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- [00:00]
A
I just always feel like I want to accomplish something. And normally it just means I want to make something pretty. And then once we got into business, it's just like, that's. I was just, like, focused in and that's what I did. And learned how to make every kind of product you could make and get things overseas.
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B
Adria Laxson is a resilient, innovative and accomplished entrepreneur and the founder of Citibella. From launching a nationally recognized brand to expanding into multiple ventures, she has built a reputation for turning bold ideas into lasting success.
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A
I can't fit in this box. I'm not going to make it here in this box. Everybody cares. Everything you do. I just gave up, like, caring about that stuff. Not, like, became a hoodlum, but just becoming, I think, authentically me.
- [00:51]
B
My name is Rudy Moore, host of Living the Red Life Podcast, and I'm here to change the way you see your life in your earpiece every single week. If you're ready to start living the red life, ditch the blue pill. Take the red pill. Join me in wonderland and change your life. Welcome back to another episode of the Living youg Legacy Podcast, Red Life Edition. Joining me today is a maker of legacies. Before platforms, before social media, there was the wild, wild west, which was called the Interwebs. And by my cohort here, Adria Nicole Laxon is a fellow maestro of Dreamweaver, weaver of dreams.
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A
Yes.
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B
How does it feel to be in the future? Be amazingly disappointed?
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A
I mean, we spent so much time learning those programs and every once in a while I only know somebody can come up with something and I'm like, well, I could have done it better, but still, that took five seconds. So I think you won.
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B
Yeah. Welcome to the show.
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A
Thank you.
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B
We just finished filming your episode for Legacy Makers.
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A
Yes.
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B
Do you feel like you made legacies?
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A
Honestly, I feel like my whole life has been, you know, here and there, especially as an adult. But, yeah, a legacy maker, no doubt.
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B
Right on. What are we going to learn about you in your Legacy Makers episode?
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A
How I grew up part of the religious family. Part of it. I had fun and did creative things when I was younger. And then we get into business, and then once we got into business, it's just like that's. I was just, like, focused in and that's what I did. And learned how to make every kind of product you could make and get things overseas. Total designer. Now that we know all the creative suite.
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B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, somebody figured out the full toolkit.
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A
Oh, yeah.
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B
We crawled so everyone else could Run.
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A
Yes. I mean, it may even be that Dreamweaver was the first one where I was actually learning. Okay, okay. Up, up, up a folder. Up a folder.
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B
Oh, God.
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A
Because once you start. Yeah, that's how. I didn't know, man.
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B
You're already giving me severe PTSD of, like, subfolder structure is not going correctly. You're gonna break subdomains. Oh, no, that's. Yeah, but this is like all old school Talk. Like early 2000s, like pre Britney Spears.
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A
Internet people can't do the same thing nowadays. I know. It's like you source.
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B
I'm like, ah, good old HTML.
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A
Yes, yes.
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B
So talk about that desire to kind of break the rules and learn more. You kind of. That's kind of like your North Star. Till this day.
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A
I just always feel like I want to accomplish something. And normally it just means I want to make something pretty and then put it in a house, put it online. You know, I like if I.
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B
Even if it upsets you, you just want to make something pretty.
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A
Oh, it. It never upsets me. I get. If I'm in a really bad mood, I probably won't want to make something pretty. But, like, do you make anything at
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B
all when you're in a bad mood besides silence?
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A
I pay bills.
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B
Oh, that's good.
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A
Because I feel like I'm already going to, you know, not like this, so might as well. If I'm in a bad mood, pay bills.
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B
Yeah, I clean when I'm in a bad mood. I just. Yeah, I do the dis.
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A
I just get headphones on.
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B
Yeah, for sure. You lock in and then that's actually. That headphones on is when I'm editing, I'm like, completely locked in and everything needs to go away. Talk about your outfits and talk about how you're expressing yourself just beyond the norm.
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A
I think I started surprising people with the purple hair, but I don't even know how long that's been. Five years now, you know, and it.
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B
It.
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A
Purple fades kind of fast. Why? It's. Sometimes it's really purple and then, you know, a month later of. You wash it five times and it's quite a bit lighter.
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B
Right on.
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A
But I love doing it that way. I get. I get a lot of compliments and that kind of thing. So. Yeah. And then I, like, in the beginning, I was a big fan of Kate Spade and this outfit. You can tell. But I've always had my little. Little things to change the dress, like the. The belt and. And, you know, something that goes underneath it. And the jewelry has to be Changed up into something, you know, and I've even chained up, changed up shoes and they were chained up kind of. I have them here. That's awesome. Yeah. But I like to make my own things and definitely look like you didn't. Just you, you thought, you thought about that.
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B
Sure.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Well, what's your first memory? You putting one thing, the other thing together going, ah, it's pretty. Like, how old were you when you started like on your path?
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A
I remember liking, really liking clothes when I was younger and my mom actually said you were so like you didn't want to wear that. If you didn't want to wear that, you didn't wear that. So apparently I wanted to wear certain things from a very young age. But the only, the main thing I remember which kind of leads into this because I played outside all the time was this that we were in this shop and there was just this beautiful red dress and it was a little frilly. Yeah. And she got it for me and I don't know, something about that red dress just did it for, for me. Now it's gotta be more fabulous. And I used to put on like cute little boots with skirts to dance to music because I felt cool in my little skirt and boots.
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B
Oh, yeah. I put on massive hair gel in my hair and pretend I was Elvis Presley in front of my grandmother.
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A
I love that.
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B
Yeah. Talk about like you are a jack of all trades. Folks are take a good look at you and be like, ah, another. Another artist. No, dude, you, you, you're good with numbers. You're good with the, with the guff. Talk about the montage of awesome that you are.
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A
First of all, thank you. That's my pleasure. Well, I mostly learned all of that accounting for our. It was Ross's in my first store and it was just right down the street from our house. We sometimes would drive the four wheeler, but it wasn't built out back then. But I had to learn because the way that we were put into this business, I wouldn't have done it exactly like it was done. But I had to count every single penny. So I had to learn accounting to the T and make sure all the sales receipts, you know, reflected the gross and that kind of thing. And so I guess I started out with, I don't know, Kaleidoscope. Maybe. I can catch on to many things, but the program took me a while.
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B
Talk about being in the Kaleidoscope program. We didn't talk a lot about. We spoke about it briefly in the interview, but I made a note because I wanted to talk about this. What is this Kaleidoscope?
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A
It's the coolest class. It's like once you start getting into where they just are going to put you in honors courses, you know, they took away the creativity and they had us doing all kinds of things and learning all kinds of things that you wouldn't learn. And I remember several times I didn't take a geography class because they did the Kaleidoscope class instead. But these quizzes where you couldn't possibly figure out the answer unless you marked everything off the list, I can't even tell you. There was so much that they did for our creative brains, even just brainstorming. She wouldn't let us just be like, we had to have 20 pages of brainstorming. I brainstorm about everything now.
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B
It's funny that you mentioned brainstorming. I just bought myself a digital notepad, even though we all have iPhones or digital devices. But I want to separate myself from a device that is literally just on making money off of my eyeballs. I just want to return to paper. And it's just a simple device that feels like paper, writes like paper. And it just centers me in the moment.
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A
I know. I feel like that sometimes too. Especially in the beginning when I was
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B
like in, in Oklahoma, like which is which I, which I think is beautiful because I, I lived in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And then closer.
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A
It's beautiful.
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B
And I lived in Tulsa for a year and then Sperry, Oklahoma for another year.
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A
And it was, yeah.
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B
And coming from the Bay Area and it was just like California living to just serene Bible bell, like tradition.
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A
So you've been in the Bible Belt. Oh, yeah.
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B
I get it. I get it.
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A
Yeah.
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B
So what, what's that like for you? Coming from that, but just being colorful and like understanding the rules but not quite following them.
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A
Okay. So it started out where I was going to follow every rule that, that you, that the pastor taught me to follow. And, and you, you're supposed to get baptized. And so I kept getting baptized. And he was like, why are you getting baptized again? And I was like, I, I, I didn't do something that was very nice. And he was like, you don't have to do this every time you think you did something wrong. So I was trying so hard. Then my teenage years came. I had some bad influences. I had some great influences. It's just like for me, for some reason, I couldn't fit in that anymore. It was like, I can't fit in this box. I'm not going to make it here. In this box, everybody cares. Everything you do, even if you're posting on a Sunday morning because you're supposed to be at church, you know, it's a. So, so pretty much somebody actually asked me what happened to me because pretty much I just gave up like caring about that stuff. Not like became a hoodlum.
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B
No, no, no.
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A
But just becoming, I think authentically me.
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B
Part of my, part of my French here. But there's a well known book called Learn how not to Give a Fuck.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Written by a really well known entrepreneur.
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A
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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B
Just like here's how you just live your life without having to worry that it's not the end of the world and that everything is not about you and everything is about you. But just understand about energy and the divine and all that good fun stuff.
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A
Yeah. My mom would tell me, would say we were fighting, not fighting, but talking about something that bothered me or something like that, maybe at school. And she would tearfully say, you do know what, you know the only thing that matters is you're going to heaven. And I would be like, die this to get better.
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B
I completely hear you. But coming from the Miami noise, being born and raised here and then moving to a town where some folks have never left and they're just like Bible beating Christians. They're just like. It was just, I was so enamored by the fact it was almost like stumbling into a village that they've never seen technology. It was just like, wow, these people truly exist. Like, great.
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A
Where'd you go? Not like to Amish country, to Tulsa.
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B
But it was Tulsa and then Sperry. Yeah, it was.
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A
The countryside is a little different.
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B
It is a little different. I, I speak of it now. So, so, so in such a positive life. I was in a very toxic relationship at the moment as anyone is living in for a year. But I speak of it now, years later. And, and, and I can't help but, but, but feel, feel your energy from that past, but in a really divine, happy, healing way. It's been a very bizarre couple hours for me.
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A
I love that I needed to take
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B
that moment and just have that, that, that honesty with you on camera. Like I'm very familiar with what's happening energy wise, with the people, with creativity. A lot of folks out there are stuck or don't think they can get out when they really, they can. I don't know why I'm going on this tangent.
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A
Oh, I like it.
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B
You know what I mean? Like, it's really awesome that you are you, who you are and you just I've learned so much about you in your interview and that the only thing
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A
to fear is fear itself.
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B
Yeah. You come from a small town. I'm like, no, dude, that town is Tulsa. Oklahoma is cool. Oklahoma in general is cool.
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A
It is.
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B
All of it is cool.
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A
Is great.
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B
I mean, it's amazing energy and people in Oklahoma for all the wrong reasons. And it's like, dude, get out. Get your head out of the bay in Miami. There's a lot of pure magic happening in the center of this country that people need to enjoy express, which is what you're doing every day with your. What's it called? You've got a whole.
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A
I just call it Bella Bluff.
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B
You got a Bella Bluff.
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A
It's a place. And now Stone Bluff is a place, too.
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B
You've made a place which is kind of what's trying to land on.
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A
Yeah. I mean, I kept trying to. Yeah, we became a place. We put the place on the map again, for sure. But it backs up to the river. It is just so beautiful. I don't know how anybody else could fit any more cool things into one place, because that wildlife and then the bottom layer. I really want to just put a beach down there, but it's so beautiful green. And soon I will have purple fills for sure. Now it's going to take a little while, but I will all in due time.
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B
All in due time.
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A
And everything that we plant is evergreen. So very co. Yeah.
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B
I guess my point of my whole rant was I spent so much time and energy in the bay with folks and engineers and dreamweavers fabricating the platforms we use today, and all they've been trying to do is recreate the feeling I got living in Oklahoma.
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A
Yeah. And did you go through the phase where you thought, I could put that in parentheses and find somebody? You know, especially if you were looking for an error code or something like that, you could find that one form and you were like, thank you. You can't find those anymore?
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B
No. Those breadcrumbs you eat for yourself?
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A
Yeah, yeah.
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B
Right on. Oh, gosh. I feel like we can export so many other podcasts from this one. Gosh. How can people find you and list out all your dot coms and your social media handles so can obsess over you.
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A
Okay. Yeah, yeah. My social media, I started seeing like a hundred thousand people in, I think it was a month or a couple weeks, and I was like, whoa, that's really growing. But that one's Adrienne Nicole Laxon. And then Bella Bluff is Bella Bluff. Literally or do I have manner on that one?
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B
You never thought about taking on that Persona? Bella Bluff?
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A
I have shirts that say, and I almost brought them. Um, I'm. I'm just here at Bella, being Bella.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Or something like that.
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B
I feel like if you go, go to come to Bella Bluffs, it's yours. It's just like Bella Bluffs already sounds like Moulin Rouge. Something over the top, like a cabaret.
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A
I like that. Yeah.
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B
Like, I love what you're all about. But Bella Bluff should be an alter ego that you do in this location.
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A
Well, it's almost like I got an. An alter ego. Not. Trust me, it's not really. But I. One day when I was going through the divorce, said, you know, maybe I should just go by Adrienne Nicole and just drop the last name. Just be Adrienne Nicole. And the next day, I started getting emails under Adrienne Nicole. I started getting mail under Adrienne Nicole. People contact me, and I don't even know how they come up with Adrienne Nicole. And I like this Adrienne Nicole thing because I get L and GQ and all these really cool magazines, and it just says to Adrian Nicole, designer, like, I don't get those under my regular.
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B
That's awesome. But think about it. That you recognize the fact that under this different name now, you're being looked upon and differently. Exactly.
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A
Differently. And they know that now I've got that website and stuff. And then you can't. Like, when you go through it, you can't argue that I've. I've put my work in everywhere.
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B
Oh, yeah. That's. Folks like you and I that come from the old web understand that we've. We've set our stake. We've. We've made our claim. We own these dot com. And this is. These are our badges of honor. We are true artists. That does not exist.
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A
Yeah. And people will never learn that again. You know, AI. Oh, yeah.
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B
Embrace it or face it.
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A
But you need those people in technology because the ones that don't know that and have learned to push more buttons than we had to do. We had to learn the code.
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B
Oh, yeah.
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A
You know?
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B
Yeah. Which is why.
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A
Never going to be like that.
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B
Which is why with your brands and my brands is like, AI will come and go. We're just going to use AI to help us ascend and create new jobs for new folks that are just a little. A little more advanced than us. So. Yeah. Any closing comments? Anything that you want to wrap up with?
- [18:31]
A
You've been very fun today. I really appreciate it.
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B
My pleasure.
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A
Made it easy and it was great.
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B
Yeah. Right on. I hope you had a great time. And I'm going to go ahead and wrap it up for Inside Success. Yeah, that's Bella Bluff and I'm Rig Diars.
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A
Bye.
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B
Bye.