Norma Almanza does not look old enough to have run her own business for 23 years. Perhaps she’s managed to avoid the stress-induced aging brought about by entrepreneurship, because, as she said, “I love my work.”
Almanza started the YA Group — a design, advertising, and outreach firm located on New York Avenue in Union City — in 1988. She did this after she left her high-end job designing print materials for big name motion pictures.
“California wasn’t for me,” she said. So she came back home to Union City.
Born and raised on 43rd Street by Cuban immigrant parents, Almanza knows her community and what it means to start from scratch. Her father started a mechanic shop on 44th Street and built his company’s reputation on honesty and good, hard work. “Till this day,” she said, “I’ll run into people who say, ‘Almanza! Are you related to Mariano? He sold me the best car.’ ”
“What you need is the passion, and you have to start from the bottom to get to the top.” –Norma Almanza
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Glamorous beginnings
Almanza attended the Fashion Institute of Technology for graphic design in 1982 after graduating from St. Joseph’s High School. During her first year, she interned with a firm named Spiros Associates, a boutique design studio for motion pictures that worked with Paramount Pictures. The internship turned into a full-time position, and eventually the company moved to California.
Almanza was asked to join them. There she became part of a team of designers who worked on all the major motion picture print jobs with companies like Paramount, 20th Century Fox, Tristar, and Universal Studios. The environment was very competitive, she said: “There were 10 top designers all competing with each other, and we had to do our own thing and see who would win.”
And win she did, earning the privilege to design the ads for such movies as “Top Gun,” “Ishtar,” “Stand By Me,” and “Beverly Hills Cop,” to name a few. She collaborated with some of the top photographers in the industry, one of them Annie Leibovitz. “It was just amazing,” Almanza said. But it wasn’t quite what she wanted.
She wanted to start her own business, and she missed her family and her community.
Re-touching her roots
Upon returning to Union City, Almanza worked for a while managing her fashion designer aunt’s showroom in New York City, “but sales were not for me.” Her parents owned property at 4211 New York Ave., and they encouraged her to use it for her own business. They told her to “just go for it.”
She and her cousin Ricky, who was 12 years old, spent days and nights scrubbing and changing ceiling tiles and stripping paint until they turned it into an office she was proud of. She moved in her old drafting table and started using her community and California contacts to serve the many Hispanic ad agencies in the city.
“I did well,” she said.
Almanza’s business expanded over the years. Some of her clients were local, some national. She has worked with Palisades Medical Center, Provident Bank, Harborage, Skyy Spirits, and Budweiser. She helps with all aspects of marketing, though mainly design and advertising. The YA Group’s main focus is on the Hispanic agencies and markets within the larger companies.
The YA Group helps with community outreach by holding fundraisers, concerts, and street festivals.
“We used to do the whole Hispanic outreach for the Meadowlands called “La Experiencia Total,” she recalled. They worked with the arena, Giants Stadium, and the racetrack.
In recent years, the company has taken on a majority of medical and financial clients. “It’s just the way it happened to work out,” Almanza said. They are now launching into web design as well.
Almanza has received awards for her creative achievements as well as for her non-profit work with Juvenile Diabetes (in honor of her father’s struggle), the NJ Cancer Research Center, and To Save Latin America.
Her only regret is that as a business owner, she doesn’t get to do quite as much design work as she used to. “It’s a trade-off,” she said; though she does sometimes work on business logo and brand development, which she loves. She also paints in her free time, but her work and two children leave her with only a little of that.
Advice for young entrepreneurs
Almanza said that a lot of young people think they need a lot of money to start their own business, but in reality, they don’t. When she began the YA Group, she had $1,500 in the bank. She feels people often look for hand-me-downs or the easy way out. But if someone is handed a company, they never learn all of its ins and outs, so they are unable to run it properly.
What about the state of the economy?
“It’s a good time to start a business now,” Almanza said, “because you get better rent and better deals.”
What is the most important thing for an entrepreneur to have? “What you need is the passion,” Almanza said. As her mother told her, “you have to start from the bottom to get to the top.”
Gennarose Pope may be reached at gpope@hudsonreporter.com/a>