In 2020, Ceremonia founder Babba Rivera’s personal and professional life expanded: She launched a clean hair-care brand built on her Latinx heritage while simultaneously expecting her first child. In the years since, Rivera has grown the brand from a single hair oil into a collection of more than 15 products. Ceremonia is also the first Latinx-owned hair-care brand to be sold at Sephora. Rivera has achieved these milestones while expanding her family with three more children. “I’ve only known motherhood from the lens of entrepreneurship,” she says. Whether she’s sharing about her decision to breastfeed her children with her more than 176,000 Instagram followers or calling out the exclusionary language that executives in the beauty industry use to talk about minority-run businesses, Rivera is not afraid to be vocal about the challenges she faces as both a mother and a CEO. She lives in upstate New York with her husband and her four daughters; here’s how she gets it done.
On her morning routine:
When my husband is home, he lets me sleep in a little. I get up at around 7 a.m. and he will have breakfast served for me and the girls. I’m still breastfeeding, and since I work during the day, I sort of built up a little milk bank. So I eat breakfast with the older girls and pump milk at the same time. I usually also do their hair while they’re eating. My nanny comes in the middle of the breakfast routine, and she will help me with the final rush of getting out the door with the kids. I do school drop-off, so she will help me do the lunchbox for my youngest who needs to bring one to school. She then takes over with the babies, and I get out the door with the toddlers to their schools and my husband starts to work. He wakes up a little earlier to do the morning prep, but then he gets to go to work a little earlier. I first drop off my 4-year-old, then I continue in the car with my 2-year-old, who goes to pre-K. If I have a slower day, I’ll fit in a Pilates class at 9 a.m., and if I have a busy day, I just drive back home. I’m usually by my desk for the first call at 9:30 a.m.
On the importance of talking about child care:
I’ve only known motherhood from the lens of entrepreneurship, so it was important for me to be very transparent about the help I was getting. I know what it’s like to not come from privilege. I grew up in a very humble family. My mom did not have any help. She also didn’t have a career, and as a result, she really struggled to make ends meet. I grew up on the welfare system and in the projects of Sweden, so I have so much empathy for women who have to do it all on their own. Although my parents were together for the first eight years of my life, my mom really was, in the very traditional sense, the primary caretaker. When I had my first baby and continued to have my career and launched my company, I got so many DMs from women who almost felt bad about themselves seeing me do so much. That’s the last thing I ever want for someone to feel, because the reality is that I’m no better than anyone else. I’m just very fortunate that I have the help that I have. I would not be able to run this company if I didn’t have a nanny.
On the stigma around breastfeeding:
I feel super fortunate that I have a milk supply and that I’m able to feed my twins, but it’s a full-time job. The milk did not just magically flow out of my boobs. I had to work really hard, especially after a C-section. It’s an active choice every day to keep the milk supply going, so I pump everywhere. I pump at the airport; I pump at restaurants; I pump in Ubers. I was speaking at Create and Cultivate and in the green room, I was like, “Okay, before mic check I just need to pump,” and I sat in the green room pumping milk.
I get two kinds of responses to that. There is one — and it’s always women, men don’t comment on this — where they are like, “Wow, you’re so inspiring, really showing that it’s possible and that motherhood doesn’t mean the end of your career and you make it work.” Then there is the other category of women who think that I should change my career, get a less intense job, and be with my kids, that I shouldn’t sit and pump in all these places. You can’t please everyone.
On balancing work and motherhood:
I want to be the best mom possible and I want to be the best entrepreneur possible. I joke that I only want to do things that I will do really well, and there are only so many things you can do really well at once. So for me, right now, I’ve made my choice: It’s family and work. That means I’m not in my best shape ever. I’m not the best tennis player I could be. I’m not the friend who can show up with soup every time my friends are sick, or the one who sends ‘Thank You” cards after a baby shower. Those are not the areas where I can excel right now.
On the advice she wishes she had at the beginning of her career:
I wish I knew that motherhood could be so expansive. Maybe because I had a mother who struggled a lot, both financially and emotionally, I was only exposed to the sacrifices that come with motherhood. My mother had children very young too, so she never finished school. I was really afraid of motherhood as a result and I thought motherhood and career could not coexist. We also see this statistically, that women are so much better off than men before 30. We outperform men at school. We actually make more money than men in our early careers. We excel faster. And then something happens in our 30s, which usually are childbearing years, and we never recover. That’s where the pay gap just gets bigger.
Having all those data points, I had a lot of fear around motherhood and being someone that is ambitious, who has been on a mission to achieve independence and have a different life than the one of my family. That was scary. I wish I knew that at the end of the day, we’re the writers of our own lives. We live in a time when we can design things to suit us. I made the conscious decision to wait with kids until I was in a place financially and emotionally where I felt like I could do it.
On Latinx representation in the beauty industry:
The Hispanic audience is the biggest minority in the United States. We account for 20 percent of the population — which, just to put it in perspective, the Black community is 15 percent. We are also the fastest-growing demographic, which I don’t think most people realize. We’re expected to reach 30 percent of the entire country by 2060. Needless to say, the future customer is Hispanic. We spend 46 percent more on hair-care products, yet have little to no representation on the hair shelves. So Ceremonia is pioneering this space.
Whenever I have a hard moment, I remind myself that failure is not an option. I refuse to have someone say, “Yeah, we tried this Latinx thing and it didn’t work.” It has to work, because this is paving the way for future entrepreneurs to follow suit. My journey would’ve been so much easier if I had a benchmark to point to. I really hope that Ceremonia can become that benchmark of success.
On the challenges she has faced:
When you go the venture-capital route, a venture capitalist’s job is to replicate success. They’re looking at track records and they’re looking at commonalities between successful founders. So when there has been a historic lack of representation, I’m not going to be in that formula of what a successful founder looks like. Another challenge of being a minority founder is we hear a lot that you can only sell to other minorities. We are a clean hair-care brand that’s rooted in Latin heritage, just like L’Occitane is rooted in French heritage. But no one thought you had to be French to wash your hands with L’Occitane soap. So then, how come you have to be Spanish-speaking to appreciate a guava-infused shampoo? It’s insane when you think about it. So for me, it’s about addressing the elephant in the room. Something that I like to tell people is that, just like L’Occitane isn’t exclusively for French people, neither is Ceremonia just for the Latinx community. Fifty percent of our customers don’t identify as Hispanic. They gravitate towards the brand because of the efficacious clean formulas.
On winding down at the end of the day:
I love to take a steam shower at night. When we renovated our bathroom, we installed a steam-sauna function in our shower. My favorite ritual is to apply Ceremonia’s Aceite de Moska on my scalp, and then I step into the steam sauna and let the oil marinate on my scalp. Then I wash it off with our Papaya Scalp Scrub and our Guava Hair Mask. I do what I guess the TikTokers call an “everything shower.” I do a body scrub and then a scrub on my face, too. That to me is like, “Okay, I’m ready to be a human again.”
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.