With her signature ginger hair color and fashionable flare, Ah-Niyah Gold was always destined to be front and center. She began an acting career on Broadway at a young age, after being cast in The Lion King, and thanks her mother for showing her the ropes of the business. “I just always have been very business oriented,” Gold recalls. “Whenever my mom was doing my paperwork, I was like, ‘What’s that? What’s this?’”
Gold also envisioned a life in public relations, further fostering her growth and interests, and she planned to dominate in the realm of fashion and beauty. Lo and behold, the public relations expert whose name is now on the tip of everybody’s tongue has made her dreams a reality with her company A Gold Consulting, “a boutique agency creating space for the next generation shaping the future in fashion, beauty, and beyond.”
A powerhouse in the making, this Black-owned agency is home to several Black women who occupy esteemed roles overseeing a variety of buzzworthy and talented companies, including Theophilo, Topicals, Brandon Blackwood, Homage Year, Black Fashion Fair, and many more. The multihyphenate Gold has many goals, but her desire to create a lasting legacy that inspires other Black women is at the top of her list.
When you picture a public relations expert in the pop culture sense, often the usual suspects that come to mind are Kelly Cutrone, Lizzie Grumman, or even Samantha Jones from HBO’s hit Sex & the City. Looking through a scope that centered white women, Gold remembers how it felt to not see anyone who looked like her and telling herself, “I can make strides to make sure there are more of us in the future, so that someone else who wants to do what I do, they can look and see that, yes, that actually does exist.”
While carving out a lane for herself, Gold knew what she wanted it to look like and what it needed to be for her company to succeed. But she was about to leave the fashion industry for good a few years ago, she shares, when Antoine Gregory, a notable fashion editor and creative consultant who leads the dynamic Black Fashion Fair, became her first client. “I had tweeted — [and the tweet is still there] — that I’m quitting fashion because I was just so over it. I really didn’t try. I didn’t trust that space much anymore,” Gold recalls. “I was like, ‘You know what? Maybe it’s time for me to pivot and figure something else out.’ And a couple of weeks later, he hits me up and he’s like, ‘Hey, girl! So, yeah, I’m going to need you to come out of retirement.’”
Since that life-changing creative partnership began, Gold has experienced several career highlights to put under her company’s belt. She represents Black businesses that never fail to generate praise and attention and can recall seeing Edvin Thompson of Theophilio in an episode of the Gossip Girl reboot. Gold gushes over that achievement: “They didn’t tell us that it was going to happen, so that was a surprise to all of us,” she says. “The night the episode premiered, they told us that Jordan Alexander wore the look, but they did not say that Theophilio had actually been written into the episode and that his name would be dropped. So when that was released, I was screaming.”