Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Jashima Wadehra. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Jashima, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Risk taking is something we’re really interested in and we’d love to hear the story of a risk you’ve taken.
Instability and I are old friends. As a child of working immigrants turned entrepreneurs i’ve never known what a home with a salaried paycheck and health benefits looks like. I grew up oscillating on the pendulum of wealth and poverty. While this is a cycle I seek to end for myself and my future children, it made entrepreneurship the most obvious career path for me, a risk rich, non-linear, opportunity to make things with my hands and mind.
My father is a jeweler and my mother a designer, before they held these self-earned titles, my dad drove a yellow cab in New York City, sold newspapers and prepped vegetables at a restaurant, my mother did facials in their Rego park apartment while occasionally hosting on the local Indian television network. I grew up between the 1% of long Island, New York and the 49th worst public education system (at the time) in Arizona. I knew kids that had prom at Cipriani’s on 5th avenue and kids that worked four jobs to help their parents pay the bills, whose only meal was at school.
The greatest risk I would take in my adult life would be to voluntarily choose a pathless career, no guidebook, no minimum wage, no set of tests to give me accreditations that would make me a more viable candidate. The risk of entrepreneurship. My parents like many, wished ease for me, they wished the knowledge i’d acquired in the school districts they bled to pay taxes for would equip me with the intelligence to choose stability, to choose predicability, to choose to not struggle.
I on the other hand, could not choose anything besides entrepreneurship because I had never done anything linear, I had never passed a test by studying the way teachers taught us to, I had never gotten a job by traditional means, I had never done anything the “traditional” way. I only knew how to trust my intuition and suffer the consequences.
This lead to me starting my agency, Ode Consulting, straight out of college during a global pandemic utilizing credit card debt and ambition. While I knew better than accruing debt as a means to business financing, I also knew I had no collateral, no family home to seek solace in while building, just student loans, and my gut. I had my lived experience.
I had spent the better part of high school and college working at varying companies from internships with Discover card to being an Elf at the mall Santa in Arizona to being a luxury automotive events assistant to being an assistant at medical malpractice and personal injury law firm. Every job taught me my strength; observing humans and understanding their needs to create opportunities, as well as amplifying my weaknesses; math and attention to detail. One thing led to another and I spent much of college as a freelance writer, everything from articles about sugaring for hair removal to sociopolitical dynamics and music.
Through writing I realized I loved helping other’s tell their stories, I loved articulating the same “it” factor that drew me to a subject to the public, I loved humanizing people I saw but didn’t see anywhere in the world. This obsession with documentation through media started very young for me, I’d read everything from shampoo bottles to the credits in every movie theatre, I was itching for familiarity or something that sparked curiosity, often this came in the form of noticing names that could be South Asian in environments I had never seen us in the west; film, music, tv and politics. Especially not in a post 9-11 America.
Was my affinity to people, to consumer and their psychology, to telling stories reason enough to tell them? I decided it was because I hadn’t seen my lived experience or qualitative data centered anywhere, It was time to do more than write.
It was time to use the lived experience, the marketing skills and the love for humans to start a creative and talent management agency. Ode was born out of a desire to support artists, immigrants and their children in retaining equity, earning money and centering their humanity. I wanted to scream from the rooftops that the most anti-colonial thing we can do is feel worthy of existing, of being compensated fairly, of choosing to document ourselves in a world that tells us our stories don’t matter.
The greatest risk i’ve ever taken is believing in myself, but because I do, you do.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
I am Jashima Wadehra, a proud Punjabi-New Yorker and founder of Ode, a creative strategy and talent management agency dedicated to building equity for underrepresented communities through art. Specializing in multicultural diaspora and subcontinent regions, Ode provides consulting, events, content, and talent management services to immigrant-owned brands, businesses, and artists historically overlooked.
My approach blends lived experience with data, ensuring art is marketed by those who understand its origins. After establishing the music division at browngirlmagazine.com, I founded Ode while concurrently, I served as the first woman podcast co-host and digital festival producer for Hip-Hop outlet Central Sauce, archived by the U.S. Library of Congress. My background includes covering over 300 artists, such as Sid Sriram and AR Rahman, through social media, editorial features, and events.
Recognizing gaps in professional support for South Asian artists, I drew from my experience in luxury automotive marketing, working with brands like Ferrari and Porsche, and applied those principles to the entertainment industry. Inspired by artists like Surinder Kaur, Nina Simone, Joseph Patel, and Selena Quintanilla, I launched Ode to document South Asian contributions to mainstream media and help artists retain ownership of their work.
Ode’s core team, composed of women of South Asian origins, has hired over 60 contractors from minority backgrounds. Representing various artists, we have been recognized in Business Insider’s “12 Black and Indigenous People of Color Agencies to Know” and achieved notable successes, such as curating influencers for “Get Out the Vote” campaigns and co-producing the Basement Bhangra Summerstage with DJ Rekha in 2022. Ode currently represents 20 artists in varying capacities from management to bookings and brand partnerships. Ode helped scale artist Avanti Nagral from 4,000 followers to nearly 850,000 subscribers and over 91 million views across platforms.
I curated VEVO’s AAPI Spotlight playlist. In May 2023, Ode produced a South Asians in the Music Industry mixer with Mass Appeal, featuring performances by Ode artists and attended by executives from Wasserman, Amazon, Audiomack, and Google. In September 2023, we produced Universal Music Canada’s first South Asian artist showcase, “Threads,” featuring Toronto artists and attended by over 300 industry professionals.
Recent projects include a writing camp with Kilometre Publishing, hosting Yung Singh’s Punjabi Garage short film screenings, and booking Raaginder’s performances at SXSW 2024, where I also served as a music mentor. Ode recently signed a six-figure distribution deal in North America to support South Asian artists.
As a thought leader, I participated in the inaugural KEYCHANGE US cohort and have spoken at events like the New York Jazz Festival, Mondo.NYC, and Canadian Music Week. I also spoke on a panel after Ava Duvernay’s “Origin” screening, discussing intersectionality in entertainment. I was also featured in Golden Voice’s official documentary, “Ascending,” that profiled South Asians on the 2023 lineup as a cultural expert, providing a sense on the grass roots experiences of the artists prior to their fame.
As an artist myself, I am set to release my first poetry book, “Valeti,” featuring poems in Punjabi, Hindi, and Urdu transliteration, in 2025.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
We had a client during the pandemic, we had done months of free work in good faith based on a familial introduction for this CPG food product. The founder was a father, middle-aged and full of rage. We had agreed on an extremely low per month fee for three months of work that entailed a full branding suite; colorways, logos, fonts, use cases, a full social media strategy with execution across accounts, product photography and a full website rebuild inclusive of a SEO diagnostic.
This client’s general mode of communication when pleased, displeased, confused or excited was aggressive screaming on calls, texts and emails. At the time, my co-founder and I decided that given he reserved compliments for phone calls and critiques for emails, keeping track of his feedback and changes was becoming difficult. In month two we submitted a deliverable four days late, this was the week of the 2020 election. We communicated the delay and apologized, with full accountability. The client proceeded to use profanity, berate us, and indicate he didn’t ask for the changes we had implemented ( though he did, several times, against our professional expertise). I zoomed out, and realized, I didn’t want to be the kind of person that allowed my co-founder and I to be abused or intimated by an older man and his word choice.
My co-founder and I decided to end our contract early, submit all our deliverables and assets and call it a day. We had done thousands of dollars in free labor by this point but none of it was worth the abuse. The client insisted we refund him the abissmal amount he had paid for two months and we refused. He proceeded to threaten and abuse us extensively over voicemail and email, and filed a case in small claims court. While this scared me, I had never been sued, it gave me an opportunity to sit in the reality of being a young woman that runs a business. Of saying, what are my values? what type of behavior do i endorse? what environment am i responsible for fostering for my then founder and other workers? It wasn’t about the money, it was about knowing that man would go on to abuse other young women, it was about setting the precedence for myself, and my nervous system that I am worthy of protecting myself , it just won’t be easy.
It is the times I have said no that have made me resilient, not the times No has been said to me.
What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?
Patience and education. Many of my clients were friends or digital community members from my time as a writer, I am a 100% beneficiary of word-of-mouth. This also meant that many of my clients as immigrants of children of immigrant small businesses had a limited understanding of marketing and talent management to begin with, they knew they needed “help.” This often meant we were educating while executing all at a relatively low cost, meaning we weren’t able to make our ends meet as a business and small clients were giving us the best they could. I was learning to provide services and they were learning what it meant to implement those services. My greatest joy and evidence of success is the year over year of return clients. While many of them did not originally understand brand strategy, drip campaigns, slow growth and intentional community building, they would reap the benefits weeks, months, sometimes even years later and then return to us.
We made it a point to educate all the businesses and artists we worked with far beyond the scope of our work, I wanted them to understand what they were signing up for, both with us at Ode and in general business. In the beginning the idea of reading contracts or being asked to sign documents or review proposals felt laborious and inaccessible to many of our clients until they built enough trust with us to realize, we were setting them up to leave us, and when they inevitably do, when our work is done for good or for the moment, they leave knowing more and knowing better.
I believe transparency, kindness and patience are the reason we’ve built a reputation for efficacy within our niche.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://odeto.co
- Instagram: @_odeto_, @jashimaw
