Built to Keep Her Alive: Roya Saberzadeh on Loss, Legacy, and Turning to AI When Her Team Walked Out

Hi, and welcome back to another episode of The Human Side of AI. I'm your host, Flora. Today's guest, Roya, didn't set out to build a company. She and her sister, Roshi, just wanted a sweatshirt that didn't exist. That idea became a customization business for the Greek and collegiate world, and it should have been a simple success story. Instead, Roya had to bury her sister 2 years in, lost her mother 18 months after that, and watched the Northridge earthquake flatten her thriving business. All before she turned 30. In this episode, our guest talks about the 7-year mourning period she worked straight through, the decision that kept her business alive when COVID took her storefront, and why losing 2 key employees in 1 week is what finally pushed her to build AI into the backbone of her company, training it the way she's trained interns for decades. She also shares the one question she asks herself before saying yes or no to anything more than 3 decades later. This is a real conversation about grief, legacy, and what actually looks like to keep going with the human part still very much intact. Hello, hello! How are you today?

Hi, how are you, Flora? So good to meet you. Are you surprised?

Yeah, I know. It's funny. The last few calls ago I was on, someone was like, "You're real? I thought you were an AI the whole time." Are you calling from LA? Introduce yourself.

Hi, my name is Roya Saberzadeh, and I'm a 37-year entrepreneur in the branded apparel industry, specifically in the collegiate world. And yeah, you know, started small in a, just like a store, but because the things that my sister and I wanted to create did not exist, Little by little, we had to become the manufacturer. So that's the whole story. And then, you know, you evolve from there. Like any business, there is an evolution that's ongoing, an undercurrent that takes you to different places when you're thinking of how do you deliver more value to your clients.

Absolutely. So I have so many questions, but first of all, what's it like working with your sister?

So I would've loved to have my sister by my side all these years. Unfortunately, my sister was killed 2 years into the business in 1991 in a scuba diving class. The business of customization for the collegiate, specifically the Greek organization on the campus that was Close to us and where we were going to school was all her idea. She got into a sorority and lo and behold, she discovered there's so many things that needs to be done as far as being made, that arts and crafts and all that, that didn't even exist. So she was talking to me one day and she was like, yeah, we could do this, we could do that. And as she was describing it, you know, obviously, You know, I'm a girl too and I love fashion. Like, yeah, let's do it. Let's do it. You know, not knowing anything about business, it's just I thought it was an incredible idea and I was all on board. And that's how we all started in a creative—

Totally.

Yeah, go ahead.

You kept your sisters like so alive throughout this. I mean, just talking to you on other calls and, you know, seeing what you've posted, like, from an outsider's perspective, your sister is just right alongside with you on this journey.

Great. That means my main mission has been, my personal mission close to my heart has been, you know, has been that to keep her alive, to keep what she wanted to do, the love that we wanted to give to our audience. It's still alive. It's very much what we do on a daily basis. You know, actually, to me and my team, we take it even more seriously because my number one rule is that my sister is not on this planet. So everything that we do on her behalf and on the behalf of her name has to be top-notch. So people receive that love and that value. And they always have something amazing to say about her name and the name of her company.

And, and, and Roya, you know, I want, I want to, I want to move a little past this at some point, but I think it's so crucial to your story and, and, and your brand. Losing your sister wasn't the only loss that you, you, that really impacted you and your brand, was it?

No, not really. Those, that was just the, The beginning of a whole lot of journey of losses, you know, um, first was my sister in 1991. Within a year and a half, it was my mom in 1993. We were all devastated by Roshi's death. Uh, and, um, the loss of my mom was like the next huge blow. And the only thing that actually helped me To pull myself out of the situation I was in after the loss of Roshi was that one day I just got fed up with myself because I knew if my mom would be here looking at me, because she's the one that was focused on helping me after losing my sister, I got to look at myself and then say, you know what? I do not really like the person that I have become. My mom didn't really raise me to be this weak. She raised me to be an independent, loving person and courageous and do the things that may not even be something that I would want to do. So I think that was the beginning of the journey of really rebuilding myself.

Sure.

The whole loss of back-to-back losses At least for me, the journey was like I was crushed and I no longer was the person that I was before. I didn't even identify with myself. And the person that I had always identified with was a winner in life. I was an athlete. I was like the top of my class always. You know, I was that golden goose person, right? Everything I touched.

Mm-hmm.

I came away with positive, all-winning stuff. So for the first time in my life, back-to-back losses that I had no control over, it did me in, right? So, but with the grace of God and also the help of my family, but more than anything, the desire to create a legacy for my sister and then my mom of what she did in creating these humans in this life that gave me that push. And it still does. It's my biggest driver. And then if that wasn't even enough, in 1994, the Northridge earthquake destroyed my entire business. Literally the business that I didn't owe anything, you know, it was thriving, doing good.

Wow.

Demolished to the ground. So—

And there was still something inside of you that said, I'm just not gonna stay on the ground. I'm not, I'm gonna continue to get up. I'm going to continue to fight. I'm going to continue to run this business and no one or nothing is gonna show me otherwise.

Absolutely. I think that's kind of like in my DNA. I'm like any other human being, you know, I go through things that are sad, that are this, that I do, have my mourning period for losses and all that. And in the case of Roshi and then my mom, actually it took 7 years. That was my mourning period. But throughout that whole period, while I grieved, I cried, I did all that stuff, I still went to work and I did what I had to do, right? That I was able to Separate my pain from what I needed to actually accomplish. I had like, I guess somehow that, that love was my North Star. So it's not like anything else I can tell you. And I've had years and years of conversations with myself, with other people, all of that, trying to wrap my head around everything that we experience in life and all the questions, the whys, and all of that. But, um, at the end of the day, the biggest driver was, okay, then I didn't die. I'm here. I gotta do something that will actually bring some kind of gift to this situation, if you will, right?

And because you'll drive yourself crazy with the whys. You'll drive yourself crazy.

Yeah.

So, so man, talk about, I mean, to say rocky start for this business does not do it justice, right? And I, I wanna come back to my question, what's it like working with your sister? Because it's just so cool to see 35 years later, To me it is. To me it's the, it's, this is a sister-run business and it is, right? Like it's very much, I just wanted to—

Yeah, it's still the same thing. I love the early days. My sister and I, you know, we would brainstorm even at nighttime before falling asleep. We had all these big dreams, you know. I think the reason I have actually pushed along because we had all these dreams we were thinking early on, yes, we'll be a manufacturer. You know, we were thinking buying other manufacturers, right? 'Cause we really had the gift of knowing early on that the idea was a big success. So then on top of that, our style was always this like big, bold style of we go all in, right? We never thought we'd be operating it, you know, I'm an engineer. My sister was going to school to ultimately become a plastic surgeon.

Oh, wow.

You know, we, so, and we come from a family of professionals. You know, we are not like entrepreneur family, any of that kind of stuff. So, but like I said, I think that was kind of like in our DNA and in our Jean, and the synergy between my sister and I was amazing, right? In general, between my mom, my sister, and myself, we really didn't even need to say like complete sentences. If one of us said something, the other two would be like right there, you know, like these sparks going off the brains and— It was phenomenal. And obviously our mom was our biggest cheerleader that, yes, you can do anything you put your mind to it. We were raised on that basis, right? So that's why we always thought unlimited. We never put any limit on ourselves. And, you know, actually it's not till like years later because I just put my head down and I worked, especially after my sister and even with my sister, this is, Pre-internet, this is pre-anything. We divided what we needed to do to conquer. We, our company, between concept and going to actually starting our store at that young age, it wasn't even 6 months, right? So we were on the phone doing this, you know, calling up.

Wait, I have to stop because you said, I don't come from a family of entrepreneurs. But you don't just own one company.

No.

You're, you're kind of a multi-entrepreneur at this point.

Yeah.

Talk to us a little bit about that.

Um, you know what? I think that, um, my biggest drive for me, it's like I love people. That's why I say I think it's in my DNA because even from like the early days of my mom describing how I was, It was like I was always trying to help people. She would say, hey, if someone came, my mom was in the medical field. And so, and I'm big time into medical and, you know, even though I didn't end up being a doctor, but that's kind of like in me. So my mom would say, hey, people would come in and they say, oh yeah, I have a headache and all that. The first thing out of me was like, okay, why don't you take this, do this, do this? By tomorrow you'd be okay, right? And early on, I actually I did want to become a doctor, except my mom decided, told me I really need to change course because I am too sensitive to people's pain. Let's just put it that way. So anyhow, going back is like, I always want to find a way to help people. And throughout my entire journey, Of life. I think that's the biggest thing. I'm always listening to people and then I'm coming out, like naturally coming out with these solutions of how to make your life easier. It's not like something I force myself. It is, you know, obviously so many things come from my personal experience. that actually drives it deeper. But in general, it is to help the person to move from their pain state or their stuck position to something different, that they move along and they find they're unstuck, basically. So that's pretty much—

Well, you touched on this, and I wanna give it a little bit more attention because This has actually been coming up in so many conversations recently, and it's not a new, a new phenomenon, right? But this idea of when you're, when you're opening a new business or starting a new business, um, if you're kind of looking for maybe this next pivot in your life, really go— going back to what do people really need? Like, what, what kind of solution can I offer? What kind of problem can I solve? And then Working from there. And I, I think that's just a beautiful conversation to have, no matter where you are in your business, even if you've started a business and kind of taking a minute to say, hey, okay, what I do now, the product that I have, the service that I offer, how can it solve someone's problem? How can I expand on it to solve someone's problem? So, so what I'm hearing from you is you became a business owner to solve people's problems.

Yeah, that we thought it was a good solution for us. You know, I went with, for instance, my sister based on what she was saying. I was like, yeah, that makes total sense. And I'm not part of the Greek, you know, fraternity sorority world, but I would love to have a sweatshirt or a jacket that, you know, would have the school with all these different fabrics in it. You know, we were talking about instead of during an era back in 1989, the most method that existed was iron-on lettering. If, you know, you may not even remember 'cause you were not around, but that was the method of customization. Never mind, now we're saying we're gonna cut the fabric in a shape of your school or your Greek letters and put it on there so you will be able to fashionably express your own identity and taste and all of that. That didn't even exist. But when she explained it to me, I was like, yeah. Ah, I'd go for that. So that was it because between the two of us, we thought it was a great idea. We thought, that's it, you know, it's going to be. We didn't even think that in any world people are gonna go for that. You know what I'm saying? That was the thing to be doing. And lo and behold, it was because everybody wants to express themselves. And that was the customization being born in that era. for the Greek and the collegiate market, right? So it turned out like it was great and it answered a pain point, especially early on for the people that were in that Greek fraternity and sorority life.

Yeah.

Because they needed to bring an identity so that they can be branded and they can, market that organization on their campus or wherever they would go, right? So it touched upon many different things, and that's why it turned out that it's successful. I mean, look at customization today. Everything is customized.

Yeah. Well, so, so speaking of customized, you sent me a customizable, customized one-pager ahead of our call, and you had a A section in there talking about the COVID turning point. What was that like for you as a business owner?

COVID obviously destroyed a lot of businesses and did its best to destroy my business as well. As I mentioned, I'm in California, so for nearly 3 years, there was no in-person schooling, right? And we had a Brick and mortar. We were right next door to a university, and, um, we— I kept that location for a while, but the overhead was just ginormous.

Right.

Um, and it was not feasible moving forward, and I had to make some decisions. Obviously, a small company, I had a very small team. I Wanted to be able to continue paying my people, but I did not want to continue paying the landlords.

Okay.

You know, they weren't willing to work with me. Um, so I decided, you know what, I need to pivot from a brick and mortar face-to-face. Painful decision after approximately 32 years of face-to-face, which I love. I had to move into an e-commerce kind of situation. I still wanted to have that one-on-one touch with my audience, and we still have that, you know, once a week you can come here if you're local to do your pickup, this and that. However, at the time, everything had to move to the Zoom, basically. And For me as a company owner, that's not a big issue. I made the pivot, was easy for me, and it also enabled me to create the environment where my team member would not be actually exposed to one another. So there was no exposure of catching COVID because at the time I would be responsible for their life. You know, this is early on, right? And then, so I did not want to You know, the idea is not to make money and not take the people into consideration. These are people that are my family, right? So that was my consideration. So I did make a lot of decisions that obviously was not very easy for me, nor it served me monetary-wise. But I still, I'm glad I made those decisions because—

Mm-hmm.

The kind of person that I am, I knew I would not be able to sleep at night had anything happened to my team. So lo and behold, that happened. Little by little, we started changing everything. The hardest part, it's still to this day, is for my clients, especially, you know, COVID no longer an issue, but they still want to come in. I have the kind of company which is a lot of touch and feel situation.

Yeah.

And it's difficult for people to kind of understand that via Zoom. So I still continue some of the in-person events that I had prior to COVID, which were always super popular in my company. And not all of them can be done at this moment. Hopefully, as we go along, We will do more and more of them. But that's when then AI came in. I had to do a lot of changes, and I had realized that what had worked for me up to that point is not going to necessarily work for me moving forward. And that was in—

Incredible.

Yeah, so that was in 2021. You know, I had to implement the whole making the website to be more user-friendly. And then obviously to have, you know, all kinds of methods of helping people faster via email, all of those things. So that was, you know, and actually the whole move, moving a business after 30-some years, it's not as easy as one might think. So that all happened.

It doesn't sound easy.

No, too much stuff.

Yeah.

Especially when you're in manufacturing, there are too many things, you know, it needed to be done in segments to be done properly. So anyways, that was '21, '22, and then lo and behold, come towards the end of '22, AI was introduced, and I was thinking, and how am I going to be using this tool? So lo and behold, what happened at the end of 2022 actually 2 of my key employees decided to leave.

Okay.

So AI timing was kind of great because now I was hit with this thing that, oh my God, so all of the information for those particular areas of my company lived in the head of those people. It lived in my head as well because thank God I know how to do it in my business, but on a day-to-day basis, It lived in those people's heads, right? And I had no time, no anything to trying to capture that. So lo and behold, I decided, nah, this is never gonna happen to me again. I need to start capturing all of my own knowledge in a better way. So early on for me, I realized, yeah, AI is great, but how can I use this to the advantage of my company? How can this do, this thing do stuff for me? Obviously there was a learning curve just like for everyone else.

Yeah.

You know, there was so much hallucination. At some point I was like, what the heck? Is this thing not even intelligent? What are they telling us? It's so stupid. You know, all of that kind of stuff. I went through it. You know, I was early adopter, obviously. OpenAI started November. I was on there. Then as soon as like Claude came on board, I went on Claude trying to find something, a remedy to my own problem, which was to get these tools to act like my employees.

Mm-hmm.

You know, I know people get that today, but for me, that was from day one because I needed to find a way to not get hit with this situation again. So anyways, that has been the journey I have been—

Tell us a few things that you had them doing even then or now.

OK, so as AI got to know me better by me training it, luckily, I've had many years of training interns when they come to my company so that they can become functional Very quickly, and I give them real work to do. I don't care if they're real employees or they're interns. They are responsible and accountable. So I decided this is the same way for this AI. I actually told AI, look, this is what you are going to be. I'm going to give you a whole bunch of information. I'm going to pour my knowledge, everything I know about my business into you, and these are my expectations. Mm-hmm.

Right.

And early on, I got AI itself to help me help me better because obviously I did not know what is the best way of prompting. You know, there was no any of these kind of stuff. But as I explained to AI and as the models were getting a little bit better and better, then AI said, yeah, okay, Roya, these are great things you're doing. Yes, I wanna help you this and that. And I was like, good. Finally, you're understanding something. So that, you know, I think for me, like anything else I have done in business, I come from the school of hard knocks. I do everything, you know, the wrong way. I don't care anyway until I get the result that I'm after, right? So I'm tweaking, doing this, doing that, and that Kind of like what I do.

So, Roya, I have a question. What do you think your mom and sister would think of you using AI so integrated in your business now?

I think they would be right there, you know, maybe even more than I would, you know, because all 3 of us can be doing, you know, anything that can help a human being to be a better version of themselves that doesn't do any damage to someone else, I'm all for it. Obviously, in any world, whether it's AI or normal, we all have to implement guardrails, safety factors, all of those things.

Yeah.

That comes to my brain naturally because of my upbringing, my mom always, when she introduced us to do something, she also told us, don't be doing this, this, this, and this. And she said the reason why we're not doing it, right? So the same thing, you know, an engineer is the same mentality. You have to think 20 steps ahead of everyone else.

Yeah.

Because you cannot come up with these things, let 'em loose, and then hope for the best. That does not even enter the mentality of an engineer. So, for me, it's just how I operate.

So, Roya, you might have touched on this, but my final question today is, what's the hardest piece of advice you'd give another founding face of— I'm sorry, founder facing a loss that could derail everything they've built? What is that one piece of advice that you'd give them?

I think that the one piece of advice for anyone, including a founder, we all have to dig deep and find that bigger why for ourselves. When you find that bigger why for you, why you even exist on this planet, Everything comes from there. Whatever you do, whatever you say yes to, or whatever you say no to, because you have established your own personal North Star and you are quite comfortable with that.

Raya, thank you so much for your time today. I feel like you and I could go on and on. I really appreciate this. There's so much food for thought here, and I look forward to sharing more of your resources with listeners, and, and just thank you so much for your time today.

Thank you. Thank you so much for this opportunity.

My pleasure.

Take care.

Have a wonderful day.

Bye.