About Jacqueline Bonfini

My Experience. Your Roadmap

For more than 20 years, I built a career most people would look at from the outside and call successful. Valentino, Yves Saint Laurent, YETI. I led teams, built strategies, made hard calls under pressure, and did all the things that look right when you're doing them. And underneath all of it, I was fighting against who I actually was.

I just didn't know it yet.

In 2018, I quit my executive role and left New York for Austin with no job and no plan, just a gut feeling. Everyone thought it was a little crazy. I met my husband, we got married, and we had two daughters in what felt like about five minutes. Beautiful, wild, and completely disorienting in ways I was not prepared for.

Becoming a mother in my late thirties broke something open. The coping mechanisms I had built over a lifetime, the ones that had kept me functional and high-performing and always one step ahead, stopped working. The mask came off. And what I found underneath it was that I had been performing a version of myself for so long that I had lost track of where the performance ended and where I actually began.

That was the real work. Not the career pivot. Not the move. The moment I stopped fighting against myself and started getting honest about what was actually there.

What I learned is that most of us are doing some version of this. We're not broken. We're not lost. We're just carrying a closet full of feelings we've never actually sorted through. When everything is jumbled together, it all feels like one big mess. But when you can pull things out, look at them separately, and understand what each one actually is, the mess becomes manageable. Your anxiety isn't all of you. Your frustration isn't a character flaw. They're just parts. And once you can see the parts clearly, you can figure out what to do with them.

That's what this work is.

In 2023, I left my last corporate role and went all in on coaching. I am a Certified Professional Coach (CPC) and ELI Master Practitioner (ELI-MP) through iPEC, one of the most rigorous coach training programs in the world, and an ICF member working toward my ACC credential. I work with executives and leaders in fashion, retail, and creative industries who are ready to stop operating on autopilot and start building something that actually fits.

My last name, Bonfini, means Good Ending. It is the philosophy that guides everything I do. We figure out what you actually want, identify what has been getting in the way, and build a real roadmap to get you there.

If you are ready to stop waiting for someone else to greenlight your next chapter, let's talk.