Exclusive Interview: Pop Culturalist Chats with The Real Housewives of Dallas’ D’Andra Simmons

For D’Andra Simmons, becoming an author, entrepreneur, and TV personality has been a journey of determination and tenacity. Throughout her career, she’s experienced the highest of highs and the lowest of lows, but she’s continued to persevere through it all and never given up on herself or her purpose in life. That’s led her to become one of the most successful entrepreneurs today. Pop Culturalist caught up with D’Andra to learn more about overcoming obstacles, starring in The Real Housewives of Dallas, and her best-selling product, Green Miracle.

PC: You’re an author, entrepreneur, and TV personality. How did you get started in your career? How challenging is it to manage all your endeavors?
D’Andra: It’s extremely challenging to manage. I have four jobs. I’ll explain that to you in a minute. When I graduated from school, my parents wanted me to be a lawyer. I’ve been acting and singing since I was a little kid. They were not having that one bit. So I went to work at a law firm in Chicago called Kirkland & Ellis. I was in an apprentice program before you go to law school, but I was so unhappy there. I left after a year because I committed to a year. I came home, and I became a stockbroker, believe it or not. I still trade. I have a broker, but I still trade in my own little account for fun. Then I spent that time figuring out what I was doing, and I ended up working with my mother when she started Ultimate Living, but then I moved to New York for five years, went to LA for five years, and worked in fashion.

I was always creative. So between twenty and thirty, I was trying to figure myself out and whether or not I had a place in the entertainment industry. Back then, you had to be falling over or needing a cracker to be in the industry. Now they like people with curvy bodies. It’s a completely different world. It’s much better timing for me now than back then. But I went through the whole ten years of rejection. I heard everything from “if you do this, if you do that.” I continued to keep trying. I’d come back and I’d work with my mother from time to time. We’d fight and I would leave. [laughs]

At the end of my twenties, I worked for the Bush administration for three years. Finally, my mother said, “Come back. I want to retire.” If you watch The Real Housewives of Dallas, she didn’t retire. [laughs] When I got back to Dallas, I decided this was going to be my career because I had grown up at my mother’s side and I learned a lot about nutrition when she became ill with breast cancer. She shut her very successful business down. She was a manufacturer’s rep for a couture line. She decided to travel the world and learn about nutrition and health. She met with herbalists. She took me with her to a lot of these places. I went to a naturopathic doctor school for two years and really studied nutrition. I left only because I wanted to go to a university that was in Seattle. I couldn’t do that and stay at my mother’s company. There were so many moving parts.

But I have focused, since 2004, really on Ultimate Living—even though there were many times I wanted out because I wasn’t being able to make the decisions and things like that. But that’s the way it is in a family business. You have to have tenacity and stick with it and know that one day it’s going to be yours. But my story, I’m telling you, it was very hard-fought because I had that tension between my mother and I. It was horrible. It kept me up many nights, sleepless nights, many tears cried. It was arguments in the family. My dad would try to be peacemaker, and then he passed away. Then nothing happened. There was no movement.

My story is one of determination and tenacity. My dad used to have this word: “stick-to-itiveness.” I’ve had that and now it’s paid off because I have my own business. My mom wasn’t able to pay attention to it, so I’m now trying to revive it. We’ve rebranded. We’ve repackaged. It’s coming along. It’s a lot harder than if we had done this ten years ago. I have this business. I have a podcast. I do Real Housewives. I’m juggling a lot of different things.

PC: Who or what has had the biggest influence on your career?
D’Andra: The one woman who inspired me was Rosemary Bravo. It’s funny that’s her last name, right? I never put two and two together until right now. She was my boss when I was at Saks Fifth Avenue. She was the president and CEO. I was her assistant when I was twenty-four. She was very difficult to work for, but I made it work. We got along professionally. She taught me a lot about being tough, sexy, and being determined. That was back in the early nineties. She was somebody that I always aspired to be. She went on to be the CEO and president of Burberry and totally turned that brand around. Besides her, there were several women at Department of Energy. There’s a woman named Sandy. They took me under their wings.

They worked very hard in a man’s world. Nuclear waste was a complete man’s world. Not that many women were in nuclear waste. I went into another situation where it’s a bunch of men and they didn’t have any time for me. They’re like, “The political appointee down there: forget her. She’s only going to be here for a few years.” But I was able to make my way, learn the trade, and learn the program that we were working on, which was the license application for Yucca Mountain. I learned from these other women.

Then also, my father was a huge inspiration. He worked with my uncle Harold and he taught me the stock market. He taught me about business. He taught me about P&L balance sheets.

And of course, my mother. She had no education at all and she built a multimillion dollar company with a telephone, desk, and sales ability that is unmatched.

Those people, my family, and others who I’ve been working with since I was twelve. There have been a lot of people who have influenced me and inspired me over the years.

PC: You’ve had a lot of success in your career. When you look back, is there a particular moment that stands out?
D’Andra: I’ll tell you what’s interesting is as far as my career, there’s something that was more meaningful to me because I came back to Dallas, and when my mother and I were having this tug of war with the business, I started involving myself in more philanthropic efforts and fundraising for different charities.

I was terrified to go and ask people for money, but I went through a program as a junior lead because somebody told me you should do that. I ended up parlaying that into an entire program and model for fundraising and teaching fundraising for years and years. I became one of the top five fundraisers in Dallas, which I never would have predicted that because I was too shy to ask people for money. I created and developed a program where you tell your personal story, and then your personal story resonates with somebody, or they can understand why you’re involved in something that helped. Looking back, I was so surprised that I was standing in front of nine hundred women at the Salvation Army luncheon, having raised almost one million dollars. The most they’d ever raised in the past was six hundred fifty thousand. I look back at standing in front of all these people and I think, “How did I get here? How did I pull this off?” I took those skills and applied them to my business career. I’m telling people my story and they relate to my brand. It’s really a full-circle moment. I sat home and cried because I was like, “How did I get here?”

PC: What’s one thing you know now that you wish you knew when you started your career when you were twelve?
D’Andra: There are so many things. I was very gullible and I was very trusting. It’s a good thing because it’s bad if you’re hardened. But at the same time, I have so much trust in people until they show me not to trust them, which probably isn’t that great either. I’m like Pollyanna. I want to believe the best in everybody, but there’s people out there that want to hurt you, want to take you down, and want to give you misinformation because they’re jealous. I would say stay true to who you are and to your brand. Don’t let people take you off the course or down another rabbit hole that’s not for you. That’s something I definitely wish I knew. I would have stayed true to my brand and had more tenacity and vision about who I was and what I wanted to be. I didn’t figure that out until later because there were so many different things I was interested in.

Also, when people do hurt you or do try to damage you and your reputation, that’s not about you; that’s about that person. Sweep it under the rug. Don’t focus on the negative. Focus on the positive. I’ve learned how to do that lately, especially in The Real Housewives of Dallas.

PC: Speaking of The Real Housewives of Dallas, has anything surprised you about the experience?
D’Andra: Yes. I’ll be honest, I didn’t watch the Housewives before I joined. When I joined and signed a contract, I was like, “I better watch this.” I was like, “What have I done? There’s no way in hell I’m going to fit into this group.” [laughs] I thought, “This is a really bad mistake.” By the time I signed up for Housewives, I had a very clear vision of why I wanted to do it. You need to have a purpose for doing it because if you just want to be famous, it’s the worst decision you could ever make. But if you have a brand or a platform to go to when Housewives is over—because we all have an expiration date—it’s great.

At the same time, I was very surprised at how competitive and the lengths that people will go to lie about you and take you down. The social media stuff and the falsities and the press. People are vicious. Last night, and I know which cast member it was, created all these fake accounts and totally trashed me. The show’s not even on right now. They were trashing me to someone for simply saying that they liked me. That’s all that person said. They went on and on and on. They outed themselves with their last reply. I’m like, “You outed yourself.” You can’t keep your mouth shut. It’s a TV show. Move on. Go do something else with your life. Why are you spending hours and hours fighting with people on social media? It’s that quest for fame. It makes people crazy. That’s what I noticed is that it creates monsters.

PC: You recently launched your best-selling product, Green Miracle. Have you always been passionate about the health and wellness space? Tell us about the backstory behind that product.
D’Andra: Green Miracle was my mother’s first product that she ever created when she created Ultimate Living. That was in 1996. She literally had a desk, phone, and had to order a thousand units of this product. She sold it all and made one million dollars in her first year. She’s a fantastic salesperson. After she had breast cancer, she wanted to find out why she became ill. Then she found one green food product that had one ingredient, and she started taking it. She noticed that she felt better. She had more energy. She had more stamina. She was thinking clearer. And she thought, “There’s something to this.” She set out to find the perfect green food formula. There wasn’t any, so she created it. She was the first woman to ever create a green food. It had over eighty ingredients. It had fruits, vegetables, greens, phytonutrients, antioxidants, and immune builders.

We still to this day have that product. I’ve made it better. I increased the amount of greens. I’ve made them organic. I have taken out some things that weren’t in an efficacious level and put better things in there. The product today is an evolved version of the original product. It’s still our best seller. We rebranded and relaunched. It’s a great taste, whereas before it tasted like grass. But my mother was selling this to people that were having a disease problem in their life. They were dying. They didn’t care what it tasted like. They just wanted to be well. She believes—and this is still her belief—that she kept healthy all these years after having a mastectomy by taking this Green Miracle product faithfully every day of her life.

I’m the only woman in the family that hasn’t had cancer. My grandmother, my aunt, and my grandfather had cancer. I have been studying health and wellness, taking health and wellness products since I was eighteen years old, when my mother was diagnosed. I will always do that. I had my Green Miracle smoothie this morning. So did my husband. I’m very committed to the nutrition program. Look, I love to cook. I love to cook all things. I’m a Southern lady. We cook fried chicken and all that stuff too, but there’s a healthy balance in taking care of yourself. We have a Monday-through-Friday routine where we take all our nutrients and we eat very healthy. Then on weekends, we’ll let it go for a bit and have some fun.

PC: What advice would you give somebody who wanted to follow a similar career path like your own?
D’Andra: I get this question a lot. I would say, first of all, if you want to be an entrepreneur, it’s very important that you know what product or service you want to put out into the marketplace. You have to have a very detailed business plan, which I didn’t have. I spent years waffling around because I didn’t have a clear vision of where I wanted to go. Make sure you’ve defined your parameters of what you want to do, how you want to do it, how you want to sell it, and stick to that. Every couple of years, you need to look and reevaluate your goals. Ask yourself, “Have I met these goals? What do I do if I haven’t met these goals? How do I change course?” It’s important because a dream without a plan is just a dream. You need a plan.

Then I would seek the advice of mentors around you while you’re building your business plan. Then if you need funding—and it’s difficult for women to get funding. I’ll be the first one to tell you that. Women are denied, I think it was seventy or eighty percent of the time for loans. There are opportunities with banks that will give you money as long as they see a clear path forward with a business plan. It’s just hard to get money. I saved money for many years at the start of my business. I failed on two businesses before. I made two movies that didn’t do well. I lost my money, and I had to start over again.

I also waited tables. I worked retail jobs. I did everything I could to have extra money on the side. If there was Uber back then, I would have driven Uber to get extra money; trust me. I’ve always been one of those people that has had three or four jobs at a time in order to do what I really wanted to do. You have to do that. You have to be willing to say, “What am I going to sacrifice in order to make my dreams a reality?”

To keep up with D’Andra, follow her on Twitter and Instagram.