A few years ago, Guillaume Gauthereau used to awake at 3:30 a.m. in New York to read emails from Europe, and his espresso-fueled “workday” didn’t end until 10:30 p.m.. Now the founder of startup Totsy.com bikes to work at 8, reads in the park at lunch and meditates daily.

Guess which lifestyle made Gauthereau, now 37, much happier? Hint: the answer is not the time he spent as North American chief executive of Lalique, the French crystal company.

“I was 35, and one of the youngest CEOs of a global luxury brand, and I realized that the only thing it means is that now I will go on to be a CEO at another big company,” Gauthereau says. “I realized that with the pull of money, I had ended up on the wrong track.”

A French native who became a New York transplant, Gauthereau founded Totsy.com, a flash-sale site that offers discounts on merchandise for babies, children, mothers and moms-to-be. The site, which launched about 18 months ago, targets eco-conscious parents, with everything from vitamins and yoga clothes to children’s clothing and shoes and even baby strollers. The company deploys green-friendly business practices, and it says it offsets its carbon footprint by planting a tree in the rainforests of Peru for every purchase.

Its eco-friendly philosophy resulted from another initiative that Gauthereau founded called Sequoia Lab, a brand development and advisory firm that helps new companies get off the ground and commit to earth-friendly business practices and corporate responsibility at the same time. Among the companies it has helped is AK Worldwide, the business arm of Grammy winner Alicia Keys, whom Gauthereau personally advised.

While Totsy.com is a decidedly crunchy-granola kind of operation, it’s also got some crisp cash behind it. Last fall, the company picked up Series A funding of $5 million from two New York-based venture capital shops that specialize in technology: DFJ Gotham and Rho Capital Partners.

Gauthereau’s financial backers do not allow him to release sales figures, but he asserts Totsy, which has more than 50 employees—including a “Chief Mom” as its main editor and social media director plus a cadre of “mompreneurs” as partners and advisers in all of the major U.S. cities—is thriving.

While there are other sites in the flash-sales site arena—like Gilt Groupe, which investors recently valued at $1 billion, and HauteLook, which was purchased by Nordstrom in February—its most serious competitor in the mom-centric flash site market is Zulily.com.

One thing that Totsy has in its corner while competing in the flash-sale sector is a CEO with a great deal of retail experience and a heck of a back story. Gauthereau is one of those high-level achievers who rose through the corporate ranks so young and so fast that he barely got a chance to ask himself questions like, A) How the heck did I get here? or B) Is this someplace I even want to be?

Here's his story: After obtaining a PhD in veterinary medicine in France, Gauthereau worked for big companies in the pet food industry. But at 24, he caught the entrepreneurial bug and, joining the dot-com rush in pre-bubble 2001, launched a company that he describes as a French version of Pets.com, which grew rapidly but alas, suffered the same fate as the U.S. version with the dot-com crash.

Spooked by having to close his startup, Gauthereau decided to go work for a big company, a goal that sent him straight into maelstrom of luxury retail: he was a manager at the Louis Vuitton flagship store on the Champs Elysées in Paris, where he helped institute a red-scarf concierge program.