Having the opportunity to pitch in front of such an amazing audience and have them vote live and get that feedback was one of the best experiences I had so far in the industry.  

Winning the Emerging Brand Spotlight really accelerated some key conversations for the business with four different types of investors. We raised money earlier this year, and winning that award was great for strategic partners.  

Also, I met agencies and partners: potentially three people that I'm going to be using right now. But I would say the most impactful conversation I started thanks to that award is with retailers.  

We're going to be the first Mexican-born color cosmetics brand to launch national at Target, and at that scale in the U. S, and I'm so grateful because I don't think I would have both started and then accelerated the conversation if it was not for that award.  

Our launch is a key milestone for the company because we are a strong Mexican-born brand now sold at Sephora, at Ulta, at Costco in Mexico, but we are just kicking off our US national rollout. 

You organized an amazing retail lunch with retail executives. Beauty Connect put together a great list of different types of retailers. I not only met Target, but also for example, met Beauty Space where we are set to launch later this year.  

An emerging and international brand coming to an event like this where I can decide who I should talk to and we are sitting at a table for an hour having lunch was amazing.  

During the Emerging Brand Spotlight competition - where people had to listen to six pitches, then vote - retailers were within the most engaged people in the room. So, they really see us in a moment where we do everything to showcase our business.  

I do believe that meeting them before, creating a relationship through lunch, seeing them in the room voting for us, and then seeing us win the award, was the natural path towards meeting them a month after in Minneapolis and working on the details of a launch.  

So, for any emerging brand coming to Beauty Connect: you don't have to be big in the US. You don't have to know everyone. Being in that room with so many talented people, it can be your first chance to talk to them. That conversation can be very efficient because after you spent almost three days with them, you can, a month after, negotiate a contract for national wide launch.  

We are in a moment where most brands understand that they need authentic content through UGC. And real creators - real people - talk about the product.  

We are in the context where TikTok Shop became the fourth largest [online health and beauty] retailer in the US, with more than $4 billion in [US health and beauty] sales.  

At the same time, UGC can feel very repetitive; it can look too much like an ad. More than ever, people are looking to participate in something. They are not looking to be interrupted by an ad. And I think that is the big change. A brand that does not just build UGC, but builds a community, is the solution.  

In our case, it’s not just UGC moving the needle right now, but using social media to get participation. We share surveys, product voting, storytelling. We do live shopping. And today the most efficient asset for a brand like Sarelly is entertainment-driven content.  

We recently launched our short format episodic content called Drama en la Chamba (drama at work). It talks about the everyday drama in our stores in Mexico City. In each episode, you have a top influencer invited as a client. People comment on the storylines, they tag their friends, and then they wait for the next episode. Something that would never happen with just an ad or UGC.  

The goal is not to build customers anymore. It's to build fans. It might not be as scalable as customers, but once you have those fans that are really waiting for your content and that are actively participating within the community you create - through that content - that is the best way to win today in beauty, especially on social commerce.  

The playbook of the direct-to-consumer brand that would only send through a Shopify website might have been the rule a few years ago, but I don't think it's the case anymore.  

First, you have to be where your clients are already shopping. The power of those marketplaces is that, for a long time, [they] were the competition of the retailers, and a lot of retailers were saying, “you’re on Amazon, I'm not sure I can work with you”. 

Today, most major retailers, and when we talked about that with Target, they really understand that both the discovery and the awareness upon launch happens on social - especially on social commerce. A retailer that understands new trends and is agile enough to capture those trends and apply them to their offline point of sales is the retailer that is going to win. Because in that new 2026 way of selling beauty products… TikTok is at the beginning of the funnel.  

I think it's the best moment for brands like ours, that are agile enough, to be strong on each of those platforms, because you're at the right moment for the consumer. If the consumer wants to discover something, the consumer will be on TikTok. If the consumer wants to browse and test something, they already met on social and retail is great. If you have a very loyal consumer that just wants an easy way to buy and subscribe to a favorite product, Amazon is great.  

So today, more than ever, a beauty brand has to be omnichannel and I think the biggest change for a founder once you have your product market fit, is your resilience and power of adaptation to all of those platforms. You have to be strong and win on all of them, which was not the case 10 years ago. 

It's a very interesting question because, now we're launching in the US as a proudly Hispanic Gen Z brand, we are taking a lot of time analyzing the needs of the US consumer.  

For a long time, the US was seen as a competitive market [with] a performance-centric consumer, meaning they are looking for the best performance at the most honest price. I think it’s very important, but then I compare the Latin Gen Z consumer, which is one of the youngest populations and one of the most connected on social.  

Lots of people said that those consumers are price sensitive – meaning if you’re a premium brand, you’re not going to make it. I would say, today more than ever, the Latin Gen Z consumer is all about identity. They know all the global brands. They are on social. They follow them.  

But I realised for a global brand launching in Mexico, if you don’t adapt your content to the audience, if you don’t connect with them, you’re not going to win the market with your existing content.  

The magic of the US consumer right now, especially the Latina consumer in the US, is the perfect mix of both: performance along with identity. Brands that mix content, with community, with entertainment, with high-performance products, can be the winners of the market.  

In our brand, we have one conviction: we don't adapt to Latinas. We start from Latina beauty and engineer performance from there. I think this is what the Latino consumer is craving in the US.  

What I love about Beauty Connect and what I expect as an attendee is a practical playbook, and that's what I got from last year. It would be, how a beauty brand like mine, which is this size, can directly compete without spending like L’Oréal.  

We have an opportunity and, as a brand, we have proved that a small team can compete with much larger companies when culture community and storytelling work together. Our item - the cow lashes mascara, which is the first engineered for Latina lashes - is today the number one makeup product at Sephora, at Ulta, and TikTok Shop [Mexico], showing that perfect [combination] of culture, community, storytelling and performance can help you win over any global brand.