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"We've relied on these platforms to bring us visibility for far too long," she said. "Sometimes that visibility can kind of hurt our communities because it results in erasure because it is inauthentic. It's people that don't look like us who don't come from our backgrounds that dictate what the Hispanic or Latinx marketing strategy is."
For decades people of color felt alienated from a beauty and fashion industry that often set unrealistic and often pale expectations of beauty. But that has been changing.
There is a surge for diverse inclusive brands in the beauty and lifestyle space. Makeup giant Sephora has created a section online to showcase Black-owned brands. And it plans to double its BIPOC-founded brands, according to their Executive Vice President Artemis Patrick.
Still, Chavez said that doesn't feel like enough, especially for Latinos, who can have very different cultural experiences. Her family comes from Central America, a very different country from the small island of the Dominican Republic or the Portuguese speaking Brazil or the U.S. neighbor Mexico.
"I think because for far too long we've been portrayed as a monolith," she said.
Shop Latinx targets the millennial and Gen Z Latina in the U.S. During the pandemic, she said, she saw a spike in sales. The marketplace is a collection of brands by Latinx founders and creators like Nopalera (an emerging Mexican-owned botanical brand for bath & body), Shocks of Love, (a fragrance house at the intersection of wellness, art, & beauty), MCLC, (footwear that empowers the sole).
On Friday the startup announced it raised $1 million in pre-seed funding backed by Precursor Ventures, Backstage Capital, Debut Capital, 2PM, Humble Ventures, Hispanics in Philanthropy, Silicon Hills Capital and Techstars.
The money raised will be used to expand their online presence and hire to expand their current team of four. Chavez told dot.LA that getting backing to launch the site wasn't easy.
"I feel like founders, especially founders of color, like we feel like we have to beg VCs to bet on us. When in fact we're doing them a favor," Chavez said. Statistics constantly bear that out.
But, the Cal Poly Pomona grad said she is hoping to see more Black and brown and BIPOC leaders in positions like hers.
She founded the company, she said, because she wanted to dictate her own terms.
"Instead of trying to rise the ranks of corporate, let me just bet on myself, I literally have nothing to lose because I'm starting from ground zero anyway."Correction: An earlier version stated that Shop Latinx debuted this October. Shop Latinx has been out for a year.
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A trained economist Fil knew he could mass market the product and thought, "I'm going to steal my husband's recipe, commercialize them and build a company out of them just as a side project."
Veronica Fil, co-founder of Grounded Food.
She did. Grounded Foods was born in 2019. The two went out to find backers and it was then during a meeting with one investor that changed their strategy.
Originally, they hoped to open up a restaurant in West Hollywood to feature their cheese, but when the investor offered $2 million for the recipe they knew they had to think big.
"That's when we reevaluated everything," Fil said. "That was the moment I convinced my partner to just give up on the restaurant and just double down on becoming plant-based cheese moguls."
Fil's side hustle turned into a full time business.
The couple decided to move from Australia to Los Angeles where there is a much larger market for vegan products. Seven days after receiving their first investment of $200,000 in venture capital, the couple sold everything, packed up their poodle, and flew to New York for the accelerator program (Big Idea Ventures), getting ready to commercialize the product.
"When we got to the US, we quickly realized that those products would be too niche for the market here," she said of the Gruyere and other cheeses Quade was serving often as part of a charcuterie board. So they switched to cheese that appealed to the mass market in the U.S. including cheddar.
The company uses a fermentation process that harnesses the proteins and fats contained in hemp and allows them to achieve textures that closely replicate dairy cheese. One of the main ingredients is cauliflower, which has a rich flavor that the company allows it to forgo artificial additives.
Grounded Foods offers three cheeses - a Hemp Seed Cream Cheese, Hemp Seed Goat Cheese that packages in cubes and its Cheese Free Cheese squeeze-on sauce akin to American cheddar. The 8 ounce package ranges in cost from about $4 to $7 dollars. All three are available online and at some Whole Foods Markets and Bristol Farms in Los Angeles.
The global vegan cheese market size was valued at $1 billion in 2019 and is expected to grow at a compound annual rate of 12.8% from 2020 to 2027, according to Grand View Research.
Fil said the product is so good that she thinks the company can go head to head with dairy makers for their customers. Because the product is made of hemp and cauliflower, it is a healthier alternative to dairy cheese that's high in cholesterol and saturated fat.
"I think vegan consumers have options that they already like, we're not trying to compete with that," she said.
The Australian duo announced Wednesday they raised $2.5 million in funding from investors, Big Idea Ventures and Stray Dog Capital, Route 66 Ventures, Nucleus Capital, Kale United, and Presight Capital.
The startup will use the money to get the company through the next six months and act as a buffer throughout the holiday season, as they are expecting this period to be a bit slow.
Fil said they had zero savings when they started the company, "it blows my mind that we've been able to get to the other side of the world and have a company at this level, and be in a position where we can ask investors for another 2.5 million just for the next few months."
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