We were lucky to catch up with Afra Nehal recently and have shared our conversation below.

Afra, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

In July of 2020, around the peak of Covid-19, My co-founder/roommate at the time were stuck in our apartment in San Francisco. The celebration of Eid was coming up, and neither of us could travel back home to celebrate Eid with our families. Stuck in the apartment, with a significant amount of zoom and virtual screen fatigue, we wanted to find a different way to celebrate with our loved ones from afar.

We started to look for creative ways to celebrate from afar. We created a few quirky, fun, colorful designs and decided to create greeting cards and sell them to our friends. Turns out, we sold 100 cards in 48 hours! It felt like we struck gold!

We realized when we shopped at any retail store (CVS, Target, etc) we never saw any of our holidays, our events, or even our skin tones represented. From there, we knew there was a gap in the market for fun & trendy greeting cards for minority holidays! The only greeting cards we saw were on Etsy with a minimalist touch – which didn’t encapsulate our personality or the uniqueness of the holidays!

Zoya and I decided to change that. Our mission became to showcase and celebrate the spectrum of diverse holidays and events across the globe. From Eid to Diwali, to Día de los Reyes & beyond. For each holiday, we contracted artists from each community to create artwork to showcase all of these holidays.

From there, we wanted to go beyond just greeting cards for the consumer market. Companies have also started to become aware of celebrating diversity within their own companies.

From there, we talked to company leaders, ERG leaders, and more to understand how we could help companies celebrate diversity within their companies.

That’s how we pivoted to Accent – a corporate gifting company that celebrates the modern workforce. We help companies build personalized and offline touch points by celebrating all holidays, identities, and occasions. Too many companies send generic swag, and call it a gift. Corporates don’t have the time for thoughtful gifting, but in order to build connections with remote and hybrid employees – it’s more important than ever!

With Accent, we’re going beyond artists from different communities. We source all of our gifts and products from small businesses that celebrate the holidays! We have a network of 400+ diverse small businesses now!

Now, we specialize in sending customized gifts for all types of events and bring an inclusive touch to our gifting experiences. We’ve helped our clients celebrate are Diwali, Eid, Lunar New Year, Hispanic Heritage Month, Black History Month, Pride Month, Mental Health Awareness Month, and Employee Appreciation Day, and so much more!

Afra, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I’m Afra, and I’m the co-founder & COO of Accent! I graduated from UT Austin in Architectural engineering. Prior to this, I was a client executive at IBM, as the youngest in healthcare and retail. Throughout college, I started a couple of e-commerce websites, selling customized tapestries when they were trendy back in 2016, beach towels and more.

I’ve always been crafty, and truly solve for my own problems. When I see something I like – but the price is just too high, I find unique ways to manufacture the same product with my own touch, to sell it to the price conscientious consumer.

I took the leap of faith and went full-time on Accent in February 2021. I decided it was time to finally make my side hustle into my main hustle! Since then, I’ve created over 5000+ gifts, worked with over 20+ corporate clients, and helped celebrate over 25 different holidays! My proudest accomplishment is that I’ve helped several hundred employees feel seen, and represented!

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

I had to re-learn how to handle rejection! In the startup world, rejection is constant, and very consistent. 99 times out of a 100, there will be rejection. I used to take rejection personally, and it would be a sign of defeat, where I would have to then pick myself back up, which took days. Too long if you’re running a startup.

I had to become fearless, and essentially forget about the response I would get when reaching out to potential clients, partners, etc. In order to deal with rejection, it had to become secondary for me. My main goal was to do the outreach, and do it multiple times.

It taught me how to cater my offerings, my story, my vision to people and how they would want to hear it!

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

We had to pivot from greeting cards for DTC to gift sets for B2B customers. It wasn’t easy, since DTC & B2B and two completely different markets. We had no idea going in!

At first, we tried to do a bit of both, where we created a two sided marketplace (similar to Etsy) where small businesses could host their products, and create an online store. We branded the marketplace as a one stop shop for cultural products, hoping both consumers and companies would use this platform.

Turns out, the small businesses on the platform were geared towards the consumers, and it did not appeal to our B2B customers – as they wanted customized items, and in bulk. Many of our small business vendors didn’t have the capacity to create their items in bulk.

We weighed the pros and cons of the DTC marketplace, and whether or not we should go all in on either a DTC strategy or a B2B. At the end of the day, we realized that as much as we love our price conscious consumer base, it wouldn’t be able to sustain Accent full time. It was a harsh realization, but a significant one. It helped us redirect our efforts in offering tailored, customized solutions for companies, using a similar network of small businesses to create these products.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.accentshop.co
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/accentshop.co/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/accentshop/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/accentshopco

Image Credits
Photo credit: Aamna Aamir