This New Clean Beauty Brand Is For Latinas By Latinas

“I started my beauty career five years ago and, since then, I noticed what everyone is I hope noticing now, and that’s a massive gap in the Latinx clean beauty community,” says Christina Kelmon, co-founder of cosmetics brand Belle en Argent, founder of Beautely, an advisory and investment firm focused on women-owned beauty businesses, and co-founder of BLXVC, a syndicate funding underrepresented entrepreneurs. “Most brands are treating us either as an afterthought or a cliché, to be nice. So, I got together with Ann, and we decided we wanted to do something about it.”

That something is Vamigas, a new clean beauty brand from Kelmon and Ann—more specifically, Ann Dunning, an online publicity expert and Kelmon’s co-founder at BLXVC—launching with six products crossing skincare, body care and haircare: face oil Luz de Sur, cleanser Olinda, face mist Pampas, hair and body mist Del Mar, hair oil Cielito and everything balm Milagritos. The products are currently available for pre-order with shipping beginning April 1.

“We are both moms with little girls under 2. Especially during the lockdowns, we have gotten attuned to cooking, DIY recipes, health and wellness, and this idea that the Scandinavians have of hygge, which involves coziness and self-care,” says Dunning, mentioning Vamigas is a nod to her and Kelmon’s daughters Valentina and Margaux (it contains their initials “M” and “V”) and includes the Spanish word for friends, “amigas.” “Our brand is into this idea of coziness and self-care, not pampering, but creating a world where you feel good and tranquil because that’s in particular what moms want.”

Vamigas is intent on building a community around self-care geared toward Latinas. Content is a critical part of the strategy to build it. On Vamigas’s website, there’s a blog called “Nuestros Cuentos” delving into the stories and rituals of the Latinas the brand is attempting to attract. Dunning compares the brand’s content to Goop for Latinas. She says, “There really wasn’t somewhere you as a Latina could go and read about yoga or skincare or maybe DIY shampoos.”

Dunning and Kelmon believe there’s a sizable group of gen X and millennial Latinas eluding stereotypes that consumer goods brands miss—and the Vamigas co-founders are in that group. Born in Viña del Mar, a city northwest of Santiago in Chile, Dunning immigrated to Los Angeles at 9 years old. Kelmon is a fourth-generation Mexican American with paternal roots in Oaxaca. The co-founders and Silicon Valley insiders met three years ago through Pipeline Angels, a network of angel investors backing trans women, cis women, nonbinary, two-spirit, agender and gender-nonconforming founders.

“Our brand is into this idea of coziness and self-care, not pampering, but creating a world where you feel good and tranquil.”

Dunning explains the group is made up of “Latinas who are second, third or fourth generation or Latinas who came here when they were little…They are not reading Spanish language newspapers or watching telenovelas. They are reading blogs, following influencers, streaming the same movies general population is streaming, etc. This means that there is a huge gap that is very ready for authentic brands to fill and really connect with. That’s where Vamigas comes in. We want to truly own that huge gap, with products that know how to speak to Latinas, that understand them.”

To speak to Latinas, Vamigas weaves their culture into products by incorporating ingredients from Latin and South America. For example, Luz de Sur, the brand’s hero product, has a blend of eight Latin American botanicals. The botanicals are rosa mosqueta, chia, prickly pear, papaya, jojoba, maracuja, maqui and açaí.

“One thing that was really bothering us was that we saw so many brands using ingredients from our homelands, and no brands were saying, ‘This is from Chile. This is from Mexico.’ So, we really wanted to bring that to the forefront, and say, ‘Hey, did you know that these ingredients are actually from Latin America, and our ancestors have been using them for centuries?’ That was important for us to give some pride to the Latina community,” says Dunning. “And that’s where this idea of wanting to decolonize Latin American ingredients comes in. In skincare, there’s this trend of using ingredients like rosa mosqueta, but many of the people using them have no people from Latinx communities [at their brands].”

With the ingredients in its products, Vamigas responds to skincare concerns specific to its audience such as hypermigmentation. According to data from consumer research firm Collage Group supplied by the brand, 33% of Latinas report skin coloring and skin tone are significant skincare concerns versus 22% of non-Latinas reporting they are significant concerns. Asked about wrinkles, 45% of Latinas say they’re a big concern versus 36% of non-Latinas. Vamigas also highlights that 55% of Latinas say it’s crucial to them that the “hair or skin of the person featured in an ad is similar to” theirs.

“Our main goal is to be the largest Latinx-focused CPG brand.”

A quality Vamigas’s target consumers share with Latinas overall is a strong penchant for beauty purchases. A Women’s Wear Daily article last year details findings from consumer insights company Nielsen that reveal Latinx shoppers constitute 14.1% of beauty shoppers, but are responsible for 18.5% of beauty spending. Latinx shoppers shell out an average of $167 annually on beauty products compared to the average of $135 annually for the general population. In 2019, United States Census information shows people of Hispanic or Latinx descent accounted for 18% of the U.S. population at around 60 million people. By 2026, people of Hispanic and Latinx descent are anticipated to account for about 27% of the U.S. population.

Kelmon and Dunning opted for Vamigas’s assortment to span multiple beauty categories and be priced in the mid-tier of the market—individual products range from $24 to $34—because they have bold ambitions to make the self-funded brand a substantial business, although they declined to disclose exactly how substantial. Its merchandise category reach could extend further. Kelmon and Dunning point to cosmetics as possibilities for Vamigas.

While it’s kicking off in direct-to-consumer distribution, Kelmon and Dunning expect retail partnerships to be impactful sales drivers for the brand and are interested in placing it in an array of retailers, from clean beauty concepts to major conventional chains. Subscription boxes will be in the mix, too. At Belle en Argent, Kelmon has had positive experiences with Ipsy fueling consumer awareness.

From guiding her other beauty brand, Kelmon says she learned to “be very specific on what your main goal is, and our main goal is to be the largest Latinx-focused CPG brand. That’s our focus. So, every partner that we are going to even think about, it has to be through that angle.” The focus provides Vamigas a lot of room for expansion, Kelmon says, because “clean beauty is just really at the beginning stages and, in terms of talking to the Latinx community, I think it really hasn’t even started yet.”