Meet Isabella Jaimie of Take the World

Today we’d like to introduce you to Isabella Jaimie.

So, before we jump into specific questions, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
I was born in Queens to Colombian parents, but I was shuffled off to North Carolina right around my fourth birthday. It was in North Carolina that I realized how much I needed to express my ideas and emotion through art. Whether it was through dancing, music, acting, travel or fashion. When I was a toddler, my family would take me out to restaurants with live music, and I’d hop up from my seat and start dancing. They knew before I did that if I heard music, I needed to move with the beat. Music has been integral to me, and it’s been my family that introduced me to the genres that I enjoy the most. At a local diner, I would always hear this one song, and I asked my aunt if she knew it. The song was “Tequila” by The Champs, but she misunderstood and introduced me to one of my idols: Sharika. After that, I’d sing along to every new Sharika song, and I taught myself to belly-dance by watching her videos.

As I got older, I went through my dad’s CD collection, a mixture of hard rock like The Eagles, classical music from composers like Tchaikovsky, Mozart and Beethoven, Vallenato bands from Colombia, and the works of Andrew Lloyd Webber. This is where I fell in love with Sarah Brightman’s voice, and just like Sharika, she became and inspiration for me, and I began teaching myself to sing from her style of opera. I knew I couldn’t learn everything from watching music videos and listening to CD’s, and my parents knew that too. While my mother wanted me to take self-defense classes, I begged her to enroll me into ballet. I started with ballet and jazz dance in formal education, but I continued to self-teach other styles the way I had been doing it.

After a few years, I got to see a few live performances of shows in New York. But, one had a profound impact on me. I was lucky enough to see a live performance of “The Phantom of the Opera” as a Christmas gift. That show made me realize I didn’t just want to sing or dance, but I wanted to act. Coming back from that, I started to pay more attention to the shows, movies, and theatre I watched. My eyes tracked how the performers in television and film moved and spoke. It didn’t matter the subject of the piece but became important was how it was conveyed. I became fascinated with the world around me, good or bad, dark or light. The content was engaging and lead me to researching all kinds of subjects, from psychology to criminality to history to language. I found that I didn’t just want to act, but I wanted to write. I wanted to put the subjects I learned into my own work and see it performed. But, I also wanted to learn more, and to do that, I needed to see and experience more.

My household had a mixture of Spanish and English, and although I lost my ability to speak Spanish as perfectly as my parents do because of the judgment I would face from others decades ago in North Carolina… I never lost my ability to understand what was being said. From a young age, my parents instilled an interest in traveling. When my father had a three-day business trip in Europe, my mother decided to save up and spend three weeks touring Italy, France, and England. I was exposed to different styles and modes of art. We would visit art and history museums, and I would learn as much as I could. My mom entrusted me with the itinerary, and we went to monuments that I wanted to visit, except the Catacombs in Paris. My parents thought I was too young for such macabre sights.

Then came my interest in fashion. I have an aunt that works in the fashion industry in New York. As a child, I’d emulate her and start experiment with my clothing, wearing cute cabbie hats and cutting up shirts and jeans. I started making a few pieces of jewelry out of rubber bands and thread, and it caught on enough that I was selling some in school. The staff told me that was against policy, but I continued, making my own little black market. After enlisting a few friends for a share of the profits, we were taking orders and selling for a quarter a piece. We eventually got broken up by the school, and after all of it, I just about broke even. However, it did let me know people liked my ideas and that I might have a mind for business. Again, my parents and I knew I couldn’t learn everything on my own. So, I wanted to go to a school that would give me the opportunity to further develop each of my interests.

I studied at New York University, where I achieved a degree at the Tisch School of the Arts. My course work helped me learn more and more about my passions and even allowed me to travel to Europe once again. I studied abroad over a summer and then spent some time visiting 27 countries. That trip awakened a wanderlust, and when I returned back to New York, my boyfriend and I built out a cheap construction van into a camper, one that we still use to travel across the United States. Besides my business, I maintain a portfolio of photography based on character concepts and ideas. I’ve been combining fashion and curated styles with short stories I’ve written. Sometimes, I’ll have the story and design a photoshoot for it, and other times, I’m being sitting down editing the photos from some other session and the character forms in my head. I occasionally sing and dance, as well as speak about the things I care about.

Currently, I’m working on a series of projects that include much more of my acting and writing within it, as well as my love for fashion and film. I believe all these different concepts form who I am today, from singing and dancing as a kid up to all the courses I took in college, and it’s these concepts I want to showcase in my work. My business is focused on helping small business and creatives as much as I can, with the skills and tools at my disposal. I want to use my knowledge and experiences as much as I can, creative or otherwise. I’m a true master of none, but I am also a Jaimie of all trades.

We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
It has not been the smoothest of roads, and I’ve faced quite a few challenges actually. Over the past two years, I’ve been working on the framework for a small business, Take the World. Neither my partner or I have an extensive background in business, so I had signed up for a retreat focused on analyzing what I could fix to help me in designing a business plan and building up the foundation for what we want to do. I thought I had received some good points and I went back to work.

Earlier this year, I found out that the organizer of that event lifted my small business plan and ideas, along with the language and talking points I had used on the initial website I showed her. I’m unsure as to why they went this route, considering they already had a larger online presence and already established business, but with every challenge comes a lesson. For this particular challenge, I learned to be careful with what information I entrusted to people; even if I pay someone for a service, they only need to know as much to get their job done.

I was initially devastated by what they did, but after going over what they put together, I realized it didn’t even match with what I wanted my business to be. They may have used my language and idea, but everything else wasn’t lining up, especially the price tag. I also learned to not be quiet when this sort of thing happens – because it happens more often than we think – and if a fellow creator or businessperson can relate, it’s at least something to bond over. I stand up for the little guy – because I am one myself. And that’s what’s most important to me. Nobody can take what was never theirs to begin with – and I realized after the initial heartbreak because thankfully, they truly didn’t understand what I was trying to do.

The goal for Take the World was to consolidate resources, information, and connections for projects and creatives, and I didn’t want to charge people exorbitant fees for this. Instead, I wanted to develop a space that was available and accessible to everyone. A low cost of entry opens the creative industry to more people who may not have had the opportunities that I was able to enjoy. Even if I ended up not enriching myself, I can find comfort in helping others. I wanted collaboration over competition, not to compete and play dirty. I realized how necessary what I initially wanted to do is and decided to rebrand and redirect my attention to specific items on the to-do list. The website is currently undergoing a complete makeover for a proper launch sometime in 2021.

So, while I did face this huge obstacle, it unintentionally ended up with me finding exactly what I wanted to do and how to do it – and it ended up igniting a fiery passion to do more with conviction from my friends and family who saw the same thing I did. It saved and solidified what I already had. With that – it became worth it. Even if it was kind of horrible at the beginning. It made me realize what I wanted was a dream much bigger than myself or any idea theft could be. I figured, if my idea was good enough to steal, then it was good enough for me to keep going and actualize my own vision.

We’d love to hear more about your work and what you are currently focused on. What else should we know?
I think it’s important to use art as a tool to inform others – and to inspire others to love learning. I also love how I am adamant about that. I want my work to stand for something more than aesthetics. And I hope to do this to help others showcase their own passions, connect with their ancestry, learn about the reality we live in, and overall become more open-minded and compassionate people.

My business is aimed at developing content for small businesses, developing their brands, and creating a digital footprint for them. We don’t just want to make content with the intention of selling something to clients that will fall out of love with the product, but we want businesses to be able to connect with their audiences and find honest connections between the owners, employees, and customers.

For my personal career, I am an actress and writer with some (ultra) petite modeling on the side. I like to do what I can and use my skills when I can, so if I get hired to sing or dance, I can do that too – but for the most part, I’m an actress and writer. I try my best to create art authentically, both personally and for my business. Sometimes social media is detrimental to creatives, and people put out work that doesn’t resonate with them and is more so to flex or sell something they don’t even use.

Often, the art I try to make is pulled from my own experiences and intensive research so that it is not only truthful but accurate. I can create authentically using my own emotions, education, and research that I do. I try to be as honest as possible – even if my work can have absurdist elements within the writing. I also am proud of my past as an activist, as I try to inject bits of social justice concepts within my work as well. I hope that my work speaks to people in a way that will inspire them to get informed and use their own creativity and learn to love learning.

So, what’s next? Any big plans?
While still putting in for roles and writing up scenes, I’m also building my business right now and doing my best to stay sane and afloat. As a business, we are working to redefine ourselves, our image, and our brand. This includes building up our portfolio with some smaller projects as well as educating ourselves in ways to better assist our clients. We’re taking courses and learning as much as we can to truly be able to bring abundance to our clientele. Our focus is to make their lives easier as they may not have the time, availability, or access to the resources that we do. Our dream is to be able to level the playing field for everybody – so we know that our education, resources, and opportunities need to be put to good use and that’s currently what we’re working on.

Helping one person might satisfy us for a bit, but our job wouldn’t be done until we could help as many as possible. We’re aimed at using my skills and talents to get a well-rounded perspective, building up unique styles for small businesses, and help in manifesting the reality we want. Our future plans are to help as many people as possible, as well as find success by being conscious creatives. And if we get to explore different cultures, experiences, and places along the way, it’d be even better. We want everybody to be able to Take The World.

Contact Info:

• Website: isabellajaimie.com
• Email: [email protected] || [email protected]
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/isabellajaimie/ | https://www.instagram.com/taketheworld/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/IsabellaJaimie | https://www.facebook.com/TakeTheWorldCo

Image Credit:
K.M. Keeling, Priscilla Mancilla

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