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It's beyond not taking it personal. It's understanding what the marketplace needs.

It was a dark alley one night. There was a Benjamin involved. Couple ventures. He was doing a drive-by. I said, bitch, step aside. That's my man.

We don't have an option. Sorry. It's either my way or the fucking highway. So take a pick. So you want to be on the highway? Go for it.

Wow, what an introduction. I want to clap for me. Wait, I'm curious who's going to come on now because I'm very excited about wanting to listen to all these, the guys that you just described. They sound like a big deal.

Well, when it comes to fashion, since I was 12 years old, it was something that I've always wanted to do, but it's been very challenging because coming from a background being Armenian, a transplant into the country when I was six years old and not being able to have the versatility to have the exposure and my family understanding what I really wanted to do.

They kept saying that it's an impossibility because I needed to do something that was more relatable to what they understood. not what I figured out that was my calling, that I wanted to be a part of, the world of. And getting beaten up and telling me that I'm not good enough and I'm never going to be successful I thought to myself, well, wait a minute.

Did you not bring us to America for all those opportunities? Now I want that opportunity. How is it that you took me out of my little village and then brought me all the way here? And now you're telling me I can't do it. Well, if I couldn't do it, you should have just kept me where I was because now that I'm here. I've got to figure out how to do it.

And if you can't help me how to figure it out, I guess I'm going to have to do the heavy lifting on that part too. So I just started embarking on the journey of wanting to be a fashion designer. And after 35 years of being in Beverly Hills... I'm still trying to figure out how to be a fashion designer. I mean, I've had my boutique for 35 years and a lot of people ask me, have you found success?

Do you feel like you know what success is? And I wonder if I've ever wanted the success in the capacity that they're asking me to question in. Because I think the success was when I decided what I wanted to do when I was 12 and embarking on the journey to be able to see my dreams come true in the capacity that I have. Am I successful? In a lot of ways, yes. Do I find that I'm at my success level?

Probably not because there's so much more to do. There's so much more you uncover. There's so much more that you inspire yourself to want to do. And then, of course, knowing how fast fashion changes, right? And keeping up with the trends, the colors, the styles, the fit, and being a world renowned, there's so many different markets that you have to tap into.

You're thinking to yourself, this can't be it. There's more. And then every day you wake up, you're excited to have to do it again. And that's the journey that I'm still on. And having a boutique, a flagship store in Beverly Hills at Rodeo Drive for over 35 years. tells me that I've been doing it OK, but now I got to step it up and do a little better.

It's beyond not taking it personal. It's understanding what the marketplace needs and where they're at in order for you to be to put together for them. And in the different markets that we have internationally around the world, there's so much that we have access to, especially with The Internet, especially with all the tools that we have available to ourselves now, it's become even more versed.

And if you don't keep up, you fall off the face. And so you need to be able to make yourself relevant. One of the reasons why I started teaching, because I teach high school. Fashion. And one of the reasons why I started teaching is because I never had that growing up.

I thought, great, well, if you can't figure it out in high school because they give you all the academics, how do you know what you want to do when you get to college and you're wasting another two years trying to figure out what it is that you're calling it? So in high school, we created a whole fashion program where then you're able to at least see, because there's so many facets to fashion.

There's a business angle, there's the marketing, there's the design, there's the production. There's so many different, and any one of those businesses, can stand on their own entity. So it's not just fashion related. It's the computerization. It's the marketing. It's the social media. It's the advertising. It's the collection. It's the grading. It's the there's so many. And I thought, great.

So you want to be a business person. Why don't you run a fashion conglomerate? If you want to be a social media expert, then why don't you do social media for a fashion brand or start one? If you're going to do designing, you could design anything. architecture do an entire building alongside the construction on a body.

It's the same thing when you're doing on soil, the other one you're doing on a human figure. So having all those facets to an industry, that's one of the biggest, um, in the world. There's so many different places that when you're in high school, you've got the versatility to be able to go, Oh my God, I had no idea I could do that. I thought fashion was just, you design clothes.

I don't want to be a designer, but I'm really good at marketing and I can take what their vision is, what the, the brand is. And I, Give it exposure that it really needs. And by the time you get to college, and a lot of kids don't want to go to college these days because they've already started a business when they're 15. They started a business when they're 14 online.

So they're not looking to college to get a diploma to be able to get a job at a firm. They've got platforms online that they can sell, they can make, they can swap. There's so many different ways. They can trade, so many different things.

And I'm like, what a great opportunity that I never had growing up until I got to college to figure out that I needed to learn, get a degree and then go get a job versus what technology is now offering the youth, how they can take advantage of being able to know to do it and not just wait for the opportunity to bring it. So create your own and start it how you do.