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Welcome to The Quality Makers, an interview series highlighting pioneers in the direct-to-consumer space. Join us as we get an inside look at the world of digital shopping through the eyes of the individuals shaping it…
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Born and raised in San Diego, Mexican founder Sandra Velasquez has lived in New York for the past 24 years. As someone who grew up about 10 miles from the Mexican border, she was very much surrounded by Chicano culture. Sandra originally moved to NYC in 1999 to build her music career because she was the lead singer of a Latin band called Pistolera. She toured around the world, did an NPR Tiny Desk concert, and had her song featured in the series Breaking Bad, only to unexpectedly become the Nopalera beauty industry queen. 15 years later, Sandra waits as her 17-year-old daughter finishes high school, so she can move back home to California.
Nopalera is a modern Mexican lifestyle brand made for the modern beauty explorer. Through bold fragrances that transport customers to the epicenter of Mexico City, this one-of-a-kind beauty brand offers an exploration of shared culture and courage for today’s global generation of consumers. Enjoy Sandra’s unique story below.
Can you introduce Nopalera? I'd also love to hear about the name.
Nopal is the Spanish word for what people call the prickly pear cactus in English. I grew up eating Nopales right from my front yard. It's not exotic, special or niche to us, it's just a part of our culture. When I created the brand in 2019, I wanted to make sure that it very overtly celebrates our heritage, so that the people that get it, get it. I've always been celebrating my culture through whatever I'm doing. I did that for 15 years with music as a platform, and now I'm doing it through a physical product. The vision was always to build an aspirational Latina brand that would really disrupt a very European beauty space. Even in this country, you’ll notice that many American brands have French names, because they continue to believe and further perpetuate this idea that if it sounds French, it must be fancy, it must be high end, it must be of higher quality. I wanted to build a beautiful brand in Spanish, to really cement our culture as aspirational as well.
How did you move from the musical world to the beauty industry?
Even as a musician, I always had a day job. Yet I found myself unemployed for the first time as a 43-year-old in 2019, with student loan debt, credit card debt, and more. It was one of those defining moments in which I thought: I'm either going to stay where I am, meaning go get another job that's not going to pay me enough, or I could go build something big. I had been working in sales for other CPG brands already, so I felt like I understood brand marketing, distribution, etc. I was standing in my parents’ front yard, staring at their beat up Nopalera that they cut and eat from, and just thought: why has no one built a brand around this plant? Everyone knows aloe vera, it has decades of marketing, but this plant is actually much more regenerative, it’s cultural, symbolic, and it grows in any climate. I realized that I felt a responsibility to do it and do it well, because I knew that if I had waited, Johnson & Johnson would have beat me to it, and they would have done it poorly.
Where does your inspiration come from? I know you channel your heritage and cultural identity, but tell me about your upbringing and how your environment seeped into the creation of Nopalera.
I like to say that I’m secretly an activist building a beauty brand. For me, it was always brand first, product second, which is an approach some people would disagree with. There's a lot of great products in the world, but not all of them provide an experience. The whole mission of Nopalera is to help make people feel proud of who they are. Positioning a premium Latina brand in the beauty space is about people seeing themselves, their culture and their lived experience reflected back to them in an elevated way. The mentality of this country is that Latinos are poor, always struggling, we’re the help, we’re the people in the kitchen. And if a Latino product is being sold, it should be $5 from Target or Walmart.
I created the brand to really change the conversation and reclaim the narrative, which is not an easy task. I didn’t create Nopalera because these kinds of products aren’t out there. There’s plenty. But we deserve to see ourselves and our highest potential reflected back to us within our surroundings. When you do that, it really does change how people feel about themselves, how others perceive us as a community, and ultimately how we all move in this world. The word ‘representation’ is so overused, but it really does matter. There's been so many decades of generations that have had to assimilate and hide who they are, and now we live in this new era where it feels like we're going backwards once again, but that’s even more reason as to why we need to stand proud and remember our worth.
Tell me about the link between beauty, self-expression, self-care and even mental health.
Beauty is an aspirational category because its products help you feel good about yourself. No one actually needs all these products, you want them because they help you step into your best self. Connecting what beauty does to your self-esteem and self-worth, with cultural expression and celebration has been my goal from the start.
One of the many things that is problematic about the beauty industry, is that we’ve been conditioned to believe that Western and European features are the epitome of beauty. Our products challenge that belief, and it all leads back to mental health. If you feel that you can be your best Latina self, exactly who you are, and have zero shame about who and what you came from, simply by using our products, we’ve won. If you go into the world feeling confident, seen and liberated, we’ve also won.
Imagine what it does to your psyche to constantly think there’s something wrong with you. The dark side of beauty is that it's made women feel like they're missing something. Choosing beauty was intentional in creating this aspirational brand around culture, and disrupting the industry.
Tell me about the products that you offer.
I was an industry outsider, so I didn't have access to manufacturers, fragrance houses, or anything. Now that I'm in the industry, a lot of my biggest competitors are all former Estee Lauder executives. We sit next to Nécessaire on the shelf at Credo. But I was way outside of this bubble, so I knew I had to start with products I could make on my own. I enrolled in formulation school, and learned how to make soap, solid moisturizing and body scrub. That was the initial collection that we launched with: 3 cactus soaps, 1 lotion bar and 1 body scrub, because I wanted the products to compliment each other, so that you could use them together.
We now offer soaps ($24), body scrubs ($32), lotion bars ($30), and our new liquid products like the Cactus Shower Gel ($24) and the Cactus Cream ($34). Those have become our top sellers and they launched us into custom clean fragrance. We've now become a scent-forward brand and we're actually working on a perfume next. We also just launched solid hair care because that was something that people were asking for.
When I first started, the industry was all about being natural, sustainable, no plastic, and now it’s all about scent. The first thing people do when you hand them a beauty product is smell it. We're in Nordstrom, Credo, Free People and 400 other boutiques, but in order for us to really succeed at bigger beauty retailers, we need a stronger assortment that resonates with more consumers, so we’re really leaning into scent now.
Tell me about your star ingredient: The Nopal.
Firstly, it really is the most regenerative plant. My parents have had the same plant in their front yard for ages, they keep cutting from the same place and new pads just grow back. It's like the gift that keeps on giving. It also grows in any climate, which is why it’s been declared the crop of the future by the United Nations. When the droughts come, we can all live off Nopales. It needs no special resources – it grows in the desert, in the tropics, all over Asia, in Mexico, even in the snow. Imagine what this plant must have inside of it in order to be able to survive any climate. It will never go extinct; there’s just an abundance of cactus everywhere.
Secondly, it's a food source, so you can eat it, it's great for digestion, it's good for your health and it's low glycemic. Thirdly, there are two parts of the cactus that are beneficial to the skin and hair. There's the pad itself, which is the part that we eat. It’s very hydrating to the skin, it’s soothing, and you can use it to cleanse your skin as well. Then there's the prickly pear oil which comes from the seeds of the prickly pear fruit – that red bulb that grows off of the edge of the pad. You need a lot of seeds to make the oil, which is why it’s so expensive, but it's very high in antioxidants, vitamins, minerals, and it's good for all skin types. Our cactus soaps only have the cactus pad in them and those fibers also gently exfoliate the skin, but in all our other products we use both parts in each formulation.
The cactus itself smells like plants, so at first we used essential oils to give scent to our products. That includes jasmine, tangerine, lemongrass, grapefruit – all things that come from nature. Now we have relationships with custom clean fragrance houses, so we're able to really create complex scents that are not found in nature. What does a magical forest smell like? We have the opportunity to really dream, test and explore through scent.
What differentiates you from other brands in the industry?
I took a lotion bar, which people were already making as a homemade product, and I made it into an elevated experience. Where I saw an opportunity was to not only to make this product elevated, but to also put our star ingredient in it, and to make it vegan. Prickly pear oil isn’t usually put into a body product because it’s expensive, so it’s usually reserved for premium skincare like facial serums. Most luxurious brands were making these bars with beeswax because it’s so much easier, so ours is a different, laborious process. I wanted to make these products objects of desire – you want to hold it, you want to pick it up, you want it displayed on your bedside table, you want to show it off. To me that’s part of the elevated Latina beauty experience.
The same goes for our solid haircare line. We’ve created a really unique formula because it was important to make sure that it delivered on performance. For a lot of shampoo bars in the market, their story is all about sustainability, plastic free, ‘save the planet.’ But the reality is that people care most about how it works on their hair. We wanted the product to perform just like liquid shampoo, providing an incredible lather with a delicious scent. And on a more personal note, I wanted to create an easy way for people to travel with these shampoo bars, so we designed a custom holder and a travel case.
When I think of what makes us unique, I want to mention that Nopalera is really meant for everyone. Even if you aren't related to Mexican or Latino culture, you can still see the female strength in the brand, and that shouldn’t go unnoticed. We may have made progress in this country but in other parts of the world, women are still fighting for basic rights. That’s why our logo, the golden cactus goddess, is something that people all over the world can relate to. The point was never to build a Latina brand for Latinas. The point was to build an aspirational Latina brand, period. And that’s what we’ve done.
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