Illustration: Kagan McLeod
Minding Our Business: A series on what it takes to work for yourself.
Growing up in Detroit, Mia Ray didn’t see anyone doing what she wanted to do: being an entrepreneur, specifically glamorous. So at 26, after working as a sales associate at a fashion boutique, she started a fashion and lifestyle blog to do just that. In about three years, she had amassed just under 5,000 followers; today, she has hundreds of thousands on her personal Instagram alone. However, her page is not just for marketing her products; she uses her platform as a tool to inspire other women, posting clips of herself discussing her generational wealth and sharing old videos from the beginning of her entrepreneurial journey, all with captions like “Stay focused on YOUR vision; no one else has to understand it.”
A year after starting his blog, Ray launched Glam-aholic Lifestyle, an affordable and luxury accessories brand, as an extension of his online content. His designs are monogrammed metallic totes, roomy toiletry bags, passport covers and travel sets for the glam girl on the go, and they sell out in seconds. In 2019, her brand had what she calls her “moment of overnight success,” even though it took her a difficult 13 years to get there. Suddenly, the brand’s metallic duffel bags were seen everywhere in airports across the country and shoppers were raising alarm bells to get their hands on travel sets before they sold out, but there was no press, celebrities. or TV – it was just the year all year. Her hard work began to pay off and her community turned her products into viral moments. This year, Ray is on track to generate $25 million in revenue. As a college dropout and single mother of two, she has had many setbacks, but little did she know that each one was setting her up for success and teaching her how to lean on her power.
What was your professional goal when you were starting out?
Being a great brand like Baby Phat. For as long as I can remember, Kimora Lee Simmons has been my role model, and I remember how I felt when she did the Baby Phat shopping, the winter coats with fur, and the feeling of being the glamourous girl on the road. . She wanted to be big and glamorous, a lifestyle brand that would set the world on fire. So what I’m currently doing was on my to-do map.
What was your biggest setback along the way?
Just the unknown, not knowing what he was doing. I’m a college dropout so technically I only have a high school education. No one where I came from or that I know was an entrepreneur, so trying to figure everything out on my own can be seen as a setback, but it really made me super strong. It made me so powerful to figure things out. Another “setback” was that my business exploded overnight after ten years in business. Imagine spending a decade trying to figure things out and wondering why things don’t work, and then one day it’s like, Boom. Not really knowing how to handle the huge demand that suddenly came up was a setback, but also something that helped me gain a lot of strength in where I am today.
How did you deal with it?
Those setbacks made me delve into thinking outside the box. Business is one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do in my life. It’s a lot of stress and anxiety, and it takes an emotional toll, but it really helped me grow my brand into the powerhouse I wanted it to be. Not just what my customers see, but everything that has been done behind the scenes in my business. I’ve done it all from shipping to marketing to photography. It has all made me a really explosive business woman.
Have you ever considered giving up?
OMG yes. I remember once I was on my knees crying looking at my PayPal account; I probably had like $200, and I remember praying like, what am I doing wrong? I remember asking my son’s father if he should get a job and he said yes. I took a nap, woke up and said, No, I won’t get a job. I will solve this. Whenever I wonder what I should do, I just collect my thoughts, compose myself, and get back to work.
What have the setbacks taught you now?
That I can do anything I set my mind to. If you had told me when I graduated from high school that this would be my life 20 years from now, I would have said: Girl, are you crazy? But now I feel like those setbacks taught me how to pivot and how to reevaluate. Sometimes people are afraid to rearrange their goals and sometimes life happens and it’s okay to change, move and then come back. I feel like that’s what my setbacks did for me. They taught me how to help others who have been through the same thing and they have taught me how powerful I really am.
Now you use social media as a tool to help other women in their own professional journeys. What inspired you to use your platform for that?
I wish I had someone like me. I didn’t have a mentor in my early days. I always say it’s just me, God and Google trying to figure this out, and if I can share or prevent a woman from experiencing the things I’ve experienced, why not share it? Because I want to be what I would like to have.
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