When was the last time you shopped for a brand because it was Latina owned? Perhaps the answer comes immediately. Perhaps the question stops you mid-scroll while you try to remember. Either way, it says something worth sitting with, about who your dollars find and who they never reach.
That question carries real weight this season. Latino-owned businesses grew 44 percent between 2018 and 2023, now numbering more than 465,000 firms nationwide, according to Stanford’s Latino Business Action Network, and Hispanic women-owned firms alone have topped 1.9 million, growing at a pace that consistently outran the broader economy. Visibility inside that growth is never a courtesy. Every feature, every repost, every dollar spent with a Latina-owned brand compounds into the kind of economic power that shapes what gets funded and built next.
This Hispanic Heritage Month, we are adding our voice to that momentum by spotlighting four Hispanic-owned businesses we genuinely admire, each one building differently, each one holding a lesson worth carrying into your own work. Below are four brands we are studying this season, and what each one taught us about the long game.
She Fed the Block Before Building Her Brand
LaRayia Gaston built LaRayia’s Bodega on a foundation most founders would call unconventional: forty-three days spent living among the unhoused on LA’s Skid Row while directing a documentary. What she witnessed there, about food access and who gets to eat well, became the seed of a business. She had been vegan since nineteen, long before it carried any cultural currency, and she understood healthy food as a form of care she wanted to extend, rather than a lifestyle to sell.
The bodega opened first in Los Angeles as an organic, vegan ninety-nine-cent store built to address food justice. When she brought the concept to Atlanta’s Ponce City Market, she carried the same DNA into the Central Food Hall: a Caribbean-inspired, Afro-Latina, woman-owned micro-market decorated with art honoring Tupac, Biggie, and Nipsey Hussle, where smoothies named for OutKast sit beside café cubano. The space now pulls in between 150 and 300 customers a day, and it functions as much as a community living room as a business.
Gaston never separated her mission from her margin. Giving away free food was, in her words, her form of tithing, and that generosity became the brand’s signature rather than a drain on it. Customers make a seat anywhere in her space and stay for hours, because the bodega was built to hold them first, and to sell to them second.
🚀 Chromie Tip: Name the specific thing you are protecting before you name your product. Gaston protected food access for people who looked like her family, and that specificity is what let strangers feel the mission from the first visit. Write down the exact outcome you refuse to compromise on, then check every offer, price point, and partnership against it. A mission stated in general terms invites everyone to project their own meaning onto it, while a mission stated with precision becomes unmistakably yours.
Transparency Is a Flex
Unda Natural makes shampoo, conditioner, and hair masks out of Guadalajara, Mexico, built around eco-friendly packaging and a clear promise: cuidando el planeta y tu cabello, caring for the planet and your hair. The formulas matter, but the brand’s real signature is how openly the team shows the work behind them.
Across TikTok and Reels, Unda Natural pulls back the curtain on the actual process of building a product line: batching, testing, sourcing, the unglamorous middle that most brands edit out of their content. That transparency has become a growth engine in its own right, turning customers into witnesses of the build rather than passive shoppers scrolling past a polished final shot.
There is a lesson here for any founder tempted to wait until everything looks perfect before she posts. Unda Natural proves the in-between stages, the testing, the small failures, the resourcefulness, carry their own pull. People trust a brand more, never less, when they can see the hands that built it.
🚀 Chromie Tip: Document one unglamorous step of your process this week and share it exactly as it happened. Skip the caption that explains it away or apologizes for it. Let your audience see a real decision get made, a real trade-off get weighed. The behind-the-scenes moment your instinct wants to hide is usually the content that builds the most trust, because it shows judgment instead of just a finished product.
She Turned a Scalp Oil Into a Sephora Empire
Babba Rivera launched Ceremonia in 2020 with a single product: a scalp oil called Aceite de Moska, inspired by her father’s early career as a hairdresser in Chile and the hair rituals she grew up with. Before beauty, she spent years in marketing at Uber and Away, and she brought that operator’s discipline into a category she loved.
The brand grew from that one bottle into a full line of twenty products, then into more than five hundred Sephora doors as the first Latina-founded haircare brand carried by the retailer. Rivera raised three million dollars in early funding and later a ten-million-dollar Series A, placing her among only fifty-eight Latinas ever to raise seven figures in venture capital. Sales climbed 230 percent in a single year, and Ceremonia opened its first flagship store in New York’s SoHo neighborhood as the next step in a deliberate, omnichannel strategy.
What Ceremonia shows is that scale rewards focus more than speed. Rivera resisted the urge to launch twenty products at once. She built credibility around one exceptional item, let the story around it deepen, and only then expanded the shelf. Retail partnerships, funding rounds, and a flagship store all arrived once the proof already existed, never as a substitute for it.
🚀 Chromie Tip: Before you chase your next big retail or funding milestone, ask whether your current best-seller has earned it yet. Look at your top product’s repeat-purchase rate and the language customers use to describe it in reviews or DMs. If the proof is strong, that is your leverage in every negotiation ahead. If it is still thin, spend another season deepening it before you spend energy expanding it.
Brand Equity Runs in the Family
Natalie Boden traces her business instincts to a textile shop in Honduras, opened by her grandmother in the 1960s and run as a single mother of three before Boden’s own parents took over. She grew up working alongside them, watching a family build something, grow it, and use it to support other families along the way. That childhood became the foundation for Boden Agency, the cross-cultural communications firm she leads today.
Boden has said her mother and grandmother remain living proof that a Latina entrepreneur can succeed in a field long dominated by men. She never had to invent belief in that possibility. She inherited it, along with a work ethic and an eye for building something that lasts.
This is where the lens turns to you. If you spent twenty or more years leading inside organizations before starting your own firm, you are carrying a version of the same inheritance Boden carries. Every team you developed, every client relationship you protected, every hard call you made under pressure lives inside your brand equity now, whether you have named it yet or left it unspoken.
The Legacy Ledger
A quick inventory of the brand equity you already own
- Name one person who modeled resilience or business instinct for you before you ever called it that.
- Name one lesson from your corporate or professional years you still lean on today.
- Name one moment your judgment carried a room, and write down what that judgment was actually built on.
- Name what you want your business to still be doing for other people, twenty years from now.
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Fill in even one line and you will see it: this season carries forward a brand that has been building for years already, long before its name went on the door.
🚀 Chromie Tip: Write your own Legacy Ledger before you finalize your firm’s positioning or messaging. The language you use to describe your inherited brand equity often becomes the most authentic copy on your website, because it comes from lived experience rather than a template. Founders who skip this step tend to write generic bios. Founders who do this exercise first tend to write ones that actually sound like them.
Our Playbook for the Long Game
Four different founders, four different paths, and one shared truth: none of them built a business by accident. Gaston’s mission needed brand strategy sharp enough to hold both a food justice cause and a thriving retail concept without losing either. Unda Natural’s transparency only works because their web design and social media management make the behind-the-scenes feel intentional rather than chaotic. Rivera’s flagship store and Sephora rollout needed brand activations built to translate one bottle’s story into a five-hundred-door experience. Boden’s inherited legacy needed a brand strategy sturdy enough to carry decades of family history into a modern firm.
This is the work we do at Chroma Creators®, every day, for founders exactly like you. Whether your brand equity comes from twenty years in a boardroom or two decades of Sunday dinners where the family business got built at the kitchen table, it deserves a brand strategy, a web design, a social media management approach, and brand activations built with the same intention these four founders brought to theirs.
About Chroma Creators®
The founder of Creative Juice™ and Chroma Creators® is an award-winning creative director, entrepreneur, and SCAD Emerging Alumni honoree with over 13 years of experience building brands that last. Based in Atlanta, Georgia, she has led campaigns for 400+ clients including The Home Depot, MARTA, Chick-fil-A, and Georgia Tech. She recently launched Chroma Creators®, a creative brand dedicated to building power brands for powerful Black founders.
You carry a version of Gaston’s mission, Unda Natural’s honesty, Rivera’s discipline, and Boden’s inheritance inside the brand you are building or the one you are about to launch. What often stands between a founder like you and her next chapter is rarely permission. It is direction.
If you are ready to translate your own years of experience into a brand built with this same intention. Book a discovery call with Chroma Creators®. Bring your version of the Legacy Ledger with you. We would love to help you fill in the rest.