Ceremonia Hair Care: How a Chilean Founder Reached 500 Sephora Doors Without a Celebrity
For most of her childhood in Sweden, Babba Rivera woke an hour early to straighten her hair. Her classmates were blonde with straight hair. Hers was thick and frizzy, and she could not find a single person who looked like her in the magazines. She calls those years a beauty prison: every morning spent fighting her hair with anti-frizz products that made it drier and more brittle.
In 2020 she started Ceremonia in New York. The first product was not a straightener or a smoothing spray. It was a pre-shampoo scalp oil called Aceite de Moska, a preparation she traced to the Dominican Republic.
Three years later the brand was in more than 500 Sephora stores, the first Latina-owned hair care brand on those shelves. There is no celebrity ambassador. The founder's own Instagram following had just passed 100,000.
Who buys Ceremonia?
The United States had 68 million Hispanic residents in 2024, one in five Americans, with a median age of 31.2, twelve years below the white population. They spend more on hair care than anyone else. Anna Mayo, a vice president for NielsenIQ's beauty vertical, puts it plainly: consumers from Latin America and Spanish-speaking Europe are the most engaged buyers in the category, spending 26 percent more on hair care than other demographic groups. Household penetration for shampoo and conditioner in the US is 86.3 percent, and 68.5 percent for styling. Among Latino shoppers, both rates climb by nearly ten points.
Spending more does not mean shopping easily. In a 2023 All Things Hair survey of 2,000 US women over 16, only 8 percent of Hispanic and Latina women said they had no pain points buying hair products, against 21 percent of white women. By texture, 37 percent of women with coily hair said it was difficult to find products suited to their hair, against 13 percent of women with straight hair.
Those two numbers describe a specific market shape: a group that spends more and still cannot find the right product. They are not spending because they have more money. They are spending because the choice is thin, and trial and error is the only way to close the gap. The median age of Hispanic Americans is around 30, nearly a decade below the national figure, so the group is still growing.
Plus-size activewear went through the same shape with a different exclusion: sizing instead of hair texture.
Why launch with a single scalp oil?
Ceremonia went to market with one SKU. Rivera has explained the reasoning as a matter of asking too much: most startups arrive with a full routine and tell consumers to replace everything they own. The better question is which single problem is most common in the community, and which product solves it fast enough to be felt.
The scalp oil answered three tests. It has a cultural source, in the Dominican Republic. It works across hair types, curly or straight. And almost nobody had a scalp step in their routine, even though the scalp drives most of what happens to the hair. Her father, a hairdresser, had told her that if she changed one thing, it should be the scalp.
The second product was a scalp massager, sold in a bundle with the oil. That bundle is still one of the brand's best sellers. The sequence is the strategy: sell one action first, then the tool that action needs, rather than a full regimen on day one.
Formulation is done in house. Ceremonia has its own lab and a full-time chemical engineer, which means it can run 300 samples and send them to community testers. Rivera has compared that with the contract manufacturer route, where a supplier sends three tiny samples and then expects an order for 20,000 units. The brand now has 20 formulas and more than ten awards, including five for the Guava leave-in conditioner alone. At Sephora, the range runs from about US$24 to US$50.
Kitsch took the opposite route on the same shelf: zero funding, a start in hair accessories, and a push toward high-frequency consumables. Ceremonia went the other way, opening with a single oil priced near US$30. Both work. The difference is which purchase a brand chooses to earn the first repeat.
How did it build trust without a celebrity?
Aceite de Moska was built with the community rather than for it. Rivera ran a tester group on WhatsApp, sent daily iterations, and revised the formula several rounds before launch. The habit stuck: new products go to the community before they go to a shelf.
Culture also became product. A braided headband called The Frida, a reference to Frida Kahlo, is now a signature item. It solves no hair problem at all, and that is the point: it makes the brand identifiable at a glance on a shelf where every bottle looks similar.
Inc.’s 2025 founder profile credits Ceremonia with 170 percent annual revenue growth, year over year, since launch. Rivera has also discussed cutting marketing costs in half while continuing to grow revenue. Those accounts do not establish whether repeat purchases, word of mouth or retail expansion drove most of the growth. Marketing efficiency is worth examining, but retention and channel sales data would be needed to explain the growth mix.
In 2023 the company made its first C-suite hire, naming Dana Onyewu chief commercial officer to run the Sephora expansion.
Why Credo and Net-a-Porter before Sephora?
The retail sequence was designed. Ceremonia entered Credo, a chain built around clean beauty, then Net-a-Porter, then Sephora. The first two doors established two attributes, clean and expensive. The third delivered scale.
The Sephora entry in 2023 came through the retailer's Hair's Next Big Thing selection and went to more than 500 doors. That same year the brand opened a flagship in New York that doubles as a community space.
The money follows the same order. Ceremonia has raised more than US$13 million in total, including a US$10 million Series A led by Sandbridge Capital with Silas Capital and Female Founders Fund participating. In January 2026 it raised roughly US$3.5 million more, according to an SEC filing that lists 30 investors.
The roughly US$3.5 million round was about a third of the Series A. Its size alone does not establish whether stores were funding themselves. Channel profitability, inventory turnover and cash flow would be needed to assess the quality of retail expansion.
Retail also has a bill that founders tend to underestimate. Rivera has said the level of marketing each brand must do to drive sales at each retailer surprised her, and that the spending makes the transparent, cut-out-the-middleman pricing she originally wanted hard to hold. Every DTC brand that enters wholesale meets the same wall: volume arrives, the margin structure changes, and the price position promised to the customer stops being available.
A third number is easy to misread. The e-commerce monitor Grips estimates that ceremonia.com sold about US$946,900 in 2025, down 20 to 50 percent on the year before, with growth of 5 to 10 percent forecast for 2026. In September 2026 the site did US$112,000 on 38,900 sessions, converting at 2.5 to 3 percent with an average order value of US$75 to US$100. Next to 500 stores that looks small, but a shrinking own site is not a shrinking brand. Once a brand is in a chain, wholesale becomes the main channel and the site returns to being a supplement. The estimate covers the website only.
Retail sequencing is a positioning tool, not a channel list. Going from cheap distribution to expensive distribution is close to impossible. Going from clean beauty and luxury e-commerce to a national chain is a route that works.
Where does the story start?
Her father was a hairdresser in Chile. When the family moved to Sweden, his language barrier kept him out of local salons, so he set up in the family living room and cut hair for relatives. Rivera has said he practised his love of hair on the family.
Her mother treated hair care as ritual. The time she spent washing and conditioning was not to be interrupted, and she taught her daughter that any bathroom can be a spa.
Then there was Rivera herself: thick hair, frizz, and no one who looked like her. She woke an hour early to straighten it, used products that promised to fight frizz, and watched them make it worse. That experience became the brand's premise, which is to leave hair closer to what it already is.
She was pregnant during the 2020 raise, pitching mostly on Zoom where nobody could see. In one meeting she decided to say it. The investor had been talking about his own children, then asked whether she had any. She said no and started to explain. He cut in: if you are serious about this business, you should wait at least five years to have children. She hung up, cried, and went for a run.
That same week she told the founder of Female Founders Fund, who had already invested. The reply was congratulations, and then: what did you want to talk about?
She now has four daughters. In 2020, Ceremonia was one of only 58 Latina-founded companies to have raised more than US$1 million. McKinsey data puts venture funding to Latino founders at about 1.5 percent of the US total.
None of this is background colour. It explains why the product line looks the way it does. Her father supplied the scalp, her mother supplied the ritual, and she supplied the part learned in front of a mirror, that hair should not have to be turned into something else.
Culture in this business landed in the formula, not the label. Guava, hibiscus and aloe are ingredients with a function, not story material. One SKU earned more trust than a full routine would have, because the customer did not have to change every habit at once. And the retail order is a positioning decision: which store you enter first decides how everyone else prices you.
For brands working on China, the useful part is not the word Latina. China has no equivalent demographic label, but it has the same shape of unmet demand: fine limp hair, colour-damaged hair, sensitive scalps, postpartum shedding. Ceremonia did not find an ethnicity. It found a group that spends more and has fewer options. That group exists in every market. What differs is whether anyone bothers to build a product around the specific problem.
Double V is a cross-border operating partner and intelligence house for emerging consumer brands, based in Hong Kong and Shenzhen. We help brands connect China and the world through three businesses: Brand Operation (marketing and distribution for brands on retainer), Brand Incubation (sister company Glam Infinite and our own-built brands), and Industry Intelligence (cross-border research and reports). Talk to our team
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