Yassie comes to you from a small sea island community sandwiched between Charleston and Hilton Head, South Carolina … Bennetts Point, South Carolina. She was born the youngest of twelve children to a farmer and a shrimper, the late Benjamin and Lydia Hodges. When she was only four years old her mother died … and when she was only nine her father died. But he left her in the able hands of her brothers who molded her into the woman she is today.
At the age of sixteen, she left South Carolina and headed for Atlanta, GA, where she enrolled at Clark College. In May 1981, she graduated from Clark with a BA degree in Accounting. Upon graduation she accepted a position with the IRS and for 22 years enjoyed an extremely successful career with them. Upon leaving IRS, she assumed the position of Director of Compliance with the District of Columbia’s Office of Tax and Revenue. In 2003, she left the government to pursue an MBA in International Management at the University of Maryland. Today, working directly with the Board of Directors for various tax agencies, she serves as a Senior Consultant/Subject Matter Expert on tax administration reforms in developing countries.
But after 30 years in one profession, she began evaluating what the next 30 years have in store for her. In contemplating her next move, she looked to her first true love … Fashion. For when she was only twelve years old, a dream began. It was at this age she began constructing her own clothing when one of her brothers presented her with her very first sewing machine. Twenty-three years later and through many trials and errors, she introduced her very first line at the “For Sisters Only Expo” at the Baltimore Convention Center on April 13, 1996. The response was tremendous with well over 800 in attendance and a new clientele market emerged ... ranging from business women . . . to entertainers . . . to Ms. Black USA ...
The rest is simply history in the making ...
