Exploring Life & Business with Cinzia Moniaci Quevedo

Today we’d like to introduce you to Cinzia Moniaci Quevedo.

Hi Cinzia, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I came to the US in 1996. I was living in Italy at the time, where I was born and raised, and I was about to get my Ph.D. in Communications. I had started working for a company based in Salt Lake City, Utah and I was invited to attend their business convention with my father for a week. At the convention, I met my current husband amongst 15000 people and we connected on our interest for growing the company internationally. He was from LA and we both shared a passion for music and had a band, He gave me one of his tapes and was very persistent in his courtship. It was the right place at the right time and we started an incredible journey together that led us to meet some incredible people, make a lot of great music, travel the world and eventually get married and have our wonderful daughter. I went back to Italy after discussing my thesis and completing my studies and I decided I was going to dive into the marketing of the company internationally. Rico had some valuable information since he was based in the US and he called me consistently to talk about compensation plans and marketing presentations.

My father had met him at the convention and when he sent me not one but two tickets to go visit him in LA for his Bday a couple of months later, I decided to go. He had written songs for me while we were long-distance and had planned a show with his band three days after I arrived. I ended up becoming the lead singer of the band shortly after as he discovered that I was a singer-songwriter as well and my music taste was very compatible to his. I felt like things were starting to shape up in a way I never could have expected and when we were sent to Paris to meet our producer and then to Bangkok to develop the business, it felt like everything was unfolding perfectly. Rico and I got back after working in Thailand for a few weeks and started playing shows with our band. We moved to a great apartment in the Marina and were busy living our dream. That is until the South East Asian markets, where we had developed most of our clientele, crashed. At that point, we had to set aside our music dream for a while while we started working on our new careers. I had a stint in the big corporate world until I decided to start my first online website selling Italian luxury brands. I was one of the first to have a resell website and I soon started my own showroom in DTLA. I then won a scholarship at FIDM based on Italian fashion and I created my handbag line Moni Moni, from my nickname in high school, my last name is Moniaci.

It became a true success, in a matter of a few months I had featured in several magazines and celebrities were paparazzied with my handbags and ended up on People and Allure, Vougue, Vanity Fair, Glamour, Marie Claire, etc. I had just had my daughter at the time and I was dividing my time between being a full-time mom with no outside help and running an international business. My husband went in finance and we both learnt a lot when I started selling privately to Asia, manufacturing in Italy and marketing in the US. Multitasking as a Mom and a CEO left little time for me to pursue music but as soon as our daughter started going to preschool, I was reminded that we had refused some serious deals and broke off with a manager that we felt had introduced another act right as he was finishing our negotiation for a major record deal. I decided it was time to get back in the music world again and I started writing a new album regularly with another musician I had met while on a playdate with our daughter, I was invited to dinner and before I knew it, we were in the studio recording while the girls did arts and crafts.

Soon after Rico joined as well and we started playing shows with our longtime friend and base player Tibor from Hungary. We loved our international band and I got us some shows and a couple of write-ups, we started playing pretty regularly in the local scene with our band perfectnines.com and then Covid hit. Rico and I had experienced working remotely for a long time and now our daughter, who got the same passion for music and plays piano, guitar, drums and sings like an angel., was attending school remotely. She had taken us to the United Nations as the only freshman invited to debate for Model UN and we got back right before the school closed.

In the meanwhile, the curve was softening in Italy and we decided to go there, where she attended school daily even if at evening hours and was even able to fulfill her duties as captain on the dance team while on Zoom for their daily practices. We got to Florence where I manufacture my handbags monimoni.com and enjoyed a time in which no tourists were there. It was a very changing time with elections in the US being broadcasted in Italy, I still remember us sending our vote for my DHL post and getting some cheers. As soon as it was time to leave again, as the infection rate started growing so we went back to Los Angeles, happy to reunite with our home and our pets. However, destiny had something else planned for us and we ended up leaving for five months on the island of Kauai after being in LA for only five days.

As always in my business career, I followed my instincts, my husband was doing real estate development in Manhattan Beach successfully and I had joined him in the design of a few units we invested in, as well as the design of brand new homes he and his partner built in our exclusive beach community. By then, I had created my own company for interior design as well, and I was running a pretty successful business as an influencer as well. I was collaborating with brands all over the world. And they sent me products, mainly clothing and accessories, even during the lockdown months. Living in Kauai was magical as we felt very safe since the island was closed early on to avoid the spread. We were able to live our lives freely and in nature.

We met many new friends, and I also 30 look around for properties to convince my husband and daughter to stay longer. In the process of searching for the right occasion, I started getting educated about the different properties and their need of being refreshed and redecorate it, in some cases also remodeled. I brought my fresh beach with an Italian flair approach to the design and soon after got the first property, We involved our partner we started investing in many more soon after, my vision was telling me the timing was of the essence, and we had to cherish that time. It proved to be the right way of thinking. We now have 25 Airbnb properties between Kauai and Malibu, California and we continue our quest to make them great while respecting the island’s rules and pace.

I put together a husband and wife team I had met while on a sunset swim, and then eventually we added more people as we grew the business, landscapers, cleaners, painters, construction workers, etc. Our operation is working full capacity now and our units in Kauai Koolkondo.com are constantly booked. We were able to pick the best locations and to get a lot of insights by living there. We feel like we have contributed to the island by giving work to many people and making vacation dreams come true for many many satisfied customers. While doing all this, I never stopped writing music and was able to record it even remotely with my producer collaborations.

I am soon ready to release my music and can’t wait for you to hear it! When we got back, we added two more homes in Malibu and I just completed their redesign. Koolkondo.com. My husband and I also started another company during the pandemic, we wanted to give everybody a chance to get away, and while we were dealing with luxury properties in Kawai, we realize that many millennials were struggling to find a safe and inexpensive way to travel around and live their experiences. We created Road House Travel and specifically for adventures and then lifers but of course, I wanted to give it an opportunity to be Instagram-friendly for all the ladies, so my design came in handy. I collaborated with three guys from Paris that we’re doing is in the US and we created the first prototypes. We currently have 12 vans in our fleet. For more information Roadhousetravel.com. We were just featured on Good Day Sacramento with an interview.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Along with the challenges of building a business from scratch and manufacturing and selling in different countries, I also had to endure a time in which the euro skyrocketed, making my handbags more expensive and driving up pricing putting me in a more niche market, I found solutions to increase the cachet of the product self by introducing celebrities to the brand and eventually collaborating with the new influencers. As musicians, it’s undeniable to say that we faced many challenges as well, when Rico and I were shopping for a record deal, we were also exposed to all the VH1 documentaries about production and record deals that had gone sour, and we were made aware that a few of our fellow bands actually got shelved or dropped and weren’t able to really build up their careers from there. Napster was coming out in that time, and musicians had very few rights to protect their intellectual property.

Another challenge that we faced in our career was even recently managing a team remotely for construction and remodeling as well as keeping the operation working smoothly, and the customer is continuing to give us excellent reviews. That requires constant check-in and attention to detail.. in conclusion, there are always many challenges when you embark in a business adventure or when you are an artist trying to market your art, you need to be incredibly resilient and also a visionary, trying to find new ways to reach the public and figure right now what the market is needing in a specific time. Do you need to be a Chamaeleon in the world of business to stay alive and to thrive.

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do??
Moni Moni luxury Italian in bags. Koolkondo luxury airbnbs.
Riadhousetravel customized vans rentals for travel and adventure.
PerfectNines alt rock band.