Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Paola Bradfield. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Paola, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear the story of how you went from this being just an idea to making it into something real.

A Life with Accent was born out of two things: my love for all things home&design and my love of sharing my experiences, stories and things I’ve learned. I was born and raised in Brazil, daughter of a single mother who struggled to make ends meet for years. Me, my brother and mom lived with my grandma, uncle and aunt under the same roof in a very small house. I had to share a bedroom with my mom and brother during most of my childhood. When my mom finally got a break and was able to afford buying our first home, I was ecstatic! I would finally have my own bedroom! Of course the house my mom bought needed so much work that we still had to wait 5 long years of slow remodeling to actually move in. During those years I did nothing but dream, plan and anticipate! Got myself a home design magazine subscription and helped my mom with many of the remodeling decisions. By the time we moved I was a teenager and an interior designer wannabe. Fast forward to my adulthood, I found myself married, pregnant and heavily nesting in our very small ranch house in northwest Georgia. Our home wasn’t my style, but thanks to all the inspiration and knowledge I had drawn from bloggers and DIYers everywhere on the internet, I was able to turn our little abode into the cutest place (using the smallest budget you can think of). Throughout the years I had many passions ranging from crafting to photography and even entrepreneurship. I had created multiple small businesses at that point, but grown tired of them after a while. Two years after my second child was born, I got a real job at a rug company. They originally hired me to do their videos since I have had experience with Youtube when I taught entrepreneurship online, but what I actually did the most, was setting beautiful sets and spaces to display their rugs for photography, and yes, I did their photography too.
After 5 years working in the same field I realized that I never got tired of creating beautiful spaces. By then, Instagram was on its peak and since I had just bought a brand new house, no better time to share this passion I had carried since childhood and that I never got tired of: A Life with Accent was then born. A place to share my journey of DIYing my way out of builder’s grade living, literally and figuratively. It looks and sounds like a diy and design account where I share inspiration for your home, but it’s much more than that. My goal is to build a community of brave women who embrace who they are and are not intimidated by the challenges they may face. When I show up with my Brazillian accent and share with them all the struggles I go through when tackling a big build I’ve never done before in my life, I hope to inspire them to try hard things and not be ashamed of who they are, where they came from and whether or not they may fail.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I’m a single mother of two beautiful kids and work a normal 9-5 job as a product photographer and videographer for a Japanese company.  I believe in the importance of sharing your gift to the world and working on your own passion projects outside of your regular job. I go to work to put food on the table and develop myself. I really enjoy what I do, all the learning opportunities and the people I work with, but I come alive when I have creative freedom and ownership over my own projects, eventually it will replace my 9-5, but in the meantime I truly enjoy both. A Life with Accent is a content hub for all things Home & Design. I offer inspiration and resources to help my community tackle their DIY projects and create a home that’s a true reflection of who they are. Most of my audience feels intimidated, overwhelmed and don’t know where to start. When they see me just starting a project on a whim, they realize it takes so little to actually get the ball rolling. That a big project is just a series of very small tasks done slowly day by day. I’m all for accepting help and knowing your limitations, no shame on that! But something about seeing a woman braving into the unknown and just starting is very empowering and makes them realize “if she can do it, I can too!” or “wait, that doesn’t look as complicated as I thought”. What sets me apart is not that I’m impeccable, but that I’m brave and have no shame in failing. I attempt big things, fail many times all the way through completion and everyone gets to watch, cheer me on, laugh, learn one or more things, but also celebrate the result in the end. I can’t begin to explain the feeling when I finished my daughter’s bedroom. It was my very first build and super complex. The whole journey was very rewarding. My daughter’s reaction was recorded during the process and I will never forget her amazement. I love that feeling of mission accomplished and dreams becoming reality. I hope it’s something she will carry with her through life.

We’d love to hear about how you keep in touch with clients.

One of the most important aspects of growing a community off of social media is gaining your audience’s attention and trust. Our attention span is each day shorter and there is so much noise on Instagram nowadays that it’s imperative to show the human behind the brand. People want to connect with people, not businesses. They go to social media for connection, entertainment and relationship. If your audience cannot relate to the human side of your brand, it will be really hard to build loyalty and trust. People buy from people they know, like and trust. Learning to communicate authentically on social media is the best way to attract not only clients, but raving fans.

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

Part of bringing humanity into your business is being able to show vulnerability. I had to unlearn to hide my lack, mistakes and imperfect projects. We often think (specially in the interior design arena) that everything needs to be perfect and flawless. That showing something incomplete will somehow damage your reputation, that if my audience sees I still have outdated light fixtures in my dining room, it reveals my lack of taste. The opposite is actually true. It’s a relief and refreshing for them to see that making a home takes time (and lots of money, no matter how frugal you try to be). More and more I see a trend in normalizing the imperfect. It feels more organic and you should capitalize on that. Too often we make excuses and complain about not having enough resources for this or that, but I say let’s get creative and leverage our limitations! Instead of saying “I can’t because I don’t have X” , say “What other way could I do this?”. There is so much possibility and creativity when we don’t have everything we need.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @alifewithaccent

Image Credits
“Paola’s cover photo credit: Tayla Lowe”