Adriel Sanders, 41, got employment as a corporate securities and mergers and acquisitions lawyer after graduating from law school. However, she didn’t like becoming a lawyer. “The entire firm was aware of it. The secret was not well kept. I made an effort to act as though I desired a partner, but I was unable to keep up that front. “I never even considered becoming a lawyer,” Sanders says to CNBC Make It.
“I didn’t enjoy the work and the expectation to work all the time and I will probably be one of the only attorneys who says it, but I don’t think it’s that intellectually stimulating.”
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After leaving that position, Sanders—who goes by Adriel Felise online—became general counsel for a publicly traded corporation. According to documents examined by CNBC Make It, Sanders was earning $286,656 annually and residing in Washington, D.C., at the time. She paid roughly $3,000 a month in rent for her studio apartment.
“Throughout my career, I encountered the kinds of situations that are frequently encountered by Black women employed in corporate America. “You keep running into this glass ceiling,” Sanders adds. “I was incredibly unhappy, right down to the core of my tiny heart and soul. I was aware that it couldn’t be sustained.
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Sanders dreamed of launching her own clothing business while working her 9 to 5. To get away from the never-ending grind of her job, she even took up photography in her spare time.
“One of my main creative outlets was photography. Starting a fashion line isn’t about quitting a stable job; rather, it’s about doing what I should have been doing all along. According to Sanders, “I feel like I’m stepping into my purpose.”
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The first time Sanders and her two brothers visited Paris was in 2017. Everything changed on that trip. After a difficult flight, Sanders was a little irritated when they initially got to the city. She was prompted by her younger brother to survey their surroundings.
“It clicked right away. “This is your home,” I said. She declares, “This is where you should be in the world and where you will always be.” “I knew I had to move to Paris.”
Following that initial visit, Sanders returned to Paris on multiple occasions. “The moment I stepped off the plane, I felt like I could just breathe,” she relates. She made the decision to relocate across the Atlantic in 2019.
Sanders quit her work, notified her landlord, and began the French visa application procedure at the beginning of 2020. She flew to France for a few days while a moving firm packed up her stuff and got ready to transport them everything abroad, and she called Adrian Leeds from HGTV’s “House Hunters International” to assist her choose an apartment.
The day before France closed its border because of the COVID-19 outbreak, Sanders arrived in Paris.
“France accelerated due of the world’s slowness. The good news is that I was perplexed by what was going on, but so was everyone else, since we were all functioning from the same level of bewilderment,” Sanders adds. “I arrived the day before the lockdown, so there was no one and it was a complete dystopia.”
Sanders leased a one-bedroom flat for 1,550 euros, or $1,815 USD, and spent two years there. After that, she signed a three-year lease and moved into a two-bedroom apartment with one bathroom.
When she originally moved in, the rent was 1,980 euros, or $2,319 EUR. Since then, it has gone up to $2,540 USD.
Sanders had to buy her own kitchen cabinets, stove, and washing machine because she lived in what is known as a “unfurnished apartment” in Paris. She thinks that in order to make the space truly seem like home, she spent nearly another $10,000 and another $5,000 on the kitchen.
“Could I have done it cheaper, 100% but my view is that I don’t know when I will leave so I want to have things the way I want them,” she continues.
Sanders’ monthly expenses, which include domestic bills including cable, internet, renter’s insurance, dry washing, energy and gas, private health insurance, and a Navigo mobility card, amount to an average of 963 euros, or $1,128 in addition to rent.
In addition, she has a 95-euro annual subscription to the Louvre and a second museum card that might raise her annual expenses by an additional 50-100 euros. In order to continue renting in France, she additionally pays a guarantor service 1,069.20 euros, or $1,252, a year.
Sanders performed some legal consulting when she first got to Paris, but she ultimately decided it was time to put her money on herself. She claims that when she left that position, she had roughly $200,000 in her business account and $70,000 in personal savings. She then focused entirely on starting her fashion line, Adriel Felise, and developing her skills as a content creator.
Sanders’ new business endeavor is financed in part by that money as well as her earnings from content creation. She has also benefited from the assistance of her parents, who are retired.
“I’m thankful for it because it allows me to do the fashion line’s runway debut, which is, in my opinion, the most crucial objective. Knowing that I won’t fall and can follow my dreams gives me the freedom to do so,” she says.
In order to have her 10-piece collection ready for release in 2026, Sanders plans to gather at least $2 million in addition to self-funding the creation of her initial prototypes and samples.
Sanders said she discovered she is more resourceful than she initially believed after leaving the US and her corporate law practice. “I can use my strategic side that I learned as a lawyer, but implement it in a very creative way.” she claims.
“I love fashion and I’m so happy that I can now just say that and be upfront about it because for so long it was treated as something that made me less serious.”
It still doesn’t feel real to see Sanders’ dream of launching a fashion business come true, which she had while working as a lawyer and taking walks around her office building.
“There’s still a part of me that strives and pushes for more so I don’t know if I’m fully ready to say I’m proud but I feel like I’m actually happy, which I wasn’t for so long and that’s huge for me,” she explains.
“I want to encourage women, especially brown and Black women, to simply follow their aspirations. It makes no difference when they do. The most crucial thing is that they have courage, make smart decisions, and just go for it.
Sanders intends to remain based in Paris and eventually own a house in the country. Sanders has visited France, Italy, Switzerland, Greece, and other places since relocating. She is now planning to spend the remainder of the summer in northern France, either in Normandy or the Loire Valley.
“I wish I had had the courage to move sooner. I wish I had the courage to do it after my first semester of law school to either drop out or enroll in business school and do something different that would have given me more options and choice to not get pigeonholed into something that I knew from the beginning I didn’t want to be,” she says.
“I know that Americans really love to classify based upon age, race, etc. but I don’t want to be classified as anything other than a woman who believed in herself enough to ignore the naysayers and go for her hopes and dreams.”
Conversions from euros to USD were done using the OANDA conversion rate of 1 euro to 1.17 USD on July 23, 2025. All amounts are rounded to the nearest dollar.
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