This article is part of Bísness School, a series that highlights one of the fastest-growing groups of entrepreneurs in the United States, Latinos. You can hear or watch the full conversation with Julissa Prado below.
For some people, it's braces. For others, it's acne. For Julissa Prado, her high school insecurity was her curly hair.
"I was straightening my hair by using a clothes iron over an ironing board," Julissa Prado said.
Prado is the co-founder of Rizos Curls, a hair care brand that specializes in textured hair.
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"You literally put your head over an ironing board, and then someone else gets an iron and they literally iron your hair straight," Prado said. "Ten out of ten don't recommend. But that's what we did. We would go to great lengths to straighten our hair and yeah, I would straighten my hair all the time. I hated my curly hair."
The hate stemmed from the fact that Prado, a Los Angeles native, didn't see curly hair as pretty. "The European standards of beauty were just so strong. That was the trend [of having] super shiny, straight slick hair," Prado said. "Whenever I would have my hair curly, kids would make fun of me. There were a lot of stereotypes surrounding curly hair and it being associated with having ugly bad hair."
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One day in high school, she decided to try to wear her hair curly, but she couldn't go to the local drugstore to buy product for her hair. "The textured haircare category, there wasn't much in there," Prado said.
Armed with knowledge from her Mexican grandmother, who often espoused home remedies for everything from a cold to a rash, Prado decided to make her own concoctions at home.
"I remember boiling flax seeds and making a little jelly, using aloe vera and all these different ingredients," Prado said. "And so I started kind of making my own concoctions, and I started wearing my hair curly to school. It changed my life. After wearing my hair curly confidently to school, I felt like I was like the Queen of England that day because I got so much attention."
That concoction would make her the "curl whisperer" at her high school and years later be the genesis for Rizos Curls, a hair care line she founded with her brother in 2017 that is now available in Target, Ulta Beauty and Nordstrom — and counts singers Chappell Roan and Thalía as customers.
Prado spoke to NBC's Bísness School about how her journey as a businesswoman started and why her brother was key to starting Rizos Curls. The answers have been edited for length and clarity.
Bísness School: Girls in your high school would pull you aside as you were walking by and they would say what?
Julissa Prado: Like if it was a secret, like they were undercover. I would be washing my hands in the bathroom when someone comes out of the stall and they're like, "Hey, here, like your curls. My hair is actually curly. I'm straightening it since I was six. How do you get it like that? What do you use?" And so I just became literally the curl whisperer. I was holding little classes in the bathroom. I could not keep up with the demand.
BS: After high school, you go to college and then graduate school. After graduate school in 2013, what do you do next?
JP: When I first started, I was in this accelerator program through Nestlé for recent graduates, and they kind of take you through learning little stunts in marketing, supply chain, finance and all these little things. When I did land my full-time official position, I was an account manager. So what I was essentially doing was managing different Nestlé brands that I was in charge of. I had Coffeemate. I had Nesquik at one point. I had Dreyer's, Haagen-Dazs. I had a bunch of billion-dollar brands and I would manage the business at different accounts. It was very interesting, you know, representing these brands in these retailers.
BS: All this time, from high school to your first job post-grad school, you're still meeting other women with curly hair and helping them with their textured hair. When does the idea for turning these hair care concoctions into a business arrive?
JP: I just remember being very annoyed at how my little concoctions I was making would go bad if I didn't keep them in the refrigerator. And I just remember having some money saved up because I had been working during my internship [in graduate school]. And then also I had just started with Nestlé and I had a signing bonus, and I just had some money saved up. I remember thinking, "OK, the responsible thing to do would be to maybe buy an apartment or buy some kind of property." But I kind of want to find a way to make my formulas professional. So I went to my brother and I told him how I, for years, I've been making my own concoctions, and that I wanted to use my extra money to kind of make them professional, or look into it.
BS: What did your brother say?
JP: "I'm going to need some time." And so he did his own research, and then he came back to me and when I tell you, I've never seen my brother be excited like this and so supportive, almost to delusion. He came back and said, "You know, it's not a question of whether you should do this. You have to do this. You have to do this fast, and you have to put as much money as you can. Invest everything. And I'm going to help you." I've never seen him react like that. He's so nonchalant and so casual and he never cares about anything. And he also is a big skeptic. He always play devil's advocate, always pokes holes. But in this situation, I was just so shocked that he told me with such certainty that I had to do it.
BS: What did he see that made him so adamant about it?
JP: He had done research looking at the textured hair care space, and he saw that there was so much white space there and such a need for not only hair care products, especially for my kind of hair type, but [also for] clean beauty. [It] did not exist. There were no products with clean ingredients, based on natural ingredients. There was nothing out there for Latinos, period.
Watch the full conversation with Julissa Prado to learn how she launched the business, how Hurricane Maria brought customers her way in 2017 and how her brand became the first Latina-owned curly hair care brand to be sold in all 1,300 Ulta Beauty stores nationwide.
