By CELINA MARIE PANALIGAN
Nina Pineda is anything but ordinary.
Having turned 15 just last September, Pineda is already managing her own online fashion business. She sells clothing items, from crop tops to flower crowns, on “Indiestructible” (http://shopindiestructible.com/), a site she started when she was 12.
Indiestructible describes itself as having been “created out of boredom” and as Pineda’s first stab at “dipping her toes into the mahoosive fashion/retail industry.”
Pineda started selling ballers she had designed herself. The booming online business is now run by Pineda and three others she had hired through online applications, and supervised by her mother. Pineda collaborates with fellow bloggers and the RX 93.1 student jocks to advertise her products. Some celebrities have also been spotted wearing her flower crowns.
Born and raised in Angeles City, Pampanga, Pineda has been enamored with the idea of entrepreneurship since she was a little girl. She attributes this to her parents who run their own businesses: Dad owns a resort in their hometown of Angeles while Mom is behind the successful C’ Italian Dining restaurant in Clark that has expanded to Ortigas. One of her favorite games as a child was playing mini “sari-sari store.”
Exposure to the Internet at a very young age also contributed to her growth as entrepreneur. Soon she was blogging.
Pineda was also to discover another passion: trying on different outfits every day. So she thought of combining all her passions: selling, fashion and blogging.
The homeschooled Pineda is currently taking up a fashion entrepreneurship short course at the School of Fashion and the Arts (SOFA). SOFA, she said, is helping her know more about the ropes of running a fashion business.
Pineda designs her own line of clothes for women, but said she would like to branch out to menswear someday.
She has a bigger dream: “I wanna have my own brick and mortar store, preferably, like in a branch or, yeah, something like that.”
The young fashion entrepreneur said she introduces Filipinos to trends she feels they are missing out on. “Original” means having your own take on already existing trends and matching them up with old trends, said Pineda, who draws inspiration for her designs from her mom, her best friend and Nylon magazine.
Her homemade flower crowns are the most popular among her products. She learned to make these through fellow blogger Ivy Torres, whom she met through Pampanga’s Fashion Bloggers, a group that “visualizes the continual acceleration of fashion’s success in Pampanga.”
She recalls how people first reacted when she started making flower crowns: “Everyone was like, ‘Who’s gonna wear flower crowns in public?’ And then like a few months later everyone’s wearing flower crowns and I was like, ‘Ah, told you guys.’ ”
Her online store and personal blog (http://www.ninapineda.com/)—where she posts about her life and the adventures in between—has made Pineda a prominent face among her peers in the social media age. She has a steady following in social networking sites Facebook (4,600 likes) and Twitter (9,700 followers).
The positive feedback she gets from blogging and from people who say her work inspires them is what keeps her going. “It’s a really good feeling,” she said.
But Pineda does get her share of anonymous hate tweets, particularly those directed at her habit of sharing her everyday life on the Internet, which others often consider as “bragging.” Some even attack her friends as well.
Being the treasurer of the official street team of the world-famous boy band One Direction in the Philippines doesn’t help, either. That’s one of the reasons she is often bashed on Twitter.
“You have to deal with a lot of people, all sorts of people, and some of them don’t know what respect means. So I guess it taught me how to make ‘makisama’ to other people,” she said.
Working behind-the-scenes in an official fan club has helped Pineda mature. She has become accustomed to meeting with adults—the people behind the band’s record label and the executives of music stores Ivory Music and Astroplus. Together with the rest of the street team, she arranges all sorts of events and album launches for the fans.
A blog. An online store. A street team. That’s quite a lot on a teenager’s plate.
But Pineda insists she’s just like the average teenager. “I’m just like everyone else. It’s just that I have different extracurricular activities,” she said.
(The writer is a Communication Research student at the University of the Philippines-Diliman who submitted this story to her Journ 101 –Introduction to Journalism– class under VERA Files trustee Yvonne T. Chua. Photos retrieved from Pineda’s blogs.)