Quickly Sonia realized that she was good.
She called her parents and told them she was transferring to beauty school. She had zero idea what she was doing but she did it and it changed everything. Her friend looked at her and said, “you do it”. The night before the video was set to shoot the make-up artist cancelled. A friend of hers who was a music producer had written a song and asked Sonia if she could do the wardrobe for the video.
When she returned she was very much in to fashion. There was a long lost cousin that owned a textile mill in Medellin, Columbia and she wanted to learn about it. It is hard to stand up for what you want but she knew she was more of a free-spirit and art school just felt right. It was not a pretty conversation with her parents but she applied to the Minneapolis Institute of Art and Design and started in January. She had a brother in medical school, a sister in nursing school and Sonia decided she should bag University of Minnesota and apply to art school. She was in their fashion design program but it just did not feel right. Sonia graduated high school and ended up at University of Minnesota for a month. She was loving being involved in the local women’s clothing store but her parents said college was in her future and it was not a choice. She was focused on fashion, color, shape and form. She drove her bike down to the local shop, Feldmans Village Shop, where sooner than later she was helping with what they were putting in the store too. Sonia worked as soon as she could convince someone that she was older than she was. Having 5 kids in that generation is probably one of the reasons why. Always hustling without a clear career path. She sold exotic cars to doing bookkeeping. Her Mom did a variety of things and was always working. He ran the operation for a wholesale meat business. I was a tad younger but being cold and seeing snow was certainly a shock to the system. I was almost 7 when I moved from LA to Ann Arbor, Michigan. Sonia grew up in Miami and then at 10 she moved to Minnesota. She has created her own path with a line of beauty products that are not only aspirational they are affordable. Smart, scrappy, tenacious, hard working and as far I can tell she never stops. She said “you will love her, she’s your kind of girl.” My friend knows me well. My good friend kept telling me about Sonia.