Hi. I’m Hadiyah Daché. You pronounce that ha-DEE-yuh DAH-shay. Hadiyah is of Swahili/Arabic origin and it means gift. I’m also a gift to work with! Daché is of ‘hood origin as it is a portmanteau of my father and mother’s names. Dawan + Chaché = Daché. And yes, they put this on my birth certificate.
I’m a Bay Area native who grew up in the tiny 2.5 square mile city of East Palo Alto. During childhood, my mother enrolled me in any and every enrichment program that kept children until at least 6:30pm. This means I was in a lot of art camps, computer camps (mainly building computers but sometimes coding), academic enrichment clubs hosted at Stanford University, community service groups, civic government programs, cultural exchange programs, theatre, band, dance and programs that facilitated general girlhood. I had mastered project management by the time I was 10.
I needed to keep your little mind occupied! You never had a chance to get into in any trouble because you were too busy.
My mom
At age 12—while I was a freshman in high school—I got my first job assisting in a local day care. That wasn’t legal working age in California but my mom was tired of me asking her for Jordan’s so I needed to make my own money. I got paid $50 every two weeks, under the table of course. Laughable today but big money to a 12-year-old. To my credit, I spent every dollar on building an impeccable sneaker collection that eventually landed me a gig at a sneaker “mecca”. More on that later. At 14, I got my first legal job working as a teen journalist for a site called OpenVoice. Think Gawker, but exclusively for teenagers. We did branded content for AOL chat rooms and some sponsorships with AT&T about 15 years before these things would become commonplace. I’ve always been an early adopter.
After graduating high school at 16, I was crushed when my mother wouldn’t let me attend Pratt to study Fashion Design (“If you think I’m sending my underaged daughter across the country by herself, you got another thing coming! Because I’m not moving back to Brooklyn so I don’t know what to tell you.”). So, I started working for a local non-profit as an Administrative Assistant part-time while also attending the local community college part-time. After I turned 18, I no longer had the fashion bug and applied to three HBCUs instead. When I received that large, thick envelope from Clark Atlanta University, I knew that’s the place I’d go despite not getting much scholarship money. It was the best decision I could’ve made. Mom did me a favor.
During undergraduate, I primarily worked in the arts and fashion industries. I worked as a sales associate at the iconic streetwear and sneaker boutique, Wish, in Little 5 Points and interned for both ARTPAPERS magazine and The Creatives Project. Music and entertainment gigs helped me pay tuition, though. I discovered blogging and social networks during my college years and frequently shared updates about shows I’d attend and new music artists I loved. This was my first foray into building a personal audience.
After graduation, I had a brief stint at home but I graduated during one of the worst economic times in the country since the Great Depression so I didn’t immediately have a job. My close friends from college convinced me to “spend a summer in New York City”. I got a gig house sitting for some tennis instructors in the Upper East Side that was only supposed to last 6 weeks. It didn’t pay but it gave me free housing. Those instructors decided to remain in the Hamptons until the following season which is how I ended up living in New York City rent-free for a year. I know, very lucky. But, it was New York City after all. I still needed a job.
I was still blogging during this time and a reader offered me a gig writing for a pretty big entertainment news site. The pay was almost nonexistent but it was something. Though that work history is now stained by the founder’s transgressions (he’s considered a forefather of rap but is currently hiding out in another country to avoid trial, use your context clues), I appreciate them for taking a real chance on me. Growing up, I was a really huge fan of VIBE magazine and Danyel Smith (who became Editor-In-Chief of the publication) so this felt a little like living a dream.
When I returned back to the Bay from NYC, I got a job grantwriting for my childhood school district. It’s not at all what I wanted to be doing but I still managed to bring in $2M over the course of two years. I left the world of education for startups and never looked back. You can read all of those details on the homepage here.
In 2018, I decided to try entrepreneurship because in 2016 I decided that I wanted to get an esthetician license. I never had any intentions on actually working as an esthetician. It’s something I thought would be a cool party trick; a little “hidden gem” about me, if you will. Jokes on me because that business is still going and I accidentally made a name for myself in the world of beauty.
The pandemic brought on the strange desire to attend graduate school. I enrolled at the University of Miami to complete their Master’s of Science in Skin Biology and Dermatological Sciences as a hybrid student. I know what you’re going to say but I would just like to gently remind you of paragraphs 2 and 9 above. Basically, I am the Lynn from Girlfriends of my friend group.
Other interesting facts: I’ve never had fried chicken in my life (I was raised pescatarian), I co-hosted a podcast for 5 years before everyone started having a podcast, I’m a performance artist in my spare time.
You can contact me at hadiyah.dache@gmail.com for more stories.
