dreamerstoleaders
An Interview With Letty Cabrera-Calvo: The CEO of Vera Mona Beauty
Q: Could you please share with us more about you and your amazing product?
A: My name is Letty Calvo and about seven years ago I created a one of a kind product that’s complete new to the beauty industry and solved a very common problem that we all have when we did our make up which was how to use one brush, but use multiple colors. How do you quickly remove color from the brush. So out of that frustration and typically using paper towels or whatever you have in front of you to quickly clean your brush, I created color-switch which was a dry way to remove color from your brush by simply rotating around this magical sponge called color-switch and then you can easily switch to another color and the product has now kept us in business for seven years and it’s in major retail stores like Sephora and Morphe and we’ve designed other product since then but the color-switch is our original baby right here the color-switch.
Q: How did you come about knowing that this is it for you, what was that journey like to find out really what clicks for you?
A: For me stepping out of my comfort zone which was going back to school, I didn’t know what I wanted to do, I didn’t go into the LMU program thinking I want to become a product developer or nothing like that. What I knew is that I did not love what I did and I wanted to go back to school to try to help me find that passion. Now that I look back at all my life and what would keep me up at night was developing products, I would go to sleep thinking “If this company just buy this idea from me I would become a multi-millionaire” and I did it I pitched ideas to different companies I sent them letters not knowing that I was giving away free information for products. That’s what kept me up at night and I didn’t know that that could be a career. I just thought I have this great idea, have somebody else make it, but it doesn’t work like that, if you have a great idea, no one else is going to truly develop and fill that idea like you are because only you are in your brain only you know the details and intricacies of that idea so that’s another good tip for anyone trying to develop a product and being scared of somebody staking your idea. People are not inside your head, they can’t truly have the same kind of passion you do so never let that hold you back.
Q: Could you please share tips to help business owners and entrepreneurs out there to cope and survive this pandemic?
A: Well for us we got hit very hard because a large portion of our business is wholesale and when retailers shut down there was no business for us, so I think being able to quickly pivot and think about how could we increase our sales in our website, we did that and that helped, and now that we have all these free time in our hands I could develop more products. Instead of sitting there and being upset and thinking this is over quickly pivoting and trying to figure out how are we going to save the business.
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