five during the pregnancy, it was considered a geriatric pregnancy. Love that term! But, more importantly, we had mono-di twins, which came about because they had used assisted hatching, a technique that can result in the splitting of the egg. In our case, I had one placenta, but each baby was in their own sac, which ran the risk of “twin to twin transfusion syndrome,” where one twin gets a little greedy and takes all the nutrients, which is bad for that baby and the other baby.
Due to my very poor mental health at the time, doctors suggested that I consider reducing the pregnancy, but even that came with the risk of losing both fetuses. We had worked so hard to become pregnant that I didn’t want any additional risk. I went to therapy at least twice a week, if not more on some weeks because I was so worried something bad was going to happen and that I wasn’t going to be able to manage a challenging outcome. Everything turned out okay—the twins arrived safely and healthy—but I struggled.
And I continued to struggle. I found working at Brigham really hard. It’s an hour and a half commute from my house, three hours there and back. At this point, our oldest child had been diagnosed with ADHD, depression, and anxiety, and she had challenging behavioral issues. The twins were young, and the Harvard system is very demanding—they lose an inordinate amount of females. I was just feeling really taxed, and my husband was like, a change needs to happen, you’re miserable.
So, once again, I started looking for a new job and really thinking about whether I still wanted to be in academia. The main driver became finding a job close to home, rather than finding a job in academics. This was before COVID, so even though I had a research position and only needed my computer, there were in-office requirements everywhere, especially at Harvard.
I landed at a company called EBSCO that specializes in information services. It was my first time working in private industry. The best I can explain is that EBSCO started off as a journal indexing tool that libraries and universities buy to help people do research. Over the years, they expanded the publishing side to actually buy some of the products they were indexing. One of those products summarizes evidence-based medicine for busy clinicians. I call it the CliffNotes for doctors, and I was hired as a medical editor.
In a nutshell, there are hundreds of thousands of medical journals, and busy physicians can’t keep up with all that research. Almost everyone on our editorial staff has a Ph.D. in a science-related field, and we use our critical appraisal skills to vet and summarize all of those studies. We’re basically an encyclopedia for clinical physicians that’s quick, at their fingertips, and at the point of care. What would be several pages, we offer in five lines.
Heather: Given our conversation about the delicate nature of using your inner drive to help with depression, I imagine it was hard to leave Harvard. Not to mention, it was home—your familiar place.
Emily: It was really hard to leave Harvard. I was proud to work for Harvard. I was proud to be a faculty member there. It was largely very rewarding, and I felt like a failure. I felt like I was giving up, and I am not someone who gives up.
For fifteen years, I was part of the Harvard system in some capacity or another. It was very much home, and I moved into something completely different. When you’re doing research and have your doctorate, you’re addressed as Dr. Kontos. Now I work mostly with MDs, and it’s only if you have an MD that you’re referred to as a doctor. These are little things, but they still smart.
“By the sea I will always be.”
Emily’s happy place.
However, at a certain point, the downside was too much for my family. I feel like there are all these other trendy ways of talking about work-life balance, but that’s exactly what it was all about, work-life balance.
I now have a seventeen-minute commute and can park my car right there. Just walk in! And when I first started there, EBSCO subsidized the cafeteria. So I was paying $3 for lunch as opposed to $16, and they had a cafeteria in which you could order dinner. So I would order dinners that were subsidized and bring them home for maybe my husband and I to eat. If we fed the kid's chicken fingers, it was just like, whoa, this is very different! I'm in private industry now, and I'm getting paid more. Change is bad, right? Benefits.
Yet, it’s about way more than the fringe benefits.
I’ve been with EBSCO for eight years now. I worked my way up and am now a managing editor. I manage the largest content area within our product. Then, about two months ago, I was promoted to Director of Health Equity, which allowed me to bring in a lot of what I was doing in academia.
The pandemic raised a lot of questions about health inequalities and disparities, as well as access. Suddenly, doctors were like, oh wait, why is COVID impacting some communities more than others? Literally, my Ph.D. is in the social determinants of health, specifically how communication and access to communication are one of those social determinants. Health equity is definitely one of the silver linings of COVID because it spotlighted an issue that people in public health have been looking at for decades.
As part of this work, I lead the task force to ensure we're communicating in an inclusive way, that the content we provide represents all patient populations, and that, in general, we’re bringing a health equity lens to our product.
Heather: COVID also helped launch The Thrifted Table. Perhaps it is silly to lump this together, but the remarkable response to The Thrifted Table seems reflective of other COVID lessons: work-life balance, slow living, pleasure in leisure. Like enjoying a well-set table, for example.
Emily: Yes, during COVID I think I became an entertainment channel for people. My Instagram feed was something they went to for whatever reason. None of this was planned. I did not sit down with a business plan or dream about being in magazines. It all just happened.
I’ve always enjoyed designing. I planned my own wedding and designed it. I designed my house, too. Other people say they don’t know where to begin, but I do. And I never spend a lot. My kids’ birthday parties were always highly styled and looked like they cost $2,000, but I hardly spent anything at all. I just made it look really nice! My personal group saw me as a designer—or a stylist, I suppose—and would ask for advice. Friends were shocked to learn I’d only paid $5 for this or that to furnish my house on a budget.
Then, during COVID, I started sharing photos of tables I had set for my family, and it really seemed to resonate. More people started following my personal account and kept telling me I should sell some of the things I was finding in the thrift shops near my home and using to decorate my table and my house. So, I started selling at the local flea market probably two or three times, and it was quite popular. Local businesses would completely buy me out. And that got me connections.
So, my Instagram following grew even bigger. Talking to my mom, I thought I should have a name and brand myself in some way. At the time, I was mostly sharing tables, and that's how I came up with “The Thrifted Table.”
“Well, it's 98% crap, but I don’t want 2% to go to a landfill. So I use that 2% of stuff.”
Heather: Interestingly, you are curating what is already available. Anyone could walk into a thrift shop and do what you do. Buy what you buy. But they don’t. There is something special about the way you present it.
Emily: I do get asked why I’m so open about where I source my finds. I’m lucky to have some really good thrift stores nearby. In the beginning, I would go just for me. But I also found stuff I didn’t need but knew was distinctive or a good deal, so I’d buy it anyway. That's what I was selling at the flea market, things that I liked but didn’t need. The point is that I started local, and when people asked I would tell them I’d found an item at such-and-such thrift store. Even as I’ve gotten bigger, I’m transparent about where I find my stuff. My public knows I shop locally, at the thrift stores near me since they also support our local charity programs.
To your point, though, the people who buy from me, message me all the time saying, “I walk into that same store and don't see any of it. I don't see what you see.” It’s overwhelming for them. They just see crap. Other people complain they just don’t have the time. I don't really either, but it doesn't take that long. It's twenty minutes out of my day. People aren’t taking that twenty minutes because for them it’s not enjoyable to go to a thrift store and sort through stuff. Personally, I don't read books. I don't read because I have to read every day in my job. We do what we enjoy.
Thrifting is just part of my normal routine.
Emily setting the table during a collaboration with Jonathan Knight-Rodriguez and Kristina Crestin Design for their show Farmhouse Fixer on HGTV.
Heather: OK, the moment our readers have all been waiting for! For someone who may want to buy one (or many!) of your vintage finds, can you please explain how it works?
Emily: Yes! With vintage, it’s not like I always have five of something in stock. I may have one pair of embroidered napkins or one piece of jadeite, for example. So I keep shopping until I have enough pieces to create a collection of sorts, and during that time my online market is down. If you were to go to my website, it would say that I’m currently restocking. I used to try to restock my online market at least once a month. Now, when I feel I have enough items to create a collection, I give folks a heads-up on Instagram and in my newsletter as to when the online market will open. And then the collection drops. I think my first sale sold out in ten minutes!
I don’t shop with a theme in mind, I just shop. I wait for a theme to bubble up based on my finds and then curate a shopping experience for my clientele. I did a nautical theme once—everything from fishermen sweaters to vintage nautical flags. And a “woods and whites” drop, which was a mix of ironstone pieces and wooden vintage pieces. Over Thanksgiving, my Black & White drop went live.
Heather: What a creative way of using Shopify!
Emily: Well, I’m not the only one out there doing a drop approach. Big national brands like Apple will do iPhone releases on a certain day at a certain time, with long lines queuing up. I’ve done a couple of research interviews with Shopify as they’re interested in how people use Shopify and learning about any challenges in their system, we talked about how it’s creating anticipation. But, honestly, this wasn’t a big strategic business decision on my part, but a practical solution to my business. I can’t constantly keep inventory on my website as it just depends on what I’m finding out there and what’s going on in my life. Plus, I don’t have the storage space to hang onto items for long periods of time.
Emily and her jadeite collection featured in Better Homes & Gardens.
Heather: You have been featured in several magazines and now have 26.5K followers on Instagram. Harkening back to a central theme of our discussion, do you ever worry it’s all getting too big for its britches, so to speak? Does the question of work-life balance once again come up for you?
Emily: Yes, my husband and I both worry that this enjoyable and rewarding new venture could easily become unmanageable. We’re constantly trying to find that line. Like I said, this was all unplanned. During COVID, I had more time because I wasn’t driving my three kids to their sports, and I was working from home. But that was it, right? Stuck in my house, what else am I going to do? I was able to do a lot more dinners and that’s when I started posting more tablescapes. In addition to my online market, I expanded a little over a year ago to have a small physical space in a multi-dealer shop in Rowley, Mass called The Barn at Todd Farm that I had been invited to join after I did a pop-up there. So, now, I must approach it all very intentionally, but I enjoy it. We’ll just have to keep watching that line.
I also like the opportunity to give back the business affords me. I donate ten percent of profits semi-annually to charitable organizations with social justice missions. And, I've also done dedicated sales where one hundred percent of not just the proceeds, not just the profit, but all of the money is donated to a specific local charity organization.
Heather: Emily thanks so much for sharing your story with us. Do you have any upcoming projects or drops you’d like to announce?
Emily: Thank you. I won’t have another online sale this season, but I am planning a drop for early in the new year. If you’re in the region, I’d be thrilled for you to visit my space and all the great vendors at The Barn at Todd Farm, located at 275 Main Street in Rowley, Mass. We have everything you need to entertain and to gift. And, of course, I encourage everyone to shop small this holiday season!
Last, but not least, I am excited to be planning another tablescape photoshoot with my friend and collaborator, Sandra Sigman, from Les Fleurs, which will be a winter table, something new for us. So, stay tuned.
Emily in a duster coat made from an original 1940s hand-stitched quilt. “Besides the beauty of quilts, I love giving something new life and working with women makers in the process.” ~ Emily Knotos
