Latest / Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast) / GEMS: How To Make $1M of Sales in Your First Year with Rizos Curls founder Julissa Prado

Transcript

GEMS: How To Make $1M of Sales in Your First Year with Rizos Curls founder Julissa Prado · Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast)

• 0:09
  was driving that growth. Like how do you actually make a million dollars worth of sales in a year? In your first year, rather. Yeah. It wasn't like the year from like November, October. It was funny because like when I first got asked this question, I was like,
• 0:25
  I was like, chismosa culture. Anybody Latino that I say chismosa culture to, they're going to be like, ha, ha, ha. Well, chismosa means almost like gossip, like spreading gossip or something. And in our culture, we always say like, oh, you're chismosa. You love the tea. You love to hear what's happening. And there's like a running joke about if you live in predominantly Latino neighborhoods, it's like you don't need security cameras. You have your neighbors. And it's like everyone's like nosy looking at what's happening. Yeah.
• 0:52
  And what I would joke around and say lovingly is like, she's most like culture, like this part of like the Latino culture of like, when you have something that you love, you don't keep it for yourself. You tell your grandma, your mom, your Uber driver, the lady at the grocery store, you tell everybody. When I tell you, there were women that have never met me before in their life. They were in Puerto Rico. They were in New York. They were in Florida. Never met me before in their life.
• 1:21
  they were like going on Facebook, writing long testimonials in Spanish, like this young lady right here reminds me of my own daughter. I use her products and look at my hair. If you believe in me and you are my family, you will support this young lady literally. Oh my goodness. Wow. It was like, every time I would read it, I would like get emotional, but then I would like, think it was just so crazy. And I think that
• 1:50
  God, again. There we go. There we go. Okay, no. Passing. To Woosa. I feel like me and my story. Oh my God. Mind you, I've done a lot of podcasts and interviews. I don't understand why this one's just so... Like, I feel like you're really in front of me. I am really in front of you. I feel like I can, like, feel your energy. Like, I'm like,
• 2:20
  I don't know. That's so cool though. Yeah. So I feel like my story and me represented so much more to people than like I realized. Like they had a piece of you in them and they were like, that's me. That's my auntie. That's my mom. That's she's doing it for all of us.
• 2:46
  And also I think that sense of like, she gets us. She truly understands what I go through on this deeply personal, intimate thing, which, you know, hair gives you confidence. It's part of your identity. All these things. Every woman was being like, you feel me. Yeah, totally. And so I think for me at that moment, like it was very apparent that
• 3:11
  with great gifts, with great talents, with great things, like comes big responsibility. And I think that that moment was when I realized, like, what am I going to do with this power that they're giving me? You know, what am I going to do with every time they're giving me their dollars? That's power. So they're allowing me to grow, allowing me to have, you know, a platform, allowing me to have everything I do have. So what am I going to do with that? So with that said,
• 3:42
  From the very beginning, like I've always said, these girls, my little personal mission statement is girls, community culture. And so every step of the way, the way that we started growing, especially in the beginning was
• 3:56
  actually being in the community, like being there, like I was holding all these different events, whether it was like curl classes, I was holding like, there was, for example, like during one of the times, there was a lot of ice raids going on, where literally ice was going into restaurants and schools and just taking all these people and arresting them without even asking for identification. It was just like really shitty things. So I remember having an event in my office where I brought an immigration lawyer and
• 4:26
  she was able to hold kind of like a Q&A session with like all these different people that wanted to come in and we would hold them in Spanish and English and she was giving legal advice and that was like one of my friends who I connected with and so Riso's Curls was like less of just like oh hair education it kind of became like a like a community center for whatever is going on
• 4:55
  that were affected by the Mississippi ice raids. And I was like, what should we do? What should we do? We came together and we threw like the most fire reggaeton party in LA. We raised like over like $8,000. When I tell you like all these DJs that like,
• 5:12
  Big time, cool DJs came and like donated their time. The venue, the local bar in downtown donated their whole space for us. We sold tickets. Like people volunteered to bartend. Like my cousins have this like ice cream shop. So like they were giving away ice cream. Somebody else was like, I have a cotton candy business. So yeah, we were like. Love cotton candy. Bring it along. Yeah, they're like, I have a cotton candy business.
• 5:39
  I'm going to go and get free call and candy to people so they could come and support this cause. So we were just like, almost like every weekend we were participating in events, whether it was about hair or not. And I feel like people really got to know me. I even went to New York. I was going to be our first time in New York.
• 5:59
  I was like, what event do you guys want? Mind you, this whole time I'm talking to my customers on social, like they are my best friend. And then that's another thing that I tell people. I'm like, if you don't have money, marketing money, you know what is the best marketing tool? Turning your front camera on.
• 6:14
  Getting right in front of the people and talking to them, talking to them like they are your friends, just directly talking to them. If you have a question about innovation, what should they do here? There is a great tool like Instagram stories, for example, that's called polls. You can ask them, like, are the first new product that we had after the initial launch was Refresh and Tangle Spray?
• 6:35
  And it was one of like the best launches that I have even had till this day. And it was because I asked the customers, what do you guys want? They were like, can you make me a lighter curl cream for refreshing? Okay, done. So I feel like so much of my role in the business has literally been less of telling people what they should need, like selling things to people and more of them telling me what to do and what they want and me taking their orders, like me being like,
• 7:03
  I'm on it. I will work my butt off to give you what you are requesting right now. You know, so I think that's been part of the reason why it's been doing good is because I listen to them. Truly like active listening and putting it into action.
• 7:20
  Hey, it's June here. Thanks for listening to this amazing episode of the Female Startup Club podcast. If you're a fan of the show and want even more of the good stuff, I'd recommend checking out femalestartupclub.com where you can subscribe to our free newsletter. We send it out weekly covering female founder business news, insights and learnings in D2C, and interesting business resources.
• 7:45
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• 8:07
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