Today we’d like to introduce you to Manisha Nair.
Hi Manisha, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
When I was first asked to give my thoughts on entrepreneurship, my brain immediately went to the fact that I don’t think I can consider myself to be an entrepreneur. But maybe that’s because when someone says “entrepreneur”, I think of someone who has started one or more businesses and is focused on evolving them. I, on the other hand am in the midst of a few things, I’m a stylist, a content creator, a professional dancer, a Sr. Product Manager for an Austin-based startup, and most importantly a mom for a three year old little girl named Eila. And I wouldn’t change any of it.
I’m a first-generation Indian American. My parents are originally from Kerala, India and my younger sister and I were born in the suburbs of Chicago, IL. Growing up, my parents always emphasized the importance of school and studies, as most Indian parents do, or at least did at that time. But I had an affinity for two things: fashion styling and dance. Both of which were nurtured at different times, but only as hobbies and not as actual career paths. They wanted to make sure that we could make enough to lead the lives we wanted, and honestly, there was no representation of a successful fashion stylist or professional dancer of Indian descent, at that time especially, to prove that those career paths could provide that kind of result.
My love for dance came first. I was introduced to ballet and jazz at age 5, and then at 7, I started my training in Bharatanatyam. Throughout my adolescent years, I also learned various Indian folk dances. I also learned Carnatic vocals and sitar, but my heart always brought me back to dance.
My love for fashion styling wasn’t so clear cut, but it started with color and tailoring experiments. In high school, I found and rewore my dad’s clothes from the 70s and then found a summer job to pay for my fashion obsession because my parents refused to indulge in my desire for unnecessary amounts of trendy clothing (and I now thank them for not doing so).
I continued dancing in my last two years at Purdue University, but my major was focused on what could put me on a good career path. I was a CS and Math major with a minor in Philosophy.
After university, I started working at a boutique tech consulting firm that took me to DC. I hit a pause with dance because I had become so focused on work, but my fashion styling mind reignited and I started playing around with my wardrobe again because I now had an income to do so.
After two years of living in DC, my consulting life took me back to Chicago, and it was then that I had realized how much I missed dancing. I tried various Bollywood dance classes but nothing was quite what I was looking for. I assumed that I might never find something that felt right for me, so I continued to take whatever class I could just to keep dancing.
Three years into my consulting career, my company was bought by HP. It took me a little over a year, but I realized that the large corporate environment was not what I wanted. I found an intriguing data management consulting start-up that was exactly what I was looking for. I joined as employee #9 and immediately fell in love with the startup life.
My husband and I got married in 2009. We lived in Chicago for two years as I continued to work at the startup. And in 2011, he was given an opportunity to move to NYC for work, and I jumped on it.
I had always imagined what it might be like to live in NYC. The saying “concrete jungle where dreams are made of” is exactly what comes to mind as per my experience, but it didn’t apply to everyone that I had met there. A lot of people live there for a few years, wine and dine, but don’t get much out of it. My experience, however, was the total opposite. It was in NYC that I began to realize again my passions that I had sidelined – dance and fashion styling.
In January of 2013, I began teaching at a Bollywood fitness company called Doonya, and in October of 2013, I auditioned and joined The Sa Dance Company, an Indian classical, folk and contemporary dance company. Never in my life had I ever imagined that I would find an opportunity that would fill the void that the lack of dance had left, let alone get an opportunity to join a real company; I truly doubted that I was good enough. These opportunities forever changed my life.
Not only did Sa and Doonya bring dance back into my life, they also brought me dear friends who encouraged me to take a more serious approach with my fashion styling interest. I played in their closets and helped them get ready for auditions and TV interviews, and each time they’d nudge me a little more to change up my career path. But I was scared. I had been building a career path that was going well. How could I suddenly drop that and go back to scratch in a totally different environment?
In 2015, I decided to get some experience at a product company and joined a FinTech consortium funded by five banks. I got great experience as a product manager, but the environment was not what I was looking for.
During this time, my friends encouraged me to create an Instagram handle to post about my perspective on styling just to see where it would take me. It made me take my love for fashion styling more seriously. I met other people in the industry and networked at first just to connect and later to explore creative collaborations. It motivated me towards building something on my own to help support personal fashion styling, but I wasn’t sure in what way.
In 2017, my husband and I got an opportunity to move to Hong Kong through his job and we jumped at the chance. My mentor convinced me that this move was actually a good time to start building something if I wanted to pursue that route. So I did something that I never thought I’d do, I resigned from the career path that I had spent so long building. It was one of the hardest yet most freeing decisions I’ve ever made. I was excited to move to a new country to experience a new culture, meet new people, and flesh out my startup idea.
However, as they say “when it rains it pours”. Two weeks after I resigned, I found out I was pregnant. I ended up moving to Hong Kong in Dec. of 2017 trying to wrap my head around the idea that I was now about to build two things instead of one: a baby and a new career path in fashion styling. It was also extremely hard to leave my dance company as I had no idea how I was going to find dance in the same way again.
The three years we spent in Hong Kong were magical. My experience there was just as transformative for me as New York was, but in a much smaller time frame. It took a bit to find my footing both as an entrepreneur and a soon-to-be mom in a new country and culture. But our time there gave me experiences that I wouldn’t trade for anything. I began freelance writing for a large publishing company and conducted remote styling sessions. I gave birth to my little girl Eila in June of 2018, began creating my fashion styling startup venture in January of 2019, and in March of 2019, I launched Doonya Hong Kong with a friend with the hopes of bringing dance back into my life.
The startup endeavor was and still is all about helping women feel good about what they wear while maximizing their existing wardrobe. Both that and Doonya Hong Kong took loads of mental and emotional energy but going through the ups and downs was all worth it. Whether or not my venture was actually going to succeed or fail became irrelevant (though it never feels like that at the moment). I believed in what I was building and I had begun learning what it takes to actually create something like that.
In Jan of 2020, COVID hit Hong Kong. We paused Doonya HK, but it became a good time to hunker down on my startup work and focus further. Another silver lining was also that it was an opportunity for me to dance with Sa again, thanks to the creation of Zoom rehearsals. I can’t express how good that felt.
For us personally, life also decided that it was time to shift again. In March of 2020, my husband was offered an opportunity back in the US and we decided to move to Austin, TX. It was super bittersweet, but the move came at the right time. We had amazing friends and framily in Hong Kong, I had finally built a growing network there as well as a career path that was still fuzzy but was moving in the right direction. But overall, for what I was building, I knew that being in the US was the best place, and of all of the cities we considered, the evolution that Austin was going through (I should say boom) appealed to me and turned out to be a great place work-wise for my husband as well.
We left Hong Kong in Nov of 2020, and after what was the longest move ever, moved to our new home in Austin in March of 2021. Moving during a pandemic, especially globally, is not fun and I would never recommend it. But it was our time to do so, and I’m happy we did.
I don’t know what it was about the move back, but it gave me a renewed view on what I was doing with both my fashion styling startup endeavor and dance. I officially started experimenting with my styling services, taking on style clients, and doing more collaborations (video especially). The remote dance rehearsals continued on Zoom but it was nice to be in a closer time zone. Last but not least, I took on a Sr. Product Management role at an Austin-based start-up. It might sound like it’s a lot and at times it is, but I think there’s something to be said about mental diversification especially when it all finally aligns.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey has been a fairly smooth road?
It definitely hasn’t been! And if anyone tells you that starting something on your own is easy, dig deeper.
For me, there were loads of struggles but I think the ones that I encounter time and time again are self-doubt / lack of confidence and fear of the unknown.
Fear of the unknown is one that I get over more easily than the other because I always tell myself that I’ll never know if I don’t try. But there are definitely days when I don’t feel like putting energy into pushing myself over the hurdle. That said, when those days come, I give myself a moment to relax and sink into the mental laziness, but only to a point. And then remind myself of two things: why I’m doing what I’m doing, and if I don’t push myself, no one will. And then I get myself right back on the road, often right back on that hurdle so that I can quickly get over it.
Self-doubt / lack of confidence is a self-esteem issue that has plagued me for as long as I can remember. I’ve constantly had to have people remind me that I don’t actually lack the skills to do what I want but just need to be confident about it. That said, my confidence improves with experience. It’s almost as if I need it to prove to myself that yes, I can do it because I have done it before. But that shouldn’t be the case. So I am always working on it and hopefully getting better at owning what I can do and being confident in it even if I’m not the most experienced person in the room. I’m working on trusting myself.
One thing that helps me get over my fears and self-doubt is journaling for 15-20 minutes daily or at least a few times during the week. The habit took a while to form, but I use journaling to remove barriers from my mind and help free it for whatever I’m doing. It’s basically a form of meditation or mental exercise and next to dance it’s one of my favorite ways to decompress.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I do a lot of things. From a creative perspective, I’m known for fashion styling and dance. My IG handle used to be @ifstyledanced because I wanted to present what it would look like if style actually danced. But more specifically, I’m known for figuring out ways to rewear clothing as much as possible. Even the collaborations I’ve done more recently were because brands wanted me to showcase how many different ways each of their items could be worn. This brand identity took a while to build and perhaps longer with the move around the world, but it is something that I truly believe in. I am proud of being known for styling clothing in as many different ways as possible and displaying it at times via dance and the videos that I create to present the options.
Networking and finding a mentor can have such a positive impact on one’s life and career. Any advice?
Finding a mentor is hard, but I believe that everyone should find one or more.
There are four key things that I think are important when it comes to finding a mentor:
1. A mentor can be anyone you look up to, a teacher, a manager, a friend who has accomplished something that you want to do, whoever they are, they should inspire you in the area of your life where you need support and advice (career, academics, parenting, etc.)
2. You can have multiple mentors for the same area of your life for potentially opposing advice – this could give you more information to decide which path you want to pursue, or you can have different ones for different aspects of your life.
3. If they inspire you, ask if they can mentor you. It always seems weird to just ask for advice but one thing I’ve learned is that if you don’t ask, you won’t know. Also, there are a lot of people who want to be looked up to, but they’re not actually willing to connect or give advice on particular things. There might be a plethora of reasons for this, but it’s good to be aware of this so that you can find people who are willing to support.
4. Once you’ve connected, maintain the relationship. The amazing mentors will reach out to you and check-in, but it is your job to ensure that you stay in touch however frequently to keep the flow going. For me, all of my mentors are people whose career paths in conjunction with parenthood inspire me to pursue my own path. But I have to mention that they came to be my mentors because I reached out and asked each one of them for advice, even outrightly to be my mentor. And I check in with them in bi-annually, quarterly, or monthly depending on the situation.
Contact Info:
- Email: ifstyledanced@gmail.com
- Instagram: _manishanair_
Image Credits
I only have credits for the first image. Photographer: Ayelen Alcover (IG: @ayelenalcover) MUA: Iana Zinovieva (IG: @i.wish.mua)
