Prados Beauty founder and CEO Cece Meadows was ambitious from a young age. As the oldest of her siblings and the firstborn grandchild in her Indigenous and Chicano family, she faced intense pressure to succeed financially. While in college, she started working as a bank teller, got promoted, and became a homeowner at the age of 21. “All of the things that my family hadn’t done I was doing,” she says.
An ovarian-cancer diagnosis later in her 20s ground all that progress to a halt. The treatment, including the removal of her right ovary and chemotherapy, was successful, but it wasn’t cheap. With no financial cushion, Meadows was left with two young children and nowhere to live. “We were sleeping in Walmart parking lots,” she says. “That fall was really hard. It taught me a lot about resilience and community.” She eventually got back on her feet and went to cosmetology school, later launching Prados in 2019. In addition to the business, through which she frequently donates money and resources to community organizations, she remains a working makeup artist.
Meadows lives on the traditional homelands of the Piro/Manso/Tiwa people in Las Cruces, New Mexico, with her husband, their four children, their chihuahua-terrier mix, and an African tortoise. Here’s how she gets it done.
On her morning routine:
My husband is a major in the U.S. army. He gets up at 4:45 and kisses me good-bye before he leaves — that’s my alarm clock. So I’m up at 5:30 every morning. I write in my journal, pray, and meditate, then I get in my car and go to the gym by six. I hate doing cardio, but I’ll start with a 15-minute bike ride. I’ll get off, go to a stretch area. I love to do yoga. I’ll do that for about 15 minutes and then I’ll spend the last 15 minutes doing weight training. I drive back home and wake up all of my beautiful children. I have a 16-year-old, so she’s there with the babies while I go to the gym. I have about 45 minutes to get them ready. I drop them off at school, come back home, shower, and make breakfast. I’ll clean up, get in my car, and come to my warehouse.
On what she’s reading:
I’m reading Viva Latina, a compilation of Latina entrepreneurs. It was put together by my friend Sandra Velasquez, who is the owner and founder of Nopalera. I’m also reading Growing Up Native in America. That one is by IllumiNative and MTV books. It’s a compilation of stories from Indigenous and Native people about their experiences growing up.
On what grounds her:
I’m a vivid dreamer. I have a journal on the side of my bed, and I’ll wake up from a dream and write down what I see, what I’m thinking, what I hear. Those things go into my collections that I create for Prados Beauty.
On a typical workday:
I start my day off praying and resetting our space. The front part of the warehouse is a store, so people can come in and shop our brick-and-mortar. Behind the store is my office. I like to put out good energy into everything that we’re touching. I’ll spend the first ten, 15 minutes walking the store, my office, the warehouse, our mailroom, manifesting good things in there. We burn sage and cedar. I really like setting the tone.
I would say that 40 percent of my time is spent doing emails and admin work, and the other part of it is social-media marketing and designing and formulating. We do that all in-house. It keeps costs down. It’s a heavy workload sometimes, but we don’t have investors or capital partners that we answer to. We get to create whatever we want and give back a large portion of our profit to Native and Indigenous communities, kids with special needs, and students who are dedicating themselves to higher learning.
On supporting the community:
I get 10 to 15 emails every day from people looking for support, whether it’s a nonprofit looking for donations or a first-time college student who literally just needs 20 bucks for gas or food. It’s cool that people out there know what we do and that there’s a place for them to ask for help. You don’t really get to do that with beauty brands. I don’t think I’ve heard of anyone emailing Sephora and being like, “Can you send me 20 bucks for gas?”
On winding down at the end of the day:
My kids are basketball players. We’re usually at basketball from five to 6:30 or seven every other day. We come home; I make dinner. My husband comes home from his long day and we sit down and have dinner together every night. I clean the kitchen with my oldest, help the baby with bath time, and my husband and I read. Then we have quiet time with the older two kids. They go to bed about nine or 9:30, and my husband and I stay up and tend to his garden or pet the dog and take care of our little turtle. We’re usually in bed by ten or 10:15.
On the biggest challenge in her role:
For minorities and small, independently owned businesses, it’s always money. It’s access to capital, to loans. When I went to 17 banks or venture-capital investors, I thought 17 “no”s was a lot. But I’m almost at 112 “no”s right now. It’s really disheartening because we have a profitable business, we have an amazing story, and we’re in mega retail locations in the U.S. We’re great partners to them, and orders are flowing. Everything is beautiful, right? But when you dream of growing that and you present it, and you keep hearing “no” and don’t understand why … At this point, I don’t even get mad anymore. I think it’s the Creator, my ancestors protecting me from something.
As an Indigenous and a Chicana person, for every hundred of us who apply for capital, only one or two get it. It’s always less than a million dollars. It limits us on the products that we can come out with and it limits us on the spaces that we can go into. Paying for marketing and PR costs thousands of dollars, and when you don’t have that, you’re depending on organic growth. We’ve never paid for followers; we’ve never paid for promotion from makeup influencers. It’s not because we didn’t want to. It’s simply because we didn’t have the money to do it. So to be able to say that you organically grew your beauty brand from your baby girl’s nursery to 609 locations across the U.S., I think that that’s really powerful.
On celebrating wins with her team:
I love to take my employees out to eat. I think that food is medicine. I’m not talking about Chick-fil-A. I’m talking about calling a restaurant owner who’s a friend and saying, “I need you to set up the nicest table and curate a custom menu. We’re coming out to celebrate X, Y, and Z.” I love to sit down and be in community with my employees. Nothing brings me greater joy than to be able to write a bonus check and celebrate a win with them.
On the people who help her get it done:
I have an executive assistant, Teresa. She’s my best friend. A lot of her work is admin-based, but she’s also kind of my personal assistant and does social media when I don’t have time. She’s someone that I can depend on to be the face of the brand when I can’t. Having another woman there to support and back you up is important. We practice what we preach, which is community over competition. My 16-year-old daughter, Anissa, helps me get through my everyday life. I’m so grateful to her. I’m also grateful to my good friend Aubrey. I go see her once a week for an IV, and that helps me stay healthy. And Mariana, a former employee who left to start her own business, owns a healthy food truck here in Las Cruces. I go see her every day for my juice.
On a time when she didn’t get it done:
I started the brand in 2019, but I created this product in 2018 that was going to launch with me on my website. I didn’t have the money to copyright or trademark the design. I launched these beautiful brushes, and a bigger beauty brand copied my brushes. That was one of the biggest blows. I’m over it, but I’ll never forget it. When I’m talking to small-business owners or creatives, I’m like, “You copyright and trademark everything so no one can copy it later.” Now I have an attorney, but sometimes bigger brands do that to smaller brands. They think they can just steal your ideas.
On dealing with pushback:
There are always gonna be people who don’t wanna see you succeed. The biggest thing you can teach yourself is to drown out those negative voices. Keep your head down and just keep plowing through and getting to that place in your career where you feel like you’ve made it, and then don’t stop. Lift your head up, enjoy the moment, embrace it, and then go off and work on the next thing. That’s what I do. Social media is a great gift of connection and bringing people together, but it’s also a place of negativity. We have a lot of LGBTQ and two-spirit people who come on our platform. We create a safe space for them. Especially right now, a lot of people come on and spew negativity. We’ll tell you straight up: We delete comments. We delete the negative, hurtful comments. Constructive criticism is always welcome; when people sometimes aren’t satisfied, it helps us reformulate or make something better. But when you’re feeding hate, we will delete those comments.
On ambition:
Having a tumultuous childhood, ambition suited me well. No one was gonna do anything for me. I was gonna have to go out and get it myself. I don’t like to be told that I don’t belong somewhere or that I can’t go somewhere, as a brand or as a person. My ambitious personality comes from my grandmothers, who are fierce, beautiful women. I’m carrying that forward in everything that I do and paying homage and respect to them for the things that they instilled in me. I want to be in Target and Ulta. I want to be a global beauty brand. I also want to educate people on the beauty of Indigenous and Chicano people and our histories and our cultures. And I want to help Native and Indigenous artists not have their art and their work appropriated, but actually be owners of collections and create generational wealth for themselves and their families.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.