Mackenzie Miller

I attribute my success to my parents, honestly, my mom especially. My mom was a hair and makeup artist from when she was young till she had me, and then completely transitioned and went back to nursing school when she was older. Now she's a charge nurse. She really inspires me because she's always told me, you know, just because you feel one way, if you change your mind, you can always go back and find new things. She's really instilled in me, like, do what you love, not what you have to do. Never take a career just because you like the paycheck, do it because you actually love it, because you find an actual passion for it, and it will reflect. She really inspired me to figure out what I like, try out a bunch of different things until I found my niche. She was like, if you need to take time, you graduated with time, take some time, work, figure out what you really want to do before you commit to it. She's a really hard-working, strong woman. She's amazing, and she really does inspire me. She's a single mom, she had a head injury when she was 45 in the middle of going to nursing school, and then she had to drop out because she fell down two flights of stairs, broke her head open. It was terrible. She went back to nursing school and forgot what she did, what she needed to do, she really figured it out, and she's inspirational to me.

The best piece of advice I received is actually a quote from Maya Angelou, and my boss told me this a couple months ago, and I've really held it with me. It was, people don't remember necessarily what you say, but how you make them feel. I've really taken that with me, and like, if you make people feel good, they really tend to remember you. Be kind.

I would definitely say, kind of what my mom's always told me, find your passion and stick with it, and if it changes, it changes. I've found many things that I've loved, and it's changed, but it's all helped me get to where I am now. My fashion, my theater, doing my work at the dealership made me more professional. Theater made me really able to be confident in speaking in front of people, and comfortable sharing myself on the internet, and my love for fashion just has made me love this job even more. All of those things together led me to social media, especially focusing in fashion. If I hadn't had taken all those different opportunities, I probably wouldn't be here.

I think the biggest challenge right now is there's a lot of people who have a lot of different ideas, not necessarily good or bad, but just different ideas, and really being able to combine everything into what the standard is has been really hard for me. We have a lot of different people who find that they want the brand to look this way, or to look that way, and it's like, well, we need to find a middle ground. That's been definitely challenging, but I've been able to kind of combine everybody's ideas of if they want to be more high fashion, luxurious, or more whimsical, fun, and make it so everybody's happy. The biggest opportunity is definitely social media. It's a new thing. Not everybody can do it, especially not people who aren't familiar with social media, because you need to know the apps to be able to use them. That's something that I found is really good for me, because I have grown up on social media, I know how to use social media, I've had my own personal accounts, so I can translate that to different brands. It's new, people are still getting into it, there's a lot of room for growth in the industry, I feel. Especially with fashion, I feel like it's been very strict on how people are presenting their brands, and brands are more leaning into whimsy and fun, and less like, oh, this needs to be perfect, and more like, let's have fun with it.

I really think being able to know your boundaries, being able to say yes or no, and feeling really headstrong in that, that's important to me, especially at work. Knowing, okay, I need to take time to do this right now, I need to take time to do this right now, knowing when's too much, that's super important. As well as kind of just always having an open mind. I've felt my parents really instilled in me to have an open mind, accept everybody for who they are. That's something that's really important to me, especially in my day-to-day at work when I see customers and stuff, always having an open mind. You don't know what everybody's going through.