Garlic Hands: Building the Dream Without Quitting the Job
What if the bravest career move is the one you can take back?
Every bottle of Naomi hand soap sold in the company's first year and a half — roughly thirteen thousand of them — was filled by the same arm. Preston's filling rig took five pumps per bottle, and the way it was set up, he couldn't switch sides. Sixty-five thousand pumps: nights, weekends, one arm, a garage. When I asked what that was like, he told me the labels took longer.
Naomi is a hand wash for home cooks. It takes the smell of garlic off your fingers without stripping your skin, looks good enough to live on the counter, and sits at a price point that barely exists — above the drugstore pump, below the Aesop it is quietly gunning for. Epicurious wrote it up. It sold out after Black Friday. It did a quarter of a million dollars in revenue in its first year, out of a garage. And its founder has a full-time job at Reddit that he has no plans to quit.
That is the part of the story that takes the longest to explain.
I met Preston at Meta, where he was one of the best product marketing managers I worked with — and where, most weekends, he was cooking. The habit started at Wharton, where he discovered something most MBA students wouldn't admit to: free time. While classmates ran mock interviews, he threw ramen pop-ups, and he developed a theory that has held ever since — giving part of his brain a creative problem that had nothing to do with his career made the career part run better. The hobby wasn't a leak of energy. It was the generator. And the cooking was never casual: he'd make two broths, identical except one had twice the ginger, taste them side by side, keep the winner, build the next test on top. One dinner for six friends might produce five findings.
Then the job soured. He was hiring for his own team when Meta ran a layoff, and one of the people cut was a candidate he'd hired — let go before their first day. "That is not a human decision," he said. "How much do I want to invest in a company that is going to make those sorts of decisions?" So he wrote to his favorite restaurants — not the ones down the street, the ones he would fly to eat at — and made a simple offer: right now I work at Meta, but if you told me I could work at your place, I would quit my job at Meta. Two said yes. The next step was planning his last day. He is honest, though, about what made the leap possible, and only one of the three things was courage. The third he names without embarrassment: "unwarranted self-confidence that I can always come back. It's not a forever decision."
The restaurant was Alouette, a Michelin-starred kitchen in Copenhagen, where the head chef rotated him weekly through stations and cooks own a dish from idea to the walk to the table. The story he still tells is about a Polish chef who baked a Polish cake one day — nothing for the menu, just a treat for the crew. That night, a Polish guest happened to book a table. The kitchen had executed its planned dessert perfectly and could have served it with a clean conscience. Instead: we have the cake — let's make this moment bigger than the menu. "Those sorts of creative improvisations are possible in the hospitality world," Preston said, "and they're not possible in tech."
Two months in, a founder messaged him about CREME, a step-by-step video recipe startup — food plus tech, the collision he'd been hoping for. He spent two years as head of product and learned the thing Meta can never teach, because Meta solved it before he arrived: what it feels like to not have product-market fit. His takeaway was almost monastic — don't get married to the idea; get married to the principles, and let them judge every idea that comes along.
The right idea arrived by argument. Wanting something with scale, he tried to recruit his girlfriend: what if she made a cosmetics product to bundle with his? "That's an awful idea," she said. She was right — and in trying to convince her, he convinced himself of something better: personal care built around cooking. The insight, it turned out, had been hers all along. At home, unlike in a restaurant, you cook alongside people who don't, and your ambition intrudes on their lives in dirty dishes and in air — through all his ramen years, she'd been telling him he smelled like garlic, and worse, so did the house. "Fine," he told her, when she still wasn't sold. "I'm going for it."
Here I should disclose something: I spent years inside big CPG — Lysol, Mucinex, Air Wick — and that is exactly why I would never have tried this. I knew too much. Preston knew almost nothing, and went. His method was the ramen method: reverse-engineer the incumbent from its own label, then test — four months of small batches in beakers on the kitchen counter, houseguests waking to find him two hours in at 8 a.m., every ingredient a row, every experiment a column. His ramen, he confirmed, lives in the same kind of spreadsheet. The first bottles embarrassed him; some arrived with tilted caps, so he triaged by friendship — "I'm going to send the worst three bottles to my friend." Then he said the thing I suspect every maker recognizes and few admit:
"I have never been proud of the product that I'm selling — because I'm always working on the next one."
He mailed bottles to food publications the way he'd once mailed letters to restaurants. Months of silence, then an email from Epicurious: tomorrow, we're publishing a review. That single day matched everything he'd sold outside pre-orders. He sold out after Black Friday — and the season nearly broke him: making soap all night in the garage, owing Reddit a full brain every morning. "What suffered was the interpersonal relationships." A manufacturer, arriving a year late thanks to tariff backlogs, saved the operation — and brought a perfumer who taught him to build a fragrance designed to disappear, because a cook doesn't want to trade garlic hands for perfume hands.
Which brings us back to Reddit — a role he chose deliberately, squarely in his own discipline, where he knows what excellent looks like and the edges hold. Half an hour of soap at seven-thirty, Reddit until four-thirty, soap at night and on weekends; when his car is completely full of bottles, he drives two hours to the person who ships them. He builds ad platforms for a living and pays someone else to run Naomi's ads. "The value that I can bring to Naomi right now is having cash and stability by working at Reddit."
Founder stories are usually cut down to a single leap. Preston's has no leap in it — only a sequence of doors he checked, before walking through, to make sure they swung both ways. He's candid that the one irreversible bet, going all in, is the one he hasn't made, and honest about its cost: "Maybe if I had the fire under my feet, I would move faster." Why did entrepreneurship take him this long? Not fear. Taste. "I'm very critical of my own ideas. Before this hand wash, I don't think there was a product I would have ever put my weight behind."
He is not proud of the bottle between us — he never has been proud of the one currently for sale, only the next one.
MEET THE GUEST
Preston Landers is a Los Angeles-based product marketer, founder, and self-taught chef whose career is best understood not as a straight line but as a series of parallel obsessions — tech and food, discipline and improvisation — that he has learned, over time, to run at the same time.
Preston built his foundation at Boston College Carroll School of Management, graduating cum laude with concentrations in Marketing and Operations & Strategic Management, before earning an MBA with Honors from The Wharton School, where he majored in Marketing and Operations. It was during his time at Wharton that a quieter kind of ambition surfaced: with more free time than he'd had in years, he began hosting tasting-menu dinners for classmates and running ramen pop-ups — spending more hours, at some point, on cooking than on class. He treats it now as the moment he realized creative work outside the day job doesn't drain the day job; it fuels it.
His early professional career was built at Deloitte Consulting in Boston, where he spent four years as a Business Technology Analyst, Consultant, and Senior Consultant. He then joined Meta, where over nearly five years he rose to Product Marketing & Development Lead — running the team supporting Meta Ads Business. In parallel, he kept staging at restaurants he admired on weekends and between semesters, until eventually the balance tipped. He sent a small number of letters to the restaurants he most respected, offering to leave Meta if any of them said yes. Two did. He spent two months at Alouette, a one-Michelin-star restaurant in Copenhagen, cycling through stations from dessert to lamb and learning what it actually means to own a dish from idea to delivery.
He returned to the U.S. as Head of Product at CREME: It's Time to Cook, a home-cooking app with the world's largest library of step-by-step video recipes, which was nominated for an Apple Design Award during his tenure. Today, he is a Principal Product Marketing Manager at Reddit, leading product marketing for campaign automation, including Max campaigns and creative generation.
Alongside all of this, Preston is the founder of Naomi — a premium hand wash designed for home cooks. What began as a four-month, one-person A/B-testing project in his kitchen (thirteen thousand bottles filled by hand before he moved to a manufacturer) has become a rapidly growing brand recognized as one of Bon Appétit's Gear of the Year 2025 and named to Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies 2026. His long-term vision for Naomi extends beyond soap: a personal care brand built for makers — the growing category of amateurs who treat cooking, ceramics, and working with their hands as luxury, not chore.
Preston was a guest on Talk to Jane | 对话身边的人, where he spoke about the quiet arithmetic of running two careers at once, why the best products come from being obsessed rather than efficient, and what it takes — when you have every reason to stay — to send the letter anyway.
