Dr. James Flowers, PhD, Founder of J. Flowers Health Institute, and co-host Robin French sit down for a heartfelt conversation with VIP guest Donae Cangelosi Chramosta, Co-Owner of Vintage Contessa & Times Past. Donae is a published writer, award-winning businesswoman, style setter, philanthropist, podcaster, and a loving wife and mother. In this episode, the Vintage Contessa shares her passion for curating luxury, pre-owned, and one-of-a-kind pieces that empower women to feel confident and socially conscious, as if they had personally traveled the world in search of these unique treasures. She also offers a candid glimpse into her personal life, revealing the secrets to achieving a successful work-life balance.
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A Heartfelt Conversation With The Vintage Contessa [Episode 8]
Welcome everyone to the show.
Robin. Donae.
How are you? Donae. We have a special guest.
Happy to be with you guys again. Thank you so much. I had the best time, thank you for inviting us to do a show with you. I laughed and had fun and enjoyed it. I hope you got a little airplay out of it.
Health And Safety During COVID-19
It’s so interesting because we are so focused on health and safety more than at any other time in our lives. We took it for granted and everybody, I know people used to say, be safe. Now everyone’s saying be safe and healthy. On the forefront of everyone’s mind. It’s not just about getting COVID, but it’s how we deal with the anxiety and the stress. What you shared, every one of my listeners loved.
Thank you so much. I had the best time.
Can I read a little bio about you? Do you mind?
You may, my difficult name.
I did, I had to pronounce it a few times. Donae Cangelosi Chramosta is the co-owner of Vintage Contessa & Times Past. She is a published writer, an award-winning businesswoman, a style setter, a podcast host, and a mother to River Oaks Baptist eighth grader, Bella.
I got to meet Bella.
Business partner and loving wife to Rob Chramosta. With a passion for fashion and lover of all things, creative and vintage, her family and friends christened her as the Vintage Contessa. She has been featured for her fashion style, her business savvy, philanthropy, and leadership in Houston Vale in New York. The Contessa and her daughter, Bella, have written and launched their children’s book, The Vintage Contessa & Princessa, donating a portion of the proceeds to pediatric cancer research.
Donae has also launched and taped over 85 episodes of a podcast, launching her new podcast, Living the Authentic Life. For over 25 years, Contessa has provided honesty and integrity in their successful luxury retail business, Vintage Contessa and Times Past. As a respected international wholesaler and retailer of luxury goods, she and her husband curate an exceptional collection of authentic, timeless, vintage, and pre-owned luxury pieces including handbags, accessories, watches, GIA-certified diamonds, signed jewelry, estate jewelry, and rare coins, gold and silver. Let’s all welcome the lovely and talented Vintage Contessa.
What an amazing bio.
That is great.
Thank you. It’s been a fun journey and an exhausting one.
I cannot even imagine.
We feel so blessed. I was telling people today that people are still buying luxury goods in the midst of this journey. I think people aren’t able to travel as much and maybe see friends.
Retail therapy.
We’ve been blessed with constant business. It’s certainly a different way. People are still searching to get something that makes them happy or creates a memory or sometimes bills avoid that really maybe they should be calling you about instead of me about but we’re here to please.
You are retail therapy.
For sure.
That’s wonderful.
I was curious, what made you decide to create that podcast, Living the Authentic Life? Let’s talk a little bit about that.
People walk into my store and the first thing they say to me is, “How do I know this is real? How is this real?” I really have been diving into what’s real and what’s fake and authenticity. Then COVID hit and we were all saying, “Is this disease real? Where did it come from?” Now with politics and so many other things, we’re all looking at it. Even my daughter in eighth grade is looking at friendship saying, “Is this real?”
We’ve really taken time, I think everyone, to reflect during COVID, to reflect on our lives and figure out a connection. We’ve lost connection. We were talking about that before. With Zoom calls, you’re not in person with people. It just is a way that we can really dive into that and dive into the stories of successful people. I don’t just mean financially successful, but people who are balanced in their lives and find out how they figure out what’s real.
Success isn’t just about finances, it’s about balance, health, and finding what’s real.
Just living successfully and in a healthy way.
Exactly. Which is what you guys are doing.
With the human condition, right? Working with the human condition. When you think about the human condition, what does the human condition mean to you personally?
I had to look up the actual definition of the human condition to understand, but it talks about human existence, birth, growth, emotion, aspiration, and conflict, and I feel like we’re all so in conflict right now. We are over what’s changed us. I just came from a Bible study I was telling you about. I was saying, “I feel like there’s this void in me that I keep thinking if I can take a trip or if I could do this or I could go to an event or I could dress up and have this experience, I would feel fulfilled.” Really we need to be looking into ourselves to be fulfilled. I found this quote I love and it says, “Happiness is the new rich, inner peace is the new success, health is the new wealth, and kindness is the new cool. It’s all about balance.”
Happiness is the new rich, inner peace is the new success, health is the new wealth, and kindness is the new cool.
I think COVID and this year have really just pushed that to us and understanding that about our lives. Being more authentic, and pausing, and looking at our health, and being real. Even though we had that loss of human connection for a while, we’re slowly getting that back, and our lives are slowly coming back in. You’re extremely successful, people are coming in, and just having something to make them feel better is therapy in itself. My friends, our friends, Susan and Neil Hirsch, who are wonderful friends of ours, are huge art collectors, and they go to Broadway, and they’re in New York, and they travel the world all the time.
They are 68 and 69 I believe and they haven’t traveled since December of last year and we just had dinner with him Sunday night, Robin and I, and he was just sitting there saying, “It has been one of the most difficult years of my life but what I’ve learned is a lot more about myself and really developed some close relationships and people that I didn’t get to spend time with it now I’m spending time with.”
Just your spouse, Rob. I would travel with Rob probably 100 days a year, but I was accustomed to him being gone 200 days a year. Then he’s there every day. I’m like, “Where’s your next business trip, babe? I’m looking forward to missing you, honey.”
Balancing Work And Family Life
Some of my patients have asked me this every day. That’s a great segue to one of the questions I had for you. As you work with your husband, tell us, how do you make that look so easy and be successful at it? I’ve seen you on the podcast together. You’re amazing. You have great chemistry. Tell me about that behind the scenes.
I have to say we have a great therapist. Big shout out to Jo Beth. Yes. No, I did learn from a therapist a long time ago that the best relationships were autonomy with the connection. We were married later in life. I was 37, he was 39. It was my second marriage. I called it my mulligan. It was his first marriage. It’s a little harder when you’re older because you’re set in your ways, but you already know who yourself. You have been through enough to learn who you are. You have more experiences to go through. Honestly, it was deferring to him at the office and letting him have the final say and deciding that I could have the final say at home over raising a daughter.
We had to come to this place and we certainly, I’m a passionate, strong, Italian woman that says everything I think and feel, and I’ve had to learn to bite my tongue. It really came to that balance and to our faith and to us having the same core values as I didn’t always see his path as the path but we had to choose that someone was going to be the leader. Ironically, I could give in to him because I believed in him. I trusted him enough.
Respected him. Respect is huge.
Respect is such a big part. I’ve been diving into what connection means and what collaborations work. I feel like when that’s missing, that partnerships fail and you have to continue to go back to what that is. For us, it could be our faith, or it could be going to that third party to help us talk through the challenges. I think life, especially COVID, is such a growing period for all of us. We don’t all grow the same way.
We don’t all grieve loss the same way. We don’t refuel the same way. Now with COVID, the way we used to refuel was for us to take a trip or to have some great date nights or go have this amazing experience. Now we have to create that experience on the couch and between the two of us with words and then sitting next to each other in an office every day with fewer people with more responsibility. Know that it’s not easy and know that so much of success is just commitment. It’s just saying, “I’m not going to stop because this is worth it.”
The Journey Of Curating Luxury Items
That’s right. I would love to hear, speaking of working together. I’d love to hear, off the cuff, what’s a story about an item that you’ve curated that’s in the store that you’ve sold, and what’s one of the favorite things that you guys have curated, and tell us about a story?
Interestingly, I love that we can we were traveling and we would go around the world to buy pieces and when Bella was three we lived in Paris for eight weeks and he was buying coins from a lot of the coin dealers there and I was going to auctions and buying pieces and we stumbled into this incredible auction and bought a few dresses in this cool book Yves Saint Laurent wrote called La Vilaine Lulu. She was this character that was in black and white, and the only color was red.
That was what inspired my children’s book, with being black and white sketches with pink with it. Was that? One of the coolest things we ever bought was my first Birkin, I would say. Sadly, we were robbed and it was taken from my closet at my house and which was supposed to be a bag for Bella. I think that I love what the pieces stand for but it’s more about the journey to buy them or the experience of what the gift was than it even is about the piece.
It’s not always the piece that matters, it’s the journey to find it and the story behind it.
That’s part of the human condition right there. Just the experience of finding the piece, and the backstory of the piece, and where it came from.
What it was intended to be or the heart behind the gift or the thought behind it that goes into it. Like I just bought him a brand new watch for our fifteenth anniversary and he’d never had a new watch for himself because he couldn’t ever pass up.
A vintage watch.
He also would never have invested in something brand new because he would have made money selling it. It’s been interesting, like it’s almost harder for us to buy gifts for each other, although I joke with him, and when something comes in I love, I’ll put it in his chair with the post-it that says, “Donae’s gift for Valentine’s Day or Donae’s Mother’s Day gift.” I try to make it easier.
That’s perfect. That’s great.
How do you schedule things while he’s traveling so much? I guess you’re more or less like a single mom when he’s traveling, yeah? I mean, how do you balance all of that because you’re spread pretty thin yourself?
I am. We’ve talked about this, I believe, when we had our first lunch together, is that pre-COVID, I was probably going to five charity events a week. I loved connecting with people and supporting my friends. In order to do great things, you have to have great people with you. I felt truly compelled that if my friends supported me, I wanted to support them. It became this vicious cycle that you can only, like I always say, “You’ve got to put the oxygen mask on yourself before you can put it on everybody else.”
There were days when I would actually write on my calendar no plans so that I could stay home. Now that COVID’s happened, I think we’ve all realized that we don’t have to go that much and we don’t have to do that much. We can give back in other ways to the community and our family is the most important thing. If I went to an event, I tried to only miss Bella’s bedtime, maybe three times a week, and I made sure that I was home for the other ones because when she was younger, we would call it pillow talk.
That’s when the most amazing moments happened when she wasn’t really thinking about it. Now that she’s a teenager, she doesn’t want pillow talk anymore. It’s odd like it’s not like I can plan it and go, this is our time, Bella. It happens whenever it happens. I was dressed and going to dinner, and I was five minutes early and went down to talk to her. It was an hour and a half. She’s like, “You’re late for dinner.” I’m like, “I’m late for dinner because you need me right now.”
I think it’s been about just constantly trying to remind myself that as much as I want to be there for my friends, the most important thing to me is my family. I know that for Rob to be the best husband and the best father and the best leader of our organization he has to fill his cup too. As much as I’m so jealous he got to go fishing in Alaska he’s like taking a trip with your friends and I’m like, “There’s nothing I really want to do right now but I want you to do that because I know that that fulfills you.” Yes, I’m jealous that he had fun times. At the same time, I know that that’s what lets us be a better couple. Does he get to have that too?
Was he already buying vintage items when the two of you met or did you two start this together?
No, so he was completely in the business and I want to say this on air. I think I’ve said it before, but I could not be the vintage Contessa without him. He was so important in my journey and he could have been Rob Chramosta in times past without me and he was. He started buying coins as a kid and he was that nerdy coin geek that was going. When kids were playing sports, he was going to coin shows and buying and selling coins, and then he grew up in Chicago.
In high school, he started buying and selling Rolexes and then he went to see you in Boulder and he started adding diamonds. He was Working his way through school and he was always doing this. I came from my family’s marble and granite business to work with him and I had a luxury background, but I was more of a marketing person. He was not branding it, he was Rolex Rob. People would go, “I got a guy for you.” I translated into not only do I have a guy for you, I have the Contessa for you too.
That’s right, exactly.
Did you have a love for vintage purses prior to that though, and you just took it to a whole new level?
Yes, so growing up, my family business was marble and granite. My dad would go to Italy. He would go to this fabulous town, which is one of mine and Bella’s and Rob’s favorite cities in the world now called Forte dei Marmi. It’s the Fort of Marble. He would buy the Carrara white marble that Michelangelo used to carve.
The Pia Tal, the Statue of David, and that’s where the white marble quarries are. My dad would go there on buying trips, and as he flew home, this was the ‘80s. This was the Gucci time period. He would buy my mom and me a Gucci bag at Duty-Free that was about $150. He was always the man who was focused on investing in properties and in our business as opposed to clothes. I would joke with my mom, I’d say we are the only Mercedes at the Wieners parking lot.
Wieners was like the ten steps down from Target. I mean I love Target. I’m a Target shopper. I’m like, “Mom, can we not go to Neiman’s?” She’s like, “No, we cannot go to Neiman’s.” I was wearing the Wieners outfit with the Gucci handbag and I was like, “I’m trying to pull this off. I think I’m cute.” I mean still, that is a part of my dress that I can have on a T-shirt from Walmart that I bought because we’re Walmart still has some cool things and a pair of no-name jeans, but I’ve got a great handbag and a great watch. I feel like I can be stylish and I can pull it off.
Like 10 million bucks and looks like it.
When Rob and I started dating, I was traveling with him and I was anywhere we went out of the US I was buying because it was duty-free and I could get the tax back, and then people started saying, “Bring them back for me.” I was going to the shows. I’d start buying the costume jewelry. He’s like, “Why are you buying a costume?” I’m like, “You’re going to love this.” My friend, I love this. The other girls are going to love it. It evolved. While I was still working at the family, I was buying these other items for myself and my friends. It organically just evolved into a business. It wasn’t like I could just jump out and go into the fashion industry.
Like for people who want to follow their dreams, I want to tell them you need a path. It’s not like you just become that. You have to work hard and make a living to pay for your lifestyle before you get to live your dream. I wanted to build a new place and spend all this money and hire employees and Rob was like, “No, no, no, no, we’re going to be.” It’s been a balancing act of all that to be a luxury provider, people want to look at you and see that you’re living a luxury lifestyle, but we can still be in a space that isn’t $10,000 a month in overhead or spending all the money there, we can be spending the money on inventory instead.
Living a luxury lifestyle isn’t about spending big; it’s about choosing pieces that have meaning and value.
That’s right. You and I have a friend in common, speaking of luxury. That’s Marnie Greenwood. I always like to give a shout-out to different friends. Marnie’s who have connected us. In that luxury, talking about people buying luxury items today, even during this economic time that we are in our country, multi-million dollar homes are just hot and selling like crazy. Marnie is the one who introduced us. Do the two of you ever work together in a luxury brand or you were just friends?
The Importance Of Collaborations In Business
In fact, I was supposed to be on the podcast. It was the week that the hurricane was coming through. We weren’t sure if we were supposed to be. We still have yet to do that but we absolutely work together. I’ve found that that’s been the greatest growth of my business. Me professionally and me emotionally as a person is through collaborating with other like-minded people because you can spread our wider net.
Also, it’s such a cliche but in giving you receive I feel like every time I put something out there for someone else organically that I believe in. I am cautious about who I align myself with it’s somebody that I feel is a representative of the same value system. I think it all goes hand in hand and like I’ve worked with and talked to him about doing another project where I bring in my goodies and I style out his closet. There are so many different ways. I mean, people are like, “She’s a luxury provider and we’re talking about health with you guys.”
It is a part of health.
Your clients are our clients.
It is, and because it’s not just about attaining luxury, it’s about attaining balance and a healthy lifestyle and all of those things together.
It really is.
Is it hard for you, we’re going backwards to something else that we segued into, but once you have this story and you have this piece and you fall in love with it. Is it hard to let it go? I mean, I imagine you have to look at it like a foster mother.
I do. I absolutely will sell certain pieces to people and say, “I’m so glad it’s going to a good home because I just love that.”
That would be sad. I was thinking about how hard that must be for you.
Rob and I have an agreement. I can have anything I want if I trade in for it. I have to trade in the value of what we could sell it for against the value of what’s there. It has opened, but that’s also what we’re telling our clients. Like if you have things in your closet that you have fallen out of love with, you can bring them in and either get money from us or trade in about something else that you love. I think too, because it is, I mean, I was saying this about Wieners earlier, but my dad always wanted to have things that were investments or had value.
That’s why he would look at jewelry and cars aren’t value. That thing at least if you use it and enjoy it, you could then trade it in later and have value. Absolutely, Rob says it’s all widgets to him. I am so passionate about it. I love each piece. I also love the journey of helping to style people. I can also be on a buying trip or see things offered to me and say, “I think that person would love it.” There’s so much excitement and being able, it’s not even like, I still get the high of giving them a gift even though they’re paying me for it. I’m like, “Look what I found you but you’re going to have to pay me for that, sorry.”
That’s right. It’s only.
There really is no difference in your buyer now after COVID than before? Is there anything different at all in the experience?
I would say we’re doing so many more virtual shopping experiences. We are such a small business and we didn’t have everything on our website before and we weren’t set up to have ten employees photographing all day long, we were instead going to shows and packing it all up, putting it out in a display case, selling 200 pieces, packing it back up with the new 200 pieces we bought and going home.
It’s a lot of work.
We were used to moving things through. We would do a lot of wholesale via FaceTime, via WhatsApp. Now it’s just organically and being a person that always loved media and just loved being social through that, I felt comfortable. It was just a matter of it already happening and we just started recording it. It felt like a natural evolution of where we were. I still believe that people want to touch and feel things. I don’t believe the internet will ever completely replace the experience of meeting with the person, seeing them one-on-one, and talking about those experiences. We’re still doing that at our office and meeting with people virtually. I feel like we’re lucky to have that opportunity.
I love that. As a final question, comment thing from you, if you don’t mind, how do you and Bella and your husband stay healthy? What is health to you and what’s health to your family and how do you all maintain that well-balanced healthy life? What advice do you give all of our listeners and your readers and your listeners?
Maintaining A Healthy Lifestyle With Family
I think it’s so great that you bring up Bella because being a teenager, she’s experiencing a lot of body image issues and that’s where we are in her journey and she has a great figure and she’s completely fit, but when she looks at herself, she doesn’t see herself as beautiful as I see her. We’ve met with doctors and we’ve had them look online at what her weight should be and what her calories should be and different things like that and working out as a healthy lifestyle.
I feel like we’re talking about it a lot. I’ve been doing intermittent fasting for two and a half years. He just started during COVID with me. That’s been really healthy. We’re trying to do low carb. He is having more arthritis issues, so we’re trying to focus a little bit on what foods are better for him. We’ve always been an active family, and we’ve encouraged working out. I feel like I cannot just say to her, “Bella, you need to work out.”
Rob rides his bike a few days a week. I do yoga. To show her that it’s not about just looking good in your clothes, which she knows that that’s a part of the journey, too, is feeling good and looking good but knowing that it’s about health and the long-term balance of it all. We splurge. I love dark chocolate and so that is my splurge, but we talk about how to just keep it in balance. I guess that’s the thing, we just keep going back to that word.
Well-balanced and enjoying it, right? Enjoying life.
Enjoying the ride.
Enjoying the ride of life. You’re amazing. I’m so glad that you agreed to come to our show. How do people find you? How do our readers find you and the Vintage Contessa?
Please follow us on Instagram at the Vintage Contessa. In fact, we’re launching a giveaway with Houston Modern Luxury. We’re giving a Louis Vuitton duffel. You can go to our Instagram page and tag two friends and follow us on YouTube and be entered to win. Also, we do Facebook Lives on Monday, and Wacky Watch Wednesdays on Wednesdays. Our podcast Thursdays at 10:00 on our Facebook page and you can schedule an appointment to come visit us in person.
My practice partner Robin Mooney is flying in from Jekyll Island, and we’re going to be there on Friday. We would love to see you. Robin, how do people find J. Flowers?
They can find us at JFlowersHealth.com, or they can dial us at 713-783-6655. Thank you for joining us.
Thank you so much. This has been amazing. We’ll do it again, I hope.
It was too fast.
I know, it feels like it’s ever too quick. I definitely want you guys to come back on the podcast and I wanna talk more about the journey, maybe around the holidays because I feel like we’re going to have COVID and holiday.
Flu season and all that stuff.
Let’s do it soon.
Social distancing. Hopefully, it’ll be gone.
We’ll tune in. Thank you again.
Thanks so much.
Important Links
- Vintage Contessa & Times Past
- The Vintage Contessa & Princessa
- La Vilaine Lulu
- Instagram – Vintage Contessa & Time Past
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheVintageContessa
- Youtube: https://youtube.com/c/vintagecontessatimespast
- Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/VintageContessaTimesPast/
About Donae Cangelosi Chramosta
Donae Cangelosi Chramosta is an award-winning businesswoman, luxury stylist, style-setter, philanthropist, published writer, and keynote speaker, although her most cherished titles are mother, wife, and daughter.
With a passion for fashion and love of all things creative and vintage, over 10 years ago she created and founded her luxury handbag and accessories brand “the Vintage Contessa “ joining Times Past, her husband’s 30 year old preowned luxury business.
The Vintage Contessa & Times Past of Houston buys and sells high-end vintage, estate jewelry, fine watches, designer handbags and accessories, GIA diamonds, rare coins, and antiquities from all over the world. The curated collection of authentic, timeless luxury pieces includes Rolex, Cartier, Patek Philippe, Hermes, Chanel and Louis Vuitton, and a reputation built on buying expertise, value, honesty, and integrity. www.thevintagecontessa.com
She was resently selected as the first Saks Fifth Avenue Affluencer/Stylist in Houston and is one of the first 5 trailblazing associates selected from around the United States. Now she is able to share her passion for luxury styling over a broader canvas including shoes, clothing, beauty and home accents.
She embraces living authentically yet luxuriously by connecting with clients and friends on social media and on her “Living the Authentic Life” podcast. She is committed to making a difference in the health and safety of her community with her primary focus on fighting sex trafficking with other like minded women as part of Houston 20.
She feels blessed to be able to live her best life doing what she loves to do, while earning a living, and making the world a better place in the process.
“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. “ Howard Thurman
