“Believe it or not, I had already planned my life for the next twenty years once I hit eighteen,” Anistia Thomas says. The “plan” sounds like a combination of teenage pipe dreams: design fashion for celebrities, establish a charity for underprivileged youth, start an insurance agency. But at thirty-four Thomas has already hit all those marks, and her resume’s still growing. Recently, she organized the new Ann Arbor-Ypsilanti chapter of the Michigan Black Chamber of Commerce.
Thomas comes from a well-connected family. Her father, Jobie Thomas, was a member of Enchantment, a Detroit R&B group that charted a handful of hits in the seventies; her uncle, Michael Stokes, produced records for Bill Withers and Dennis Coffey. Most crucially, Thomas’ aunt, Linda Stokes, owns LSO Designs, which lists the likes of Cher, Will Smith, and Jennifer Lopez among its clients. Thomas grew up on Detroit’s west side, but her parents began sending her to spend her summers with Stokes in Woodland Hills, California, at age twelve. “She basically put me on all these projects,” Thomas says. “So here I was in high school, working on these big projects for Will Smith and Prince and Britney Spears.” Her tasks, she says, could range from sewing to styling for photo or video shoots.
“All my girls were really good at their tasks,” Linda Stokes says, speaking of Thomas and her other interns. “I think that [Thomas’s] working here gave her a little edge and insight, but I work with a lot of celebrities, and all my staff get hands-on experience with that.”
Thomas says that the experience gave her career an early boost, but that much of her success–particularly her business savvy–came from having to rely on herself at an early age. “Money would flow through our house, but it was definitely not a financially literate home,” she says, declining to offer specifics. In high school she took a variety of odd jobs, including working on a moving truck, and during her senior year she moved into her own apartment. “I had to take my own brains and grow up much sooner than my peers,” she says.
After graduation, Thomas attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago on a partial scholarship. While she honed her design skills in school, she read everything she could about business and finance “to understand the business side of fashion.”
After graduating from SAIC in 2001, Thomas did contract work for LSO, designing what she describes as haute couture, “runway-style pieces” for various celebrities. She names Jay-Z, Sade, and Janet Jackson as some of her favorite stars to work with, but she’s discreet when it comes to telling tales. “They’re people, they’re human, and they just have a job that’s in front of the camera. There are other things that may be economically different, but they have feelings, they have a life, they want to be treated just like anyone else.”
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Eventually, Thomas says, she’d designed for every celebrity she’d wanted to, and she grew tired of “living out of a suitcase.” She adds, “You don’t sleep for days oftentimes. I knew I wanted to have a family sometime, or at least have a healthy relationship, and I knew that wouldn’t be able to happen if I continued.”
She relocated to New York in 2006, fulfilling the next step of her master plan by starting a foundation. It “geo-targeted” inner-city high schoolers in Brooklyn and the Bronx, offering weekend workshops on the business, rather than the creative, side of fashion. “I know no one prepared me for that when I was going to school,” Thomas says.
That was the point where Thomas began to leave design behind for the world of finance. She relocated to Ann Arbor in 2010 for a “personal relationship,” and though it didn’t pan out, she’s still happy she made the move. “I knew that if I wanted to be financially stable, I could not live [in New York],” she explains. “Even though I lived and traveled all these different places, I knew that Michigan would be a place where I would end up eventually on a permanent basis.”
Responding to recruiters who had contacted her previously, Thomas opened a Farmers agency on Zeeb Road, near her home in Scio Township. “Financial services is where it’s at,” she says. “I think if I had known what a good opportunity it was, I would have done it years ago.”
Then, last summer, she was approached to head up the new Ann Arbor-Ypsilanti Black Chamber of Commerce. Since then, Thomas has organized a variety of workshops and events, including a meet-and-greet with Ann Arbor mayor John Hieftje and Ypsilanti mayor Paul Schreiber. “What I find is that [for] a lot of the African-American population, you have to bring things to them,” she says. “A lot of people don’t know how to research the Internet, or they don’t know how to strategically prospect out resources or things like that.”
Small businesses must be at least 51 percent black owned to join the chamber, although larger corporations like Google have also partnered with the organization. So far Thomas has recruited around fifty member businesses, including Joyful Treats Catering, LegalShield, and law firms McCoy and Associates and TGQ Law. “She’s trying to make it something that will matter,” says TGQ owner Terrence Quinn. “She’s not just doing it to make another small networking group.” Thomas says the Black Chamber is “definitely a second job”–forty hours of work per week–in addition to her full-time work for Farmers.
Mementoes from her days in celebrity fashion line the walls in her office conference room, and a signed photo of Beyonce (“Anistia–Thanks for the bathing suits!”) sits on her desk. But Thomas says that phase of her life is over–she turned down an offer to design for Michael Jackson’s planned 2009 farewell tour.
Having checked off her twenty-year plan, Thomas is considering what’s next. Although her foundation is on hiatus, she’s considering creating a web-based instructional tool based on it. She’s also considering penning how-to books–not on fashion, but on business development.
“It’s more important for me to watch my money than it is for me to design a dress, at the end of the day,” she says. “You can’t do both.”
