Yes, sex sells cars but if my business was crap I’d fail
As a child, she and her family endured a perilous escape from Somalia, now Nadia Adan has used her feminine wiles to become the only female owner of a car showroom in Ireland
NADIA Adan is apologising for being a few minutes late to our interview. The 33-year-old businesswoman has just landed the sale of a supercar — a Ford Mustang, 2.3 Ecoboost 2019 to be exact — so she has a good excuse.
A natural salesperson, Nadia is the only female owner of a car showroom in Ireland. Undoubtedly also the most glamorous, she is proving herself to be nothing short of revolutionary in the market too.
Her latest customer purchased the flash wheels after spotting it — and, let’s face it, her — on an Instagram post last week. In fact, Nadia has amassed quite the fan base since she took a leap of faith just before the pandemic and left her stockbroking job to start her own luxury used car business, Ashford Motors in Co Wicklow.
Using cheeky, revealing videos to market her cars, Nadia has become a social media sensation, racketing up 180,000 followers on TikTok and 80,000 on Instagram. It’s gotten to the point where she even has fans waiting for her at her premises.
We meet on Valentine’s Day, when one admirer has travelled all the way from Clare with his mum to give his crush flowers, for example. ‘Another customer who bought a car from me came with his two sons as they wanted to meet me, it’s mad,’ she laughs.
She takes none of the flattery too seriously — but is far too clever not to use her beauty and wit to attract her mostly male customer base. For Nadia is a businesswoman through and through who has worked hard to get to where she is today.
Her success is all the more impressive when you consider her tragic childhood.
Born in Somalia in the early 1990s, she led a gilded life with her trailblazer mother until the age of three, when the vicious Mogadishu war destroyed their world.
‘My mum owned a cargo fleet company and went to Russia and leased aircraft — she worked with the UN to bring in medical supplies to war zones,’ said Nadia. ‘She had her own tourism company too and specialised in safaris. We were very wealthy, had a big house, fancy car, our own driver.
‘Then when the war happened and the airspace was closed down, overnight we lost everything — our family, our business, our home... everything.’
Her mother’s priority was to get them out of Somalia alive and, like millions of others, they became displaced, travelling through country after country for years in search of a place they could call home.
‘My mum always had education as a priority for me and an English-speaking country,’ says Nadia.
The arduous journey to get to that place — which eventually happened to be Ireland — was marked by danger and dire conditions. Travelling though Africa, mother and daughter spent over a year in a refugee camp, were put in prison and even spent a lifethreatening six weeks trekking though the Sahara desert.
‘Think of parents giving their children urine to drink to keep them alive — it was that bad,’ says Nadia, who was too young to have distinct memories of the time, relying on conversations with her mum for context.
‘We were trafficked from country to country — one of the boats almost capsized — and got fake passports thanks to money from an aunt in America.
‘Eventually, we ended up on O’Connell Street.’
It was here that they finally felt safe, and they got the warmest of welcomes.
‘A couple of people gave us £100 notes, we were shown where to go to get asylum and we got our papers in three months, got a house, my mum got a job. But it was a different time, there wasn’t many refugees here,’ says Nadia, reflecting on the current tensions regarding immigration today. ‘We don’t have the infrastructure and I get that.
‘People need to redirect their anger but the system needs to change too,’ she muses.
Growing up in Firhouse in Dublin, Nadia recalls how her mum went from having her own driver and businesses to packing boxes in a factory in Walkinstown.
‘She walked there and back as we didn’t have a car for years,’ she says. ‘But I wanted for nothing, I was very happy.’
Education was always a priority for her mum, says Nadia, admitting it was a bone of contention between mother and daughter which reached boiling point when Nadia finished her finance degree.
‘I was determined to get a job and start making money and having fun, but my mam was having none of it,’ recalls Nadia. Her mother was determined that her daughter would complete a Masters in finance in Trinity, even though her grades didn’t add up. She ended up marching Nadia to the Dean’s office, hoping that he’d listen to their life story and give her a chance. Their unconventional tactic worked and after a summer of being tutored, Nadia was accepted into the college, and then went on to beat her fellow classmates to land an equity analyst role for a prestigious firm. ‘The CFO told me I was chosen because I had something that the others didn’t — and that was cop on,’ recalls Nadia. ‘The rest you can learn from a book.’
From here, she turned her attention to stock broking, and was the only female in a ‘shark tank’ of 18 men. It was a challenging environment, but she was in no way intimidated.
‘The overall boss was also a woman, so maybe that helped,’ she muses. ‘But I never felt inferior or in any way unequal in that role. It was a very professional environment.’
It was here Nadia developed a love for cars, surrounded as she was by men driving top of the range motors.
‘I had the fancy job, now I wanted the flashy car,’ she shrugs. ‘I bought a 2008 3-Series BMW coupe. I loved a fast, expensive car.’
As it happens, it was this car that would introduce Nadia to the motor trade as she ended up selling the vehicle on her lunch break for a profit.
‘I was doing a trade-in but it was a crap deal, so I thought I’d sell it myself,’ she says. ‘I made a few quid and thought, I want to do this again. So I would buy a car, drive it for a couple of months, sell it, make a few bob, and that’s how it started.’
Nadia began to build up trust with dealers, sourcing cars from far and wide.
Then in January 2020, she decided to take a leap of faith, leave her job and concentrate on her passion of selling cars.
‘I took a lease out on a yard in Wicklow, and filled it with a few of the cheaper cars I had for sale,’ she says. ‘I didn’t even have an office — I was working from my Jeep.’
Just two months later, the pandemic began. For a moment, Nadia thought it was game over.
‘I was like, how am I going to let people know I exist? How am I going to meet customers?’ she says. ‘Then I pivoted to Instagram, and it changed everything.’
What started as reels showing off cars in her garage transformed
‘We were trafficked – one of the boats almost capsized’
to a lucrative selling platform when Nadia sold a Bentley on social media. ‘I started investing in more cinematic videography but then realised that while the customer base was growing, it wasn’t enough,’ she says. For while her cars were garnering some attention, there was something missing — and that was Nadia herself. Nadia’s eyes were opened to the power of TikTok during lockdown and she hopped on board. ‘I started doing fun videos,’ she shrugs. ‘I would be hunkered down close to a car and viewers would have to try to guess the model. I had a low-cut top on and it sounds ridiculous, but it worked. ‘People just didn’t know what to do with me,’ she reasons. ‘They put me in a glamour model box, and that’s fine, but I wasn’t that.
I’m a businesswoman, I’m educated, I can talk the talk, plus I have my boobs on show,’ she says frankly.
Finding herself in another maledominated business, Nadia says this was a tougher territory to navigate as a female.
She has even experienced competitors trying to devalue her offering and blocking her on social media.
‘I feel like I have to prove myself five times more than a man would,’ she admits, adding that as the only woman in Ireland to run a car showroom, she’s had to deal with a lot of backlash.
Of the idea that her marketing is exploitative of women, harking back to a time of lads’ mags and a more toxic masculinity, Nadia has an empowering perspective.
‘There’s a crucial difference — back then, men were making those decisions. Today, it’s me making the choice to wear revealing clothes to sell cars. I’m the boss,’ she says proudly.
In fact, Nadia is unequivocally unapologetic about highlighting her beauty and curvaceous figure to get her business noticed — but there’s substance behind her style. ‘Sex absolutely does sell,’ she admits. ‘However, if my business was crap, I’d be gone. I did a huge amount of grafting to make sure the business was solid because then I can market how I want. ‘There’s no rule book for this, or if there is, I haven’t seen it. But if you don’t deliver from a business perspective, you’ll be pulled apart.’ Speaking of which, there’s trolling — a lot of it. But never one to miss an opportunity, Nadia has a novel approach to dealing with it. ‘The first time I was trolled I was so upset,’ she says. ‘I think it was something along the lines of, “the likes of you are bringing women back 100 years”,’ she recalls. ‘It was nasty. ‘I learned, though, that trolls are a viral moment because if someone says something really stupid to me, I’ll now respond with a funny video,’ she shrugs. ‘People love it. ‘Men are the ones that comment about my appearance, they might say “you’re a skank” or “you’ve daddy issues” or something like that. Women might hate you from behind the screens for a while, and then all of a sudden they will support you,’ she observes. ‘They’re my biggest supporters in that way.’ In a struggling market besieged by job losses, declining sales and the closure of physical garages, trailblazer Nadia is also reinventing the way we buy motors, by taking deposits on Revolut and confirming sales on Instagram. ‘If you don’t have a social media presence as a garage, you’ll be gone soon,’ she predicts. ‘Like I‘m in an industrial estate, no one would ever find me if it wasn’t for standing out online.
But I can sell an Aston Martin to a guy in the States, or an €80,000 R8 on a 10-second TikTok video, which costs me nothing but boobs,’ she laughs.
‘Me being a woman is an opportunity in this game. At the end of the day, my content is tailored to men, and they do like boobs and they do like cars. It‘s very simple marketing.’
Nadia’s wit and the fun that she clearly has on her online content is winning her legions of fans — plus the fact that she’s a magpie for shiny promotion opportunities. She cleverly completed a TikTok series with influencers like Eric Roberts, Garron Noone and Black Paddy, and even a search for a new staff member is going to be formatted in an online Dragon’s Den-style series of videos.
‘It’s not what I want you to watch, it’s what you want to watch, and that’s very critical when selling cars,’ she says. ‘The car is going to sell itself, it’s about getting that relationship with the customer through the screen.’
Nadia has even dipped her toe into the land of ‘merch’ — she produced a Christmas calendar to raise money for Men’s Aid and sold almost 1,000 copies. ‘It was very tasteful and people loved it, now we have a big client base to sell things to — I’m thinking leather-bound notebooks, high-quality merchanise,’ she says, adding that she has already been approached to star in a possible series for Netflix.
‘Oh I’d love to be on TV,’ she grins, and she’s already had a taste of it by featuring in an RTÉ docuseries in 2022, Secrets From The Showroom.
Nadia ends our chat with some sage advice on entreprenuership.
‘You just have to believe in yourself, take a risk, be good at what you do and and then you can market what you want,’ she says. ‘Like I know my cars but you don’t need to be a mechanic to sell one.
‘I wouldn’t be hugely technical about it, and that’s OK. I’m not here to get oil under my nails.’
‘Men like boobs and cars, it’s very simple marketing’