Babba Rivera (Ceremonia) on Making Business Personal, Winning Retail, and Convincing Investors to Bet on Latinx Communities
Description
Building a beauty brand that celebrates Latin culture while competing on a global stage is no small feat—but for Babba Rivera, it’s not just business— it’s personal.
Babba founded Ceremonia to create a haircare brand rooted in Latin heritage, ritual, and community. Today, Ceremonia is one of the fastest-growing brands at Sephora, has raised over $11 million, and just took home an Allure Beauty Award. In this conversation, Babba shares how she built a company that’s as mission-driven as it is profitable—cutting marketing costs by half while still growing revenue—and what it really takes to lead a fast-scaling startup as a founder and mom of four.
Babba also shares about her early days leading teams at Uber and Away, the power of saying no to investors who don’t get your vision, and why she believes the future of beauty is community-first, not celebrity-led.
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Here’s what Sammi covers with Babba:
00:00 Babba Rivera’s Social Currency
02:27 Growing Up Between Cultures
05:07 Early Beauty Rituals and Haircare Influences
07:00 Lessons from Uber
10:48 The Wild World of Away
13:11 From Marketing Agency to Beauty Brand
15:53 The Birth of Ceremonia
19:44 Navigating Funding During COVID-19
22:36 Direct to Consumer and Learning from Customers
27:00 Strategic Move to Credo
27:16 Scaling with Sephora
28:04 Challenges of Big Retailers
30:27 Allure Best of Beauty Award
33:46 Focus on Profitability
38:01 Representation in Beauty
45:11 Balancing Motherhood and Business
50:05 Daily Routines and Systems
53:31 How to Show Social Currency Some Love
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