Today we’d like to introduce you to Noah Love.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I was born and raised in Miami, Florida, but moved to New York in September of 2010. It was during the time in which I was modeling, and New York City had always been a part of the dream, the vision. I modeled here from 2010 to 2015, and during that time I was fortunate enough to build relationships and connections with industry leaders, which ultimately landed me a very interesting and propelling position with AMCO NYC, founded by my good friend Adriana. I started off with her as an intern, and that flourished into multiple roles within the organization over the span of what I believe was about 10 years.
During that time, I’d always had a passion for the fashion industry and modeling and the business of it all, and that led to me doing a lot of modeling coaching and consulting for other agencies. That ultimately led to me starting my agency in 2016, IA Models NYC, where I got a chance to work with black and brown models and models with disability. This just opened a world of opportunity for me. Everything from public speaking to mentorship, my entire process or my entire journey here in New York City has been an ever-evolving process of me learning and dreaming.
I also worked in corporate. I worked for Wells Fargo. I worked for GAP. I’ve worked for Children’s Place. I’ve worked retail for a very long time. I guess that is where I honed my people skills, but yeah, I’ve done the 9 to 5.
In 2018, I went completely solo, went headfirst into entrepreneurship, and I’ve been a full-time entrepreneur ever since. I launched Noah Love and Associates in 2016 alongside IA Models NYC, and those two kind of served each other, and it’s become what it is now. I’ve been fortunate enough to work with some really amazing people and some great opportunities, some really great publications, some amazing red carpets, and it’s just the beginning.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
This hasn’t been a smooth road, and if I’m being completely honest, my entire existence has been anything but smooth. I think some of the struggles were at the very beginning, really identity, being able to embrace who I was as a person, as a black man, as a gay man. Being able to accept what my story started off as, who my parents were, who my family was, and where I came from, that was the first hurdle for me and being able to embrace who I am and who I was becoming.
As far as my career goes, it hasn’t been easy for a multitude of reasons, but more so than anything, I think I was in my own head a lot of the time. I was overthinking, I was considering other people’s feelings too often, and I was questioning my own faith. I was questioning my relationship with God, and again, that kind of goes back to the external validation that I was seeking. I think life got a little bit more beautiful, a little easier, a bit more progressive when I locked in to trusting my vision, trusting my relationship with God, and believing what I was feeling, believing what I was seeing, believing what I was dreaming. I know most people are using the word “delusional,” but I think it’s a space in which I got to where I believed the vision that I would wake up to, that I would go to sleep thinking about. I believed what life could be and should be, and I rejected, in all honesty, what reality was telling me it was.
Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
Noah Love and Associates started off as a necessity. Our practice, our firm, our agency, serves communities, leaders, individuals, creatives, artists who, at the very beginning of this, looked like me, sounded like me, and came from the places that I came from. I wanted to make sure that the stories that were being told were owned by the individuals that were living those stories or writing those stories. Noah Love and Associates represents community. It represents advocacy. Our work is directly entangled in outreach and legacy building. We are solely focused on the continuation of evolving stories.
I think what sets us apart, what sets me apart, what sets my team apart from other agencies, other companies that do what we do or exist in the same space that we do, is that I care about the visionary first. We care about why this individual created or why this business exists. We care and we serve first the visionary, and that directly allows for the vision to serve its community, to serve its consumers, to serve its demographic. We’re not worried about making a dollar. We aren’t concerned about the competitive strengths. We’re not concerned about what the next person is doing. We’re more so concerned about how do we continuously serve the community that you started creating? That’s branched out obviously into a multitude of things, but that’s at the core work of what we do. That also leans into our ideology that who you are, what you come from, what you’ve created matters, thus meaning your name matters, your story matters, your why matters.
Are there any important lessons you’ve learned that you can share with us?
I think the most important lesson that I’ve learned (and, obviously, this changes, I think, year to year or as you grow as a person) was to trust my intuition, to trust my internal voice. I think, for me specifically, that lesson was so important because I’ve grown so much. I’ve seen enough and I learned enough about me that I trust my internal voice. My internal voice is always echoing the vision. It is always moving me closer to the dream, always moving me further in the right direction. My internal voice, my internal compass, if you will, will not allow me to feel small. My internal voice will not allow me to question my relationship with God. My internal voice reminds me of how much I am loved, how capable I am, how strong my team is, how big and beautiful my life is.
It took a long time to build. It took a long time for me to unlearn the negative things that I learned about myself. I should say it took me a long time to uproot all of the negativity that was seated in me. I had to pull all of that up out of me, and it took a very long time. Now that I’m in a space where I am surrounded by nothing but love and positivity and assurance, my internal voice echoes that. I think that’s probably my most important lesson to date right now: to trust my internal voice, because he is always leading me in the right direction. He is always leading me back toward God.
Contact Info:
- Website: [email protected]
- Instagram: https://Instagram.com/iamnoahlove
