Hispanic Heritage Month: Why Mel Peralta of Greenhouse Is Driven by Telling the Best Stories

Mel Peralta is a natural storyteller. The senior project director of Foot Locker’s Greenhouse incubator program is first-generation Dominican-American and comes from a family who worked in the apparel industry. A native of New York’s Bronx borough, Peralta’s family all worked at the same baby clothing manufacturing company in the Garment District — something that clearly would have a major influence on his life. While speaking about his childhood in the 1980s, Peralta recalled feeling embarrassed, thinking the food he was eating wasn’t good enough because of how different it was from the Americanized meals he saw on TV. He also remembered how his uncle would sometimes sneak people underneath the turnstyle to watch the New York Yankees and New York Mets play because they only had one ticket to the game. These experiences not only informed his approach to storytelling and fondness for compelling narratives, but they also reinforced an idea he learned from his family at a young age: When you walk through a door, it’s your duty to hold it open for the person behind you. “I feel like I have a responsibility to tell impactful stories, and if the story comes from someone of a Hispanic background, that’s amazing, but if

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