🧵 Timestamp: Q1 2020
My plan for my clothing startup in 2020 was to scale up. I had just hit 6-figures, had a few production runs under my belt, and my confidence was through the roof. As you can imagine, I was in for quite the surprise.
In January 2020, my manufacturing partner in Portugal started hinting at the pandemic.
➡️ By March: my factory partner told me they were operating at <50% capacity.
➡️ By May: they told me they were shutting down work with smaller clients like me.
Without a production partner, I had no product. No product meant no sales. No sales meant...no business....so what was I supposed to do next?
🔥 Hot take: No one tells you what to do after you fail your own startup....
💡 Inside This Issue
If you're new here — hi! I’m Arshiya, Founder & Principal of NIYAH Advisory, Your Leadership Studio.
This newsletter lives at the intersection of storytelling, leadership, and what it means to build something real without losing yourself. I work with executives, founders, and creatives on growing their leadership, building resilience, and finding their dreams.
This week → I’m sharing the behind-the-scenes story of how I stepped away from my start up... and what it taught me about building relationships, and taking a chance on something new.
🌊 The Stormy Path From Founder To Employee
Throughout the summer of 2020, I tried to establish a new and temporary supply chain here in Los Angeles. I started half-heartedly applying for jobs and interviewing even more half-heartedly. I got lots of interviews...but couldn't close the deal.
People didn't seem to know what to do with my experience, and my sharp departure from the corporate world. I considered going back into real estate, where I spent the first half of my career. But even that felt just...bad.
One day, I opened an email from Shopify and saw that a partner org was running a pandemic-era giveback program — a free course on performance marketing for entrepreneurs.
I had too much time, so I signed up.
Over the next 2 weeks, I poured over the basics of running a profitable business through performance marketing. I had a tiny bit of product left, and I tried out some of the new strategies I learned. I was shocked to see how well they cleared out my inventory.
Shortly after, I saw that the CEO was hiring. I cold messaged him on LinkedIn with my resume.
He interviewed me within the hour. I was brutally honest in that meeting. I told him I didn’t know what I knew how to do, but I’ve done a bunch of different things, and I wanted to be around really smart people, and I promise to learn.
⏭️ What’s Next
Two weeks later, I started as a paid media buyer at Common Thread Collective, a leading ecommerce performance marketing agency in Southern California.
When I look back at that time, I feel all kinds of feels. It was one of the hardest times of my life. I felt like I was giving up on my dream. And yet, I felt eternally grateful to have a steady paycheck when the world was falling apart.
Next week, I’ll share Part 2 of this story — and how that job transformed me, my confidence, and my understanding of what it really means to be resilient.
But for now, I’ll leave you with this:
👉🏽 Don’t underestimate the power of planting seeds.
I still can’t believe that opening that one random email... then signing up for that one webinar series... then sending one shot-in-the-dark LinkedIn message yielded me a whole-ass job.
Despite so many messages going unread, unopened... this one didn’t. And it changed the trajectory of my life.
📣 Work With Me
If parts of my story are resonating with you, I'd love to connect. I work with founders, executives, and rising leaders to build resilience into the next steps. And I'd love to chat about what that looks like for you.
🥨 Snacks:
🧠 Reframe: 11 visuals to shake up your perspective this week.
🌎 A Rising Right: How Zionism Is Leading The Global Right Worldwide.
👏🏽 People & Culture: The case for renting an executive...would you?
