Swatch Her Go

What began as the side business of a single mother became a flourishing cosmetics company with a proud message. Taking a spin on look and meaning, Beauty Bakerie creates distinct dessertlike products and strives to provide for all skin colors on the spectrum – especially those on the darker end. This "passion project" was initially a labor of love and creative outlet for Cashmere Nicole Carillo, founder and CEO of the now over 5-million-dollar company. However, her journey to commercial success was far from sweet.

There were no shortcuts for Carillo. As a young mother, she depended on food stamps and daycare assistance after becoming pregnant in high school. Despite the challenge, she made it through college and nursing school while maintaining a small beauty business on the side. When faced with a breast cancer diagnosis ten years later, she fought the disease and underwent surgery while maintaining the fledgling business. Later after her treatment, the time spent educating herself on consumer safety came in handy when she devised her line of nontoxic, cruelty-free, vegan products, and the years of spending free time dreaming up product designs helped shape a successful reality.

While Carillo changed the look of makeup products with her packaging style, she went beyond simply superficial appearance by providing an array of shade ranges, proving diversity in the industry was as commercially feasible as it was necessary. As a creator, Carillo sought a deeper, more thoughtful perspective into the needs of her customers, and that depth was key to her ability to create something meaningful to so many. She followed her advice to really listen to what the clientele has to say, and her heightened awareness of the challenges nonwhite customers faced when shopping for makeup moved her to create a solution. While paying attention to feedback is crucial for a creator to best fulfill exigencies in their domains, Carillo had no trouble putting herself into her customers' shoes. Herself a woman of color, her own experiences led her to identify a critical feature missing in the cosmetics industry: diversity. Though she was light-skinned, she still had trouble finding makeup shades that matched her complexion - and an even harder time finding products for her daughter, whose skin was darker than hers. She utilized her personal experience and those of her customers well, as Beauty Bakerie not only makes products like foundations available in thirty shades but orders the colors in order of darkest to lightest, furthering Carillo's message of inclusivity. In an industry that so often forgets to include such colors, let alone number them first, it is a uniquely powerful statement. However, Carillo doesn't consider this shift from the status quo a radical one, as she claims she is simply "normalizing it. It isn’t genius. I’m making this brand look like how the world looks. It is diverse […and] we will knock down walls and make the world a sweeter place together."

Defying the status quo is a predictably common trait among creatives throughout history. One does not have to be in the flashy world of commerce and beauty to catch mainstream attention and success; Albert Einstein was an innovator from an entirely different realm and era but nonetheless made history for breaking convention. Creative people often find solutions by adjusting the questions that are being asked. In Creative Minds, Howard Gardner writes that such people accomplish this by searching for “basic understandings unhampered by conventional delineations of a question” (10). In the 21^st century, convention used to mean women of color could expect to leave a Sephora with any products but those that matched their skin, but thanks to pioneers like Carillo, they can finally feel like every other makeup shopper. Einstein “was able to effect a breakthrough precisely because he did not simply accept as given the paradigms and agendas of the physics of his time” (9). Evidently, what made him different wasn’t just his intellect, but his defiance of accepted ideas and doggedness in the pursuit of his own. Likewise, Cashmere Nicole Carillo – mother, cancer survivor, and woman extraordinaire, certainly doesn’t plan on sticking to any agenda but her own.

Sources:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/amyfeldman/2017/12/03/how-a-single-mom-battling-breast-cancer-built-beauty-bakerie-to-a-5m-brand-got-unilever-to-invest/#2ce3622b43f8

https://www.allure.com/story/beauty-bakerie-cashmere-nicole-interview-inclusivity-makeup-mission

https://www.instagram.com/cakeandcashmere/

https://www.instagram.com/beautybakeriemakeup/

Creating Minds by Howard Gardner