A Passion for Fashion and Beauty with #GirlBoss Atiyah McDaniels
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Written by James Quinn
Atiyah McDaniels is the fashion icon that is going to not only take the world by storm, but also use her entrepreneurial skills to give back to the women and people she serves. Atiyah McDaniels is the founder and CEO Intense Beaute: a hair extension and lifestyle company that not only offer extensions for straightened and natural hair, but they also offer lace frontals, lace closures, clip-in extensions, and 10+ different hair textures to satisfy the needs of every woman. McDaniels makes sure that herself and the team she works with give customers authenticity, product knowledge, and women empowerment.
“Women empowerment comes in the form of purchasing hair” McDaniels explained. “A new hair-style can make a woman feel great, beautiful, and powerful. We really try to uplift women’s self-image and make them feel beautiful with our products.”
Intense Beaute began from personal struggles that McDaniels had gone through to achieve her goals. Atiyah McDaniels grew up around fashionable and artistic members. Her mom and aunt worked in the beauty industry and her father was a visual artist. With so much artistic and beauty influence, it seemed only inevitable that Atiyah would also make her stamp on the beauty industry as well. “My mom and aunt are naturally fashionable people,” McDaniels said. “When I see an item, I have a natural tendency to make it stylish and look good in a way that people would want to wear it.”
Atiyah McDaneils had worked at clothing retail stores and had gone to community college to pursue her goals of getting into the fashion industry. However, Atiyah grew dissatisfied with both her jobs and her extra-curricular education. She had grown tired of cleaning messy stores, and folding clothes. At the community college she had attended, Atiyah felt as if she was wasting her time not gaining the knowledge on business and marketing as she liked.
“The professors that taught me, didn’t have the day-to-day business experience that I believe I want and need; therefore I left and kept working.”
During that time, a personal crisis had happened when Atiyah had colored her hair and put in a relaxer which caused most of her straightened hair to fall out. By that point, Atiyah had no choice but to tend to her natural hair. While tending to her natural hair, Atiyah felt that her hair was healthier and getting more of the nourishment it needed to be bountiful again.
“From that day on I stopped using relaxers in my hair.” Atiyah said. “African American hair is healthier when you don’t put all of those chemicals and products in your hair.” It was through this experience of taking care of her natural hair that Atiyah started making hair extensions for her, and even started selling them.
“I am driven by the creative visions I have.” Atiyah answered when asked about how she develops her ideas. “I write down a lot of my ideas in a notebook and often go back to flesh out more and make them reality.”
On top of running her own business, Atiyah has three books related to her business endeavors in the beauty and fashion industry. While McDaniels has written three ebooks on business management, and resources to use for the beauty industry, her most popular and the one that’s in print is Change Your Mindset Change Your Life: Learn How to Manifest the Life You Want. Change Your Mindset was written during the hardships of last year’s pandemic. Atiyah was dealing with raising her newborn, some personal issues in her life, and struggling with whether or not she would continue her self-made business. It was through writing about her personal philosophy on how to conduct your own business that she was able to find the heart to continue Intense Beaute. The book takes the reader through the journey McDaniels had gone through to make her own business, and it all starts with changing your mindset.
“It was a way to uplift myself,” McDaniels says as we discussed her book. “It was a way for me to help myself and create a sisterhood for those that felt the same way I did. I wrote a chapter a day based off the topics I wanted to tackle from the chapter titles, and I kept it going until I was done.”
Atiyah McDaniels is not only an author, a CEO, and a mother, but she is also a lecturer on business management and beauty. McDaniels is currently running an online course called “A Boss Academy” in which she’ll take students through the step by step process of starting, maintaining, and thriving in being an entrepreneur.
McDaniels has also taken inspiration from other fashion and beauty companies such as Ming Lee of SnobLife studios for business conduct, and Fashion Nova for their “in your face” marketing strategies.
When asked about the future of Intense Beaute, Atiyah responded by saying “I don’t want to say too much, but I do plan on expanding Intense Beaute from a retail format to…something else.”
Here are some of the social media tags and website to all of Atiyah McDaniels’ work:
Instagram: @materialgirl
@bossacamdy
