Amazon boss Mindy Espidio-Garcia opens up about the family tragedy that shaped her approach to work and life
Losing her 10-year-old daughter showed Mindy Espidio-Garcia the best of humanity in the workplace, and has now moulded her approach to running Amazon’s Australian operations.
Saturday March 17, 2018 is forever forged in the memory of Mindy Espidio-Garcia.
It was the day she kissed her precious 10-year-old daughter, Alana, goodbye.
Alana was known to her family and friends as “Prancer” because she regularly ran around on the tips of her toes and loved to dance.
She enjoyed throwing tea parties, or any occasion which she could get dressed up for. She collected stuffed animals and loved unicorns.
Her diagnosis of incurable leukaemia in 2017 rocked her mother’s world.
“At that moment, we just dropped everything and tried to take account of what it meant and what we wanted to do,” Mindy now says of listening to the doctor’s confronting words, while holding the hand of her second husband and Alana’s father, Rafael Espidio-Garcia.
“We told Alana, ‘This is your time. If you want to fight, we will go and find every way to fight this. If you want to take your time and spend it with your family and doing fun things, we can do that too’.”
Mindy, now director of operations in Australia for online retail juggernaut Amazon, has told the story of her daughter’s passing many times to her family, friends and Amazon staff.
But today, sitting in a nondescript meeting room at Amazon’s Sydney headquarters, it becomes too much. She breaks down.
“I’m so sorry,” she eventually says after a long pause, wiping away tears.
“I don’t tell it this way all the time … I’m not so good to get deep.”
After her media manager brings her a box of tissues, she composes herself.
“Alana wanted to fight it. She wanted to do everything that she could to try to get through it,” Mindy continues in a pained tone after a deep breath.
She and Rafael found an experimental drug program that was willing to accept Alana, at Seattle Children’s Hospital on the other side of the US from the family home in Tampa, Florida.
She stayed with her daughter as she was treated there between November 2017 and February 2018.
“In early March she picked up a fungal infection on her lungs. There came a point where we just knew there was no turning back and that she would ultimately succumb to this fungal infection, unfortunately, so she wanted to go home. We found this medical flight to get her home that was hugely expensive. But you know, in all honesty at that moment, who cares about that. It’s just about her,” she says slowly.
“So we got her home. I think it was five or six days later that she ended up passing away.”
There is another long pause, and more tears. “I’m sorry,” she says again. But I tell her there is no reason to apologise. She is a mother who lost a daughter.
After joining Amazon in June 2014, Mindy worked her through the ranks and took on the leadership role of director of operations in Australia midway through 2021, moving to Sydney with Rafael.
I ask her why she has put herself through the pain of sharing her deeply personal story with the wider world for the first time.
“It really forces you to think about your life and how you are living life, and how you are prioritising things in your life. I think the big thing for me is that by sharing my story, it allows others to see that it is possible to live through it, even though it sucks,” the now 38-year-old says resolutely.
“It was hard as hell. I don’t wish it on anyone else. I just know that there are other people out there who are dealing with the same things.
“I want them to know it is okay to deal with things in your life. You can still find your way through them, even though sometimes things are terrible.”
Young single mother
Mindy had the world at her feet in 2005 when she secured a scholarship out of high school in Florida to go to college.
She wanted to study medicine, loved helping people and volunteered for work at the local hospital.
But just before she started university, her life took a very different turn when she decided instead to get married and have children.
“As a young mum I didn’t have the best of luck in my first marriage. I was a victim of domestic abuse and left in the middle of the night, essentially, with my two dogs and two very young daughters,” she says, without flinching.
As a single mother with two young girls in her early 20s, Mindy was working two jobs while struggling to make ends meet. She eventually met Rafael and they were married in 2009 after the birth of Alana.
Trying to earn more money, she went to college as an adult; it took her five years to graduate. She was recruited by Amazon to join as a junior manager on the fulfilment centre floor after the family moved from Tampa to New Jersey when her mother was diagnosed with cervical cancer.
When they eventually returned to Tampa and Mindy took on a senior managerial role, they discovered Alana had leukaemia. She started chemotherapy treatment at John Allen Hopkins Hospital – an hour’s drive away from the family home.
Suddenly the Amazon fulfilment centre staff that Mindy managed, became her family.
“My general manager was super supportive. He said, ‘Listen, we’ll do anything that you need. We’re here to support you. You take whatever time you need; it’s not a big deal, your pay cheque will continue to come’,” she recalls.
“So I had meals delivered to my house basically every night. People were coming over to watch the kids. Just that outpouring of community and love was overwhelmingly unexpected.
“You don’t expect that from people that you work with.”
Alana received a bone-marrow transplant and improved to the point where Mindy could return to work.
“I would pop over to the hospital in the evenings and in the mornings, and go to work in between. We had this really great routine going,” she says.
“We got her cancer free and we thought, ‘This is our path, we are headed in a good spot’. About three months later, we had a spinal tap and her cancer had returned.
“My Amazon team was there for the whole time. They were bringing gifts, checking in and just doing everything that they could.
“One of the things I’ve always kept from that is: this isn’t just a team, it isn’t just humans who come in to get a pay cheque and check out at the end of the night. This is truly a family, a community that leans on each other when we really need it.”
During Alana’s final months, the Ryan Callahan Foundation – the charity of former American pro hockey player Ryan Callahan – offered Mindy and her family a week-long trip to the TradeWinds Island Resort on St Pete Beach, so they could cherish some final moments together.
They threw Alana a tea party and made her feel like a queen.
During the party at the resort restaurant whose centrepiece was a giant fish tank, a diver appeared carrying a sign that read: “Hi, Alana! There is nowhere you could go that we won’t be with you. We love you!”
Alana’s funeral was held on Friday March 23, 2018 at the Sylvan Abbey Funeral Home in Clearwater.
The family requested that in lieu of flowers, donations be made in her name to the Ryan Callahan Foundation.
“Her funeral was filled with Amazonians. Not just the leaders, but the associates who I led years ago or who had heard about it, and had kids or family members who were impacted by cancer and wanted to be there. It was just really cool to see everybody come together in that moment,” Mindy says.
To honour Alana’s love of unicorns, the team at Tampa’s Amazon fulfilment centre created unicorn pins to be awarded to associates who go above and beyond.
Mindy says Alana’s passing was confronting for her older sisters, Caterina and Isabella. But they got through it.
“Something like this changes the family dynamic. I think they were very nervous about ‘How do I express my emotions without making mum and dad sad’. Which is tough,” she says.
Now aged 18 and 20, they are both at university.
“The two of them have done phenomenally well. They’ve done well in school and they are super resilient young ladies.”
Leadership style
Mindy took just a month off after Alana’s passing before she returned to be general manager of Amazon’s Orlando distribution facility.
She ran another six Amazon facilities in the southeast of America before moving to Australia last year – a market vastly different in population density to the US and other areas of the world Amazon operates in.
A key part of Mindy’s role now is navigating a complex logistical land mass, while still being able to meet Amazon’s delivery promises.
Amazon Australia offers more than 200 million products across 31 different categories.
The business more than doubled its operational footprint in 2021 and now has more than seven million cubic feet of storage space across six fulfilment centres nationwide.
But it is also experiencing growing pains.
In January, the Seattle-based company revealed plans to cut 18,000 jobs worldwide – the biggest set of lay-offs in its history – representing about 6 per cent of the retailer’s overall corporate workforce of 300,000 people.
Amazon is responding to threats of a recession and a decline in consumer spending in America after its shares lost half their value in 2022, which was the worst year for shareholders since the dotcom crash in 2000.
Waves of redundancies across the tech sector in recent weeks by companies such as Salesforce, PayPal, Google and Facebook have been widely criticised as most were announced via email.
But in Australia, Mindy says she is working to drive cultural change with a leadership style defined by the way her team corralled around her in the face of adversity.
She believes that as a result of her experience, the company made significant changes to its care leave and benefits policies globally. It also set up a an organisation called “Amazon Goes Gold” to support children with cancer.
“When I started with Amazon in 2014, there weren’t any general managers who were women,” she says.
“We now want to provide mentorship opportunities for female leaders to be able to see what their path is and how they can get there.
“For the single mums who are dealing with the pressures of daycare and domestic violence and some of these other things.”
She wants the business to give back to the community in which it operates and she wants to build a workplace that is “safe, inclusive and connected”.
She recalls the story of a male executive in Sydney who recently lost their child to a miscarriage and how she tried to help.
“I think having somebody on the outside to talk through it, who went through it, is just sometimes helpful when you’re not sure how to get through it at home,” she says.
After having surgery, Mindy’s mother is now cancer free and living a healthy life in California with her step-father.
She says the tragedy of her daughter’s passing has given her a new awareness of the curve-balls life can throw at anyone.
“Work is much more about the people than it is necessarily about the end result of producing business numbers or metrics,” she says.
“There’s certainly also a theme of resilience and how you take a really tough situation - whether it was my first divorce, my daughter or some of these other challenges - and not give up. How can I help others go through these same types of problems and offer up my experience to just remain positive and keep going.”