Rizos Curls has been making waves for Latinas as founder and CEO Julissa Prado continues to light up the natural hair market with innovative products, fresh ingredients, and eye-popping branding. Rizos was the culmination of Julissa spending years trying to love and embrace her textured curls and finding products to help remedy the most basic hair needs. She wanted to create products that would not only help treat common natural hair challenges like frizz and dryness, but also empower customers to truly love and embrace their curls, coils, kinks, and waves. Rizos Curls now spans several hair products, tools, accessories, with clean and natural ingredients that help nourish, hydrate, and moisturize hair. Customers can be delighted with the brand’s education approach that not only promotes their products but teaches them how to use them functionally in their everyday hair styling. We spoke with Julissa to discuss the brand’s impactful messaging on culture, products, and the newest trends for the year.
Which Latinx beauty pioneers inspired you growing up?
Selena and Jennifer Lopez were my two biggest Latina beauty idols growing up.
One of your biggest rollouts featured a collaboration with Thalia, why was having a Latinx celebrity important for your brand?
Working with a Latina celebrity was important to me because I always want to shine a light and uplift Latinx voices. However, what was more important to me with the Thalia collaboration was to tell the story of her curl love journey. First, never in my wildest dreams did I ever think I’d get a phone call from Thalia to help bring her curls back to life. Thalia, like many people, had been looking to revive her natural curls and waves and enhance the health of her hair from past heat damage. So, Thalia and I worked closely to be able to share a regimen with people to give them the steps to revive and nourish their beautiful curls and maintain a healthy scalp and hair.
You remain so dedicated to community and culture with your online customer base, why is it important for you as founder to provide that visibility?
The very heart and DNA of Rizos Curls is Curls, Community and Culture. Everything we do – from the products we develop, to our marketing campaigns, to how we/I show up on social – revolves around those three Cs. We exist to empower our online customer base and beyond to uplift and celebrate Curls, Community and Culture. It’s important for me to uphold those three C’s because that’s where the representation we seek lies in.
Read more about Rizos Curls’ origin story.
Rizos Curls social media is integral to the marketing of the brand by giving clever, witty, and relatable content that reflects the Latinx experience, what goes into the ideation of your social content?
As a brand, we’re storytellers first. Whether it’s to educate, inspire, or whatever the message is, we have to be able to tell a story with the product and/or content. The ideation process for us is simple – it’s whatever our community wants. We show up on social media where they are, not where we think we want them to be. The ideas come from our comments, DMs, and emails. We really put ourselves in our community’s shoes and think about how they would want to learn about our products or be entertained by us.
We’re seeing an evolution of more Latinx brands enter the beauty sphere, how is this breaking Latinx beauty tropes?
The rise of Latinx brands is happening thanks to our community now having more access, education and more representation. We’re sharing resources and knowledge. It’s also in part to the combination of the consumer demand and the need to a focus on our unique cultural rituals.
What inspired your newest product the “Volumizing Hair Spray”?
The inspiration for our Volumizing Hair Spray is due to our own customer requests combined with my own need to develop a hair spray that gave hold, volume, and shine without compromising the health of the hair with an alcohol-free formula all while being good for the planet with the non-aerosol mist pump.
For first time users scarred from the hair spray of yesteryears, what are your best hair spray styling tips?
First, you can load up on our Volumizing Hair Spray without any guilt of damage thanks to the formula of clean and natural ingredients including Red Algae, Argan Oil and Rosemary.
For mega volume, spray the Rizos Curls Volumizing Hairspray all over the roots of your hair. An important step is to toss your hair forward so it hangs upside down and continue misting the hair spray on all roots. Then toss is back. Next, you’re going to grab your favorite hair pick, and begin fluffing your hair from just the roots in an upward motion. Add more hair spray to the root of your hair, if desired. Keep picking until you’ve achieved your desired volume.
Another tip is that you can apply our Volumizing Hair Spray on wet hair for even stronger hold than when it’s dry for even updos, buns, etc.
What hair trends are inspiring you at the moment?
At the moment, now that my hair is the longest and healthiest it’s ever been, I’m loving styles that keep my hair down but away from my face. So, I’m really enjoying half up and half down styles with playful braids or really cute headbands, incorporating clips, scarfs, and/or any different accessory for that cross between style and functional.
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