Gabriela Trujillo knows firsthand the power of combining passion and perseverance, with a dash of creative intuition on top for good measure. Born in Havana, Cuba, Trujillo moved to Miami with her family at age three. She currently resides in Hialeah, which has the highest percentage of Cuban-Americans in any US city with 94.7%. This heritage plays a key part in the ethos of her cosmetics brand, Alamar Cosmetics—the brand name is derived from the neighborhood of Alamar where she grew up—which was founded in 2018 with the tagline “celebrating culture through cosmetics.” “Latin, urban culture really influences my brand in the names of the products and the color selection. It's all very vibrant, colorful, seasoned, full of life. It’s present in everything that I do from what I eat to the people I surround myself with, so it's inevitable for that to spill into my product creation,” she explains.
Her time as a makeup artist at MAC Cosmetics and marketing manager at BoxyCharm proved to be an essential training ground for branching out into beauty entrepreneurship, arming her with the necessary know-how for product formulations and community strategy. “I feel like if I hadn't had those jobs, I wouldn't have been able to do the brand. At MAC, I learned so much about working with different skin tones and different types of people. I had a really good idea of what products were going to work the best across the board, and I learned so much about product ingredients, knowledge, and efficiency. With BoxyCharm, I learned so much about how to market a product to a wide range of people, how to build a following in the community. I've implemented what I learned at both in my brand,” she comments.
The business was completely self-funded, aided by her own personal savings, which she boosted with freelance makeup artistry alongside her full-time job at BoxyCharm. “I always worked as much as I could. I was still freelancing for weddings and quinces and never turned down a job. I was saving money the entire time; I just didn't know what for,” she recalls. With $20,000 in savings and the creative spark that was to become Alamar Cosmetics, she began with one SKU: the Reina Del Caribe Eyeshadow Palette, a tropical explosion of metallic teals and turquoises contrasted with matte burnt oranges and deep raspberry tones.
The profits from the launch went directly into funding her next product, the Spanglish Pressed Pigment Palette, “my love letter to being living in a hyphen, being equally as Cuban as I am American,” she explains. Its color palette is an ode to her ’90s childhood, with purple and peach tones in finishes ranging from multicolor reflecting metallics to neutral matte shades. Her third launch were the DesNUDEAs lip liners, a best seller to this day—a six-shade-strong collection that accommodated all skin tones from the most fair to the deepest complexions. To date, the company has launched over 30 SKUs and now encompasses items such as trio bronzer palettes with talc-free and hyaluronic acid-infused formulas, beaming liquid-to-powder highlighters, and lip plumpers with skin-boosting ingredients like jojoba and argan oil. The newest release are liquid blushes with a serum-like texture in striking hues such as orchid purple and strawberry red.
Aside from her Cuban-American roots, keeping her finger on the pulse has been another guiding star in Trujillo’s product development process. Being a self-funded startup with a modest amount of team members has given her the ability to change direction with the ever-speedening, shifting tides of the market. “One of the strengths of being a smaller business is that you can pivot more easily. You cannot take anything personally; you have to be willing to say ‘Oh, that didn't work, change it’ and not die on that hill of ‘I need to push this product,’ because sometimes it's just not what the market wants at that exact moment,” she adds.
Her intuitive approach to brand leadership and product development has not gone unnoticed. The company was announced the winner of this year’s Valdé Latinx Beauty Entrepreneur Grant. Founded last year as an extension of the Valdé NFT Collective, the win includes a $10,000 grant as well as business services such as PR, brand marketing, and legal support. Alamar Cosmetics was selected for the semi-finalist round along with Araceli Beauty and Miss Rizos. Judges and mentors for this year included UOMA Beauty’s Sharon Chuter, Wander Beauty co-founder Divya Gugnani, Briogeo founder Nancy Twine, Shop Latinx founder Brittany Chavez, and Vice President of Estée Lauder Companies, Alicia Romero.
“Margarita [Arriagada, founder and CEO of Valdé Beauty] is really passionate about helping young women getting into beauty. Ever since I met her she's encouraged me to apply for this grant and believes in my brand,” the entrepreneur enthuses. “It was amazing to win that grant; $10,000 helps with operational costs so much. It's an injection of cash that takes the strain off having to be hyperintentional with every dollar. That's an incredible opportunity there, but for me, the most valuable asset is the connections with the people involved in the grant.”
Those connections are helping to shape the retail future of Alamar Cosmetics. While the brand launched with three products at 200+ Target doors and on the retailer’s site as part of Hispanic Heritage Month in September 2020, a majority of its business has been through its direct-to-consumer presence. “Getting us into retail is something I've wanted to do for a long time. You have to be extremely knowledgeable and intentional because the profit [margin] is super slim. One little hiccup can cost you your entire profit, so having experts in that field that can guide me is absolutely priceless,” she adds. “There have been so many times where I've gone through the door with a retailer and then see the fine print of all the little expenses I'm responsible for, like returns or damages, and when I add it up, I realize that could be everything [that we have].” With the grant cash injection and invaluable guidance of her mentors, Trujillo is looking to take things to the next level.
Commenting on the role that such programs play in the future of the beauty industry, she notes, “These initiatives are incredibly important. When you start off as so many women like me do, never knowing anybody to be a CEO, you're doing this blind. You’re doing this by the skin of your teeth, mistakes are your only teacher. Having access to people that have successfully done this, that want to lift you up—without them I honestly don't see how it would even be possible. It’s giving you an insight to places that are unimaginable to us."
Coming along for the exciting ride of her post-grant-win are Alamar Cosmetics’s 225,000 Instagram followers and 105,000 TikTok followers. Trujillo’s social media strategy is putting the customer experience and connection at the forefront, with a booming TikTok community and free same-day virtual color match analysis services through Instagram. “You have to take into account what's trending at the moment. Social media is the biggest tool for marketing,” she proclaims. “The liquid serum blushes were an idea that I personally probably wouldn't have launched on my own, just because it's not a popular category within my community—we're more into very pigmented powder blushes. But I saw that there was a need for it; my customers were asking for it. So I take into account what's current and also what is fundamentally important.”
One of those fundamentals is shade range inclusivity, which is no easy feat as a self-funded indie brand. “We try to make sure there's something for every single person even with our small budget. For us to launch five colors is a big deal because there's a minimum order for each shade, but I always have to make sure that there's a shade for everyone. I'm really proud of that,” the founder explains.
A quick-witted polymath, Trujillo makes sure there is open communication through the marketing as well as creative departments of her company. “I'm seeing everything that's coming through our customer service department; just trying to stay as closely connected to the customer as possible, so I know their needs and how to respond to them. A super small set of loyal, happy customers is way more valuable than 500,000 followers with no connection. I strongly believe that it's about the strength of the relationship rather than the number of followers,” she remarks.
Her customer base, while predominantly Hispanic, spans across ages, demographics, and locations, with Miami, San Antonio, New York, and LA being top-selling areas. Trujillo describes a unifying aspect of her broad audience as “a mindset, a person that really loves beauty, glam, loves to do their makeup, but has an emotional heart and loves to support brands that have more authenticity, heart, and story. They are excited to share your brand with their friends and family.”
The power of that mindset and adoration for what Alamar Cosmetics has to offer continues to flourish over time. “My community is still so powerful that I can have an entire business and pay myself a salary for five years. To me it’s insane that I've been able to do that just creating products and doing something I love,” Trujillo says. In her five years of business, the company has made $5 million. “I can't even fathom that. Of course, it's all gone right back into the brand,” she adds.
The industry recognized this growing loyal following. In 2021, the brand partnered with Disney on the Encanto Colección, a 13-product collection in honor of the namesake animated release which tells the story of a multigenerational Colombian family trying to preserve the magic tradition in their family. Janet Coleman, Vice President of Marketing at Disney, reached out to Trujillo directly on Instagram to set the collaboraiton (which completely sold out upon release) in motion.
“Never in a million years could I have imagined them saying we would be the best person to create a collection of products to capture the beauty of this new movie. I thought ‘I will do anything to make this work.’ I paused all my other projects; every dollar we had allocated to something else, I pulled to make sure I could make this happen,” Trujillo says. “She put so much trust in me, took such a major risk, because these collabs usually are with MAC or ColourPop—multimillion dollar brands where Disney stands to make so much money because they sell so much makeup. For them to do it with an indie brand like me, they saw the value in doing it with a smaller brand that could really speak to the Latino community the way we could.” Trujillo spent over a year working on the collection, translating colors from still images of the film directly into color cosmetics, to translate that mystical quality into the products—after all, makeup is in itself something akin to magic with its ability to transform and excite.
As for the keys to her success in a highly competitive industry, Trujillo states, “There's so much great makeup out there, but having an authentic story that people can relate to—everybody on my team, we're all immigrants, live here in Miami, and we're figuring it out as we go along and sharing our dynamic;that speaks really well to our audience because they see themselves in us. It’s them seeing how much passion we put into the products; that we're not just mass producing for the sake of sales. That relationship and showing them behind the scenes is how we're able to build such an engaged community because they're invested in us and in the process.”
When it comes to her upcoming business plans, the entrepreneur wants to “push the envelope on innovative techniques in products” as well as expand distribution to South America. Her words of advice for other aspiring beauty brand owners? “Do it for yourself, because you love it, because you love product, and know what your passion is, and what your strengths are,” she states. “There are going to be times where there's no money, and you have to be able to compartmentalize that. You have to have savings for a rainy day. You can't always fall into the hype of needing to launch something. You cannot compare and have to do things at your pace. Slow and steady wins the race for sure.”
