Nadia Adan I apologize for being a few minutes late for the interview. The 33-year-old businessman writes that he has a good excuse, as he has just put his supercar, a Ford Mustang 2.3 Ecoboost 2019, up for sale. lisa brady.
A natural saleswoman, Nadia is the only female owner of a car showroom in Ireland. Undoubtedly the most attractive, she has also proven herself to be nothing short of a revolutionary in the market.
Her most recent customer spotted the flash wheel in an Instagram post last week and purchased it. In fact, Nadia has amassed a sizable fan base since taking the plunge and quitting her stockbroking job just before the pandemic to launch her own luxury used car business, Ashford Motors, in County Wicklow. are collecting.
By promoting her cars with saucy and revealing videos, Nadia has become a social media sensation, amassing 180,000 followers on TikTok and 80,000 followers on Instagram. There are even fans waiting for her inside her compound.
For example, we met on Valentine's Day. One fan then traveled all the way from County Clare with her mother to send flowers to her loved one. “Another customer who bought a car from me wanted to meet me and she came with her two sons. It's frustrating,” she laughed.
Although she doesn't take flattery too seriously, she's too smart not to use her beauty and wit to attract a primarily male customer base. Because Nadia is a businesswoman at heart and she has worked hard to get to where she is today.
Her success is even more impressive considering her tragic childhood. Born in Somalia in the early 1990s, she lived a glorious life with her pioneer mother until she was three years old, when the devastating Mogadishu war ravaged the world.
“My mother owned a cargo shipping company and went to Russia to lease aircraft. She worked with the United Nations to transport medical supplies to combat zones,” Nadia said. “She also ran her own tourism company and specialized in safaris. We were very wealthy and had a big house, expensive cars and a private driver.
“Then the war happened, the airspace was closed, and we lost everything overnight: our families, our jobs, our homes… everything.”
Her mother's priority was to get them out of Somalia alive, and like millions of others, they became refugees, traveling the country for years in search of a place to call home. I continued to do so.
“My mother always made education a priority for me and for English-speaking countries,” says Nadia.
refugee camp
The difficult journey to reach that place, what eventually became Ireland, was marked by danger and dire conditions. Traveling through Africa, the mother and daughter spent more than a year in a refugee camp, were imprisoned and even spent six weeks trekking through the Sahara Desert, a life-threatening journey.
“Think about parents forcing their children to drink urine to stay alive. It was terrible,” Nadia said. She was too young to have clear memories of her time and relied on conversations with her mother for her context.
“We were trafficked from country to country, one of our ships almost capsized, but thanks to money from my aunt in America we got fake passports. We ended up on O’Connell Street.”
Here they finally felt safe and received a warm welcome.
“Some people gave us a £100 note and told us where to go to get asylum. And within three months we received the papers, got a house and got a mother. I found a job. But times were different and there weren't many refugees here,'' says Nadia, reflecting on the current tensions surrounding immigration today.
“We don't have the infrastructure, I get that. People need to redirect their anger, but the system also needs to change,” she muses.
Nadia, who grew up in Firhouse, Dublin, remembers how her mother ended up having her own chauffeur and business, packing boxes at a factory in Walkinstown. She said: “We didn't have a car for years so she walked there and back and I didn't want anything. I was so happy.”
finance degree
Education was always a priority for her mother, Nadia said, and admitted it was a source of conflict between mother and daughter, which reached a boiling point when Nadia earned a degree in finance.
“I was determined to find a job, earn money and start having fun, but my mother was not interested in it at all,” Nadia recalls. Her mother was determined that her daughter would pursue a master's degree in finance from Trinity University, even if her grades didn't match up.
She ends up marching Nadia to the dean's office, hoping he will listen to their life story and give her a chance. Their unconventional tactics pay off, and after a summer of tutoring, Nadia is accepted into college and later beats out her classmates to win a job as a stock analyst at a prestigious company.
“The CFO said I was chosen because I had something that others didn't have, and he was strict,” Nadia remembers. “You can learn the rest from books.”
From here she turned to stockbroking, becoming the only woman in a “shark tank” of 18 men. Despite her difficult circumstances, she was not intimidated at all.
“My overall boss was also a woman, so maybe that helped,” she recalls. “But I never felt inferior or unequal in the role. It was a very professional environment.”
It was here that Nadia developed her love of cars and was surrounded by men driving top-of-the-line motors. “She had a fancy job and now she wanted a fancy car,” she said with a shrug. She said, “I bought a 2008 3 Series BMW Coupe. I loved fast, expensive cars.”
Coincidentally, this car introduces Nadia into the car trade, and she ends up selling it for a profit during her lunch break.
“I had a trade-in, but it was a crappy deal, so I decided to sell it myself,” she says. “I made a few pounds and I wanted to do it again. So I bought a car, drove it for a few months, sold it and made a little money, and that's how it started.”
leap of faith
Nadia began sourcing cars from a wide range of locations and building trust with dealers. And so in January 2020, she decided to take the plunge and quit her job and focus on her passion of selling cars.
“I took a lease on a garden in Wicklow and put some of the cheap cars that were on sale there,” she says. “I didn't even have an office. I worked in a Jeep.”
Just two months later, the pandemic began. For a moment, Nadia thought she was game over. She said, “She thought, how do I get people to know who I am? How do I meet customers? Then I pivoted to Instagram and everything changed.”
What started as a reel of cars in a garage turned into a lucrative sales platform as Nadia sold Bentleys on social media. “I started investing in more cinematic videography, but then I realized that while my customer base was growing, it wasn't enough,” she says.
While her car was attracting attention, something was missing: Nadia herself. Nadia discovered the power of TikTok during lockdown and she jumped on board.
“I started shooting fun videos,” she shrugs. “I crouched down near the car and viewers had to guess the model. I wore a low-cut top, which sounds silly, but it worked. People wondered what to make of me. I didn't know.
“They put me in the glamor model box, and that was fine, but I wasn't. I was a business woman, I was educated, I could speak, and I’m also showing my breasts,” she says candidly.
Nadia, who found herself in another male-dominated business, says navigating the field as a woman was even more difficult. She has even had her competitors try to devalue her products and block her on social media. “I feel like I have to prove myself five times more than men,” she says.
Nadia takes an empowering perspective on the idea that her marketing is exploitative of women and harkens back to the days of youth magazines and more toxic masculinity.
“There's a crucial difference. Back then, men made those decisions. Today, I'm the one who made the choice to wear skimpy clothes to sell cars. I'm the boss.” she says proudly.
In fact, Nadia has no qualms about highlighting her beauty and curves to attract business attention, but there's substance behind her style.
sex sells
“Sex definitely sells,” she admits. “But if my business was crap, I would have left. I've done a tremendous amount of grafting to make sure the business is solid so I can get what I want. There's no rulebook for this, or if there is, I've never seen one. But if it doesn't deliver from a business perspective, it falls apart.”
Come to think of it, there is a lot of vandalism. But Nadia, who never misses an opportunity, has a fresh approach to dealing with it. “The first time she was trolled, she was very upset,” she says. “I think it was something along the lines of, ‘You guys are taking women back 100 years.’ It was awful.
“But I've learned that trolling is a viral moment because if someone says something really stupid to me, I'm now going to respond with a funny video. People love it.”
“It's men who comment on my looks. They might say things like, 'You're an asshole,' or 'You have daddy issues,' or something like that.” Women may hate you on the other side of the screen for a while, but then all of a sudden they're supporting you,” she observes. “They are my biggest supporters in that sense.”
Nadia receives her deposit on Revolut and sees her sales on Instagram. “If you don't have a social media presence as a garage, it's going to disappear pretty quickly,” she predicts. “I'm in an industrial park, but if I don't stand out online, no one will find me.
“But you can sell an Aston Martin to a guy in America, or you can sell an €80,000 R8 with a 10-second TikTok video, and it won't cost you anything,” she laughs. “The fact that I'm a woman is an opportunity in this game. At the end of the day, my content is made for men, and they certainly like boobs and they like cars. It's very simple marketing. .”
Nadia's wit and the fun that is evident in her online content has earned her a legion of fans, along with the fact that she is ideally suited to land some shiny promotional opportunities. She expertly completed a TikTok series with influencers such as Eric Roberts, Garron Noone and Black Paddy, and even the search for new staff members will be formatted in an online Dragon's Den-style video series is.
“What you watch for when selling a car is really important,” she says. “Cars sell naturally. It's important to build relationships with customers through the screen.”
Nadia concludes our chat with some sage advice on entrepreneurship.
“If you believe in yourself, take risks, and are good at what you do, you can bring to market what you want. There's no need. I don't know too much technicality about it, but that's fine. I'm not here to put oil under my nails.”
Photo: Nadia Adan, owner of Ashford Motors. (Photo: Fran Veer)
