Arshiya Kherani

🧵 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...

🧵 The Unhinged Confidence That Helped Me Build A Globally-Recognized Brand I was 26 years old and had spent about 8 months working on my side hustle, Sukoon Active. I had the naiveté and unhinged confidence of a first-time founder in her 20s: I thought everything was possible — and to some extent, it was. Sukoon consumed most of my nights and weekends. What most people don’t know is: news outlets, podcast hosts, everyone in media is ALWAYS looking for a story. I actually didn’t know that...

🧵 Is Your Story...Storying? Recently, I had a feedback session with a client around storytelling — and it left me thinking a lot about how we actually find our voice, especially in professional contexts where we’ve been taught to hide it. Maya (not her real name) is a powerful community leader doing deep systems-change work in rural areas. She’s spent years building trust, designing public health equity strategies, and navigating relationships across agencies, partners, and community members....

🧵 Uhhhh....Whoops Yesterday, I was on a consulting call with a social media strategist. I’ve worked in social media for years.... I’ve built content for multiple of my own brands, worked at a DTC marketing agency, written scripts, shot photo and video, spent hours editing, and even made ads that have gone viral. On a technical level, I know how it all works. But for this phase of my work, for NIYAH Advisory, I’ve been kind of stuck on marketing. The first year+ of my work was fueled by warm...

🧵 "Stop Being A Bot!" My oldest niece is visiting me this week. She’s 16, juggling a full AP course load, college apps, and multiple sports — and she’s already in conversations with college recruiters for rowing (wild, right?) To me, she’s still a little kid! But she's actually not. She already has her driver's license in had, and is ready to chase her future. She asked me to help her prep for a conversation with a college recruiter, and I got goosebumps. I role-played as the interviewer and...

🧵 When Are You Ever Ready? Last week, I was on the phone with a founder-to-be. He was flirting with the the idea of starting his own company after leaving his last place of work unexpectedly. We had done three calls, and he had all the signs of a client ready to hire me: he was engaged, motivated, and texting me excellent follow up questions. He told me he was ready to invest in himself and in this pivot. We mapped out a plan. I sent him the contract...and then...pin drop silence. When I...

🧵 Founder POV: When Does It Become...Real? This week I had a routine call with one of my clients — a founder in the early stages of launching a product — and he asked, “When does it become a real business?” He’s in prototyping mode for his CPG brand, and while finance, marketing, growth, packaging (the list goes on) are all spinning in his brain, we keep coming back to one thing: the product. Let’s get something that's ready to get into the world, and then tackle the rest. He’s asking all the...

🧵 This Week's Thread: Me vs. You This week, I kept running into the same frustrating feeling — like I just couldn’t connect, no matter how hard I tried. A series of interactions, both personal and professional, left me spinning. I pride myself on clarity. I know how to communicate. And yet... something wasn’t landing. In each situation, I found myself thinking: “I’m being so clear. Why can’t they hear me?”“Are they not listening?”“Is it them... or is it me?” And then the spiral: “Why is this...

🧠 What’s Inside Why pronouncing names right is SO important How Zohran Mamdani’s mustard-yellow, biryani-eating campaign rewrote NYC politics What leaders can learn from authenticity, branding, and leading out loud 🎤 Louder For The People In The Back "It's Mamdani - M-A-M-D-A-N-I - and I reminded him not just for me...but for all of us who were denied the basic dignity of being addressed by the name we were given. Because what it speaks to is the inability to understand that we too, are New...