Draft:Nicole Pietrandrea Hough

Nicole Pietrandrea Hough (née Pietrandrea) is an alcohol-recovery advocate and is the publisher and Editor-in-Chief of AFTER Alcohol-Free Magazine.. and the founder of the alcohol-free search engine Mocktail Quest

Early Life and Education
Pietrandrea Hough was born to physician and sculptor Dr. Samuel Pietrandrea (1940–2023) of Beaver Falls, PA and educator Dorothy Manasian Pietrandrea (1942-2024) of NYC. The family moved to Ridgewood, NJ in 1982, where they remained. Hough has one sibling, artist and writer David Edward Pietrandrea.

Pietrandrea Hough graduated from Ridgewood High School in 1991. She attended Bucknell University where she served as class president for four years earning a B.A. in Economics and International Relations in 1995. After several years working on Wall Street in the 1990s, Pietrandrea Hough was accepted to the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business and earned an MBA in Corporate Strategy and Entrepreneurship in 2001.

Career
From Business to Design to Publishing

Pietrandrea Hough attributes her success as a publisher and editor to the skills she learned throughout her varied career. She worked in fixed income at Merrill Lynch from 1995-1999 before leaving to attend business school. As a Kauffman Fellow (prior to the program's present-day cohort model) Pietrandrea Hough completed a summer internship at VC group Elvey Collaborative Capital in New York City and was named co-chair of Booth's Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital group and editor of the New Venture News newsletter under the direction of Professor Ellen Rudnick.

Upon her return to New York in 2001, Pietrandrea Hough found a calling in design and attended the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) to complete several courses in interior design before landing a job as a Senior Designer at Homeworks Kitchen & Bath/Wood-Mode showroom in Chelsea (now closed) with her mentor the late Reeva Locker. She spent a year as VP of Programing and a year as President of the Manhattan Chapter of the National Kitchen and Bath Association. Pietrandrea Hough's design work has been featured in publications such as Designer magazine and New York Spaces which named her one of "10 Young Designers to Watch in 2007 . After leaving the city to move back to Ridgewood, NJ, Hough started her own design business, Nicole Hough Designs, to continue her kitchen and bathroom design work. Her work was published in House Beautiful magazine as the "Kitchen of the Month" in April 2012 . Pietrandrea Hough was also named one of Bergen Health & Life Magazine's "Greenest Housewives of New Jersey" around this time for her work in design and in promoting healthy foods

During the pandemic, Hough started dabbling in video production under the pseudonym Coco Hough and produced 37 hour-long, live cooking shows which were released every Thursday for nine months. The experience ultimately led to the creation of AFTER Magazine and its associated channels.

AFTER Magazine
AFTER giving up alcohol in December 2020, Pietrandrea Hough started making mocktail videos but concluded that her cooking skills were far better than her mixology skills. After meeting a large community of sober people on Instagram she realized she wanted to share the stories of the alcohol-free world. Her overarching goal was to help anyone struggling to give up alcohol to know they are not alone. Out of this mission, AFTER Magazine was born. (The AF in AFTER stands for "alcohol-free" and the magazine's concept is that "the best life begins AFTER saying goodbye to alcohol.") Pietrandrea Hough launched the magazine in 2022, a time that happened to coincide with a dramatic boom in alcohol-free beverage sales in the United States and increased interest in an alcohol-free lifestyle. As of March 2023, six quarterly issues have been published and the seventh and eighth are currently in production.

Mocktail Quest
As part of her new alcohol-free lifestyle, Pietrandrea Hough was continually on the lookout for places that offered alcohol-free products, mocktails, events and other products and services. These places were somewhat difficult to find consistently so Pietrandrea Hough created Mocktail Quest, a geographic search engine with listings of alcohol-free offerings around the world. Pietrandrea Hough and her team continue to build out the site. Site users can also request or add new listings.

Personal Life
Hough married David Brewester Hough of Saunderstown, RI at New York City's Marble Collegiate Church in 2001. They spent 16 years together before separating in 2017 (divorce pending). Their two children were born in 2005 and 2007.

Alcoholism and Sobriety
Pietrandrea Hough describes her relationship with alcohol as "unhealthy from the beginning"—using alcohol to fit in at a young age and to feel like her "best self"—although it didn't begin to affect her day-to-day life until her late 40s after the dissolution of her marriage and the years that followed. Pietrandrea Hough gave up alcohol for nine months from 2019 to 2020 before picking it up again during the summer of 2020 when binge drinking among women increased dramatically in the U.S. Within a few months, after experiencing a blackout state more and more quickly after consuming even small amounts of alcohol, she knew she could no longer include alcohol in any amount in her life and gave it up for good on December 6, 2020. She is now an advocate for the personal development and growth that can happen after entering sobriety and believes the most beautiful life begins after saying goodbye to alcohol.