A South Beach date-night sunset inspired Lulu Cordero when she was creating the label of her cult hair care line’s Forbidden Oil. Featuring a bright sun and palm trees, the packaging design, just like Cordero’s decision to keep manufacturing based in South Florida, was highly intentional.
“I started Bomba Curls out of my house, using generational recipes passed down from my mother. The community received us with open arms,” says the Afro-Dominican founder. After retailers like Nordstrom picked up the brand, production went from just dozens to up to 15,000 units per month, and Cordero considered moving Bomba Curls for distribution reasons. In the end, she decided to keep it in Miami.
“It’s sabor,” she says. In Spanish, sabor translates to “flavor” but can also mean, more metaphorically, the spirit or essence of a thing. Cordero’s entrepreneurial goals are fueled by her desire to see her culture better represented within the beauty industry, a goal that is more authentically maintained by staying close to Miami. “Latins are not so represented on the shelves,” she says. (According to a Nielsen report, Latine and Hispanic consumers, who account for 14.1 percent of the market demographic, spent 19 percent more on beauty and personal care products than the average U.S. beauty shopper in 2023.) “I set out to broaden the spectrum of beauty,” Cordero says. “In Miami, I feel connected to the pulse of my community.”
Other Latine beauty entrepreneurs also savor the sabor and connections that Miami brings. The city is a center for art and design, sports, and finance and is a rich melting pot of dierent Latin cultures ( just over 70 percent of the population identifies as Hispanic or Latino). The strong Latine community makes it easier to bond over shared experiences, find mentors, and tap into networks. When Millie Morales, a Cuba-born makeup artist and hairstylist, first arrived in the city, she met local hairstylists, including one who taught her how to do a good blow-dry (her client roster now includes Daddy Yankee and Roselyn Sánchez). In 2021, she launched BBella by Millie, a makeup and accessories line.
Andrea Lisbona, who is Spanish and the founder of Touchland, a personal care brand, moved to Miami in 2018 and received her biggest leg up from one of her investors, a mentor from Venezuela who introduced her to potential buyers and strategic partners. “He helped us find our first logistics partner in the U.S. when no one knew us. This partner, also from Venezuela, welcomed us into their business like family,” she says. When Bernardo Möller, the Mexican cofounder of fragrance line House of BŌ, launched his first campaign video, he found his director and a Latin Grammy-nominated composer to do the background music through his crew of Miami friends.
“There’s always something happening here,” says Morales of the area’s buzzing cultural scene, which also includes events sponsored by Spanish-language media giants Telemundo and Univision. Lisbona chose to relocate to the city because of the good weather and the vibrant culture, which inspires everything from her product formulations to marketing campaigns. In 2022, she commissioned local grati artist Pedro Amos to create a mural in the Wynwood neighborhood for Touchland’s Beach Coco hand sanitizer. For the Argentinian model–turned–wellness entrepreneur Valentina Ferrer, Miami’s hot and humid climate even helped spark a product idea: Enlighten, a spirulina-infused electrolyte powder for Kapowder, a line of skin care ingestibles.
This kind of culture-driven storytelling and artist collaboration is an emerging hallmark of the Miami beauty brand. Carolyn Aronson, founder and CEO of It’s a 10 Haircare, selected Miami artist Romero Britto to create limited-edition bottles of the brand’s Miracle Leave-In. Möller commissions Mexican artists to hand-sculpt every perfume bottle cap from crystals and stones. The brand “lives and breathes the heritage of Mexico,” Möller says. But when he chose the place to build it, he picked Miami—land of the endless summer, and now, endless opportunity.
This story appears in the October 2024 issue of ELLE.