When I was 6 years old growing up in Malaysia, I decided I wanted to be a flight attendant (or stewardess as they were called at the time). It might have something to do with all those beautiful glamorous women who worked for Malaysia and Singapore airlines that I saw when my parents would take us on vacation all over Asia. My parents were avid travelers and my extended Filipino Vietnamese family (with a touch of English) were all foodies and musicians so my childhood was full of cooking, music, dancing, and travel. I quickly evolved into wanting to be a pilot, then an astronaut, clearly having a passion for travel at an early age. My curiosity of foreign lands brought me to California where I went to high school and made the” grown up” choice to go to the University of California at Berkeley to study Chemical Engineering.

My hope was that Chemical Engineering would take me to a job at NASA and maybe space. Then I found out most of the jobs were in cosmetics, food processing etc, nothing that I was interested in so I floated a while from major to major till I landed in the second love of my life, architecture and design.

After college, armed with my Environmental Design education, I worked for architecture firms building everything from custom homes, to sky scrapers, schools and airports. After a few years, I realized though I loved design, I didn’t want to own my own firm so I pivoted to a career in music. I became an event producer and artist manager running my own company and doing as many as 70 events a year.

Along the way, I was recruited to go back to Design by working for Gap Inc which catapulted me into a long illustrious career in Retail Store Design. I have had the fortune and pleasure of leading Store Design Brand Transformation for some of the most iconic Fortune 500 brands in the world which has solidified my professional reputation for being a change agent, being able to conceive and create an environment for reinvention. This career has taken me all over the world. I have volunteered repairing homes in New Orleans after Katrina and built homes in El Salvador with Habitat for Humanity. Most recently we were residing in Singapore working for an Asian multinational and traveling across Asia.

During this time which spanned 20+ years , I also had the fortune of meeting the love of my life, a like minded soul with happy feet and a love of architecture and real estate. We saved, bought and sold homes with our investment company Little Green Houses. We have planned elaborate travel events for vacations , destination weddings, birthdays with friends spanning the globe from Singapore to Barcelona, Istanbul, Greece, Mexico and many more – 38 countries and counting. When we travel we eat, we cook, we listen to music and explore different cultures.

I have now come full circle relinquishing my corporate responsibilities to lead a semi nomadic life of traveling this glorious world of ours, still doing design consulting as Brandesign, and launching a new career in Travel Event Planning soon. Along the way I am always cooking, eating, and learning. Come with us! 

(CFO) Chief Fun Officer

DeborahBrandProbst@ShrugLife.net

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