“Live the life you want to live,” Mabel Frías of Luna Magic

Meet Mabel Frías, Co-Founder and CEO of Luna Magic. With her sister at her side, she launched a multimillion-dollar company—they even faced the sharks of Shark Tank and left with a deal. With a vision of offering high-quality cosmetics at great prices con mucho amor (with lots of love), Mabel has found great success. This inspiring entrepreneur boasts mentions on Good Morning America, Telemundo, Refinery29, Allure, People En Español, Oprahmagazine.com, and so many more! She has been a part of panels like the 2021 Royal Society of Arts - Women Paying it Forward at Work, and she received the Glossier Grant Initiative.

Deirdre Locksley, Senior Manager, Content Marketing had the pleasure of meeting with Mabel for a Pass the Mic interview. It’s no secret that she’s living her best life—and if you take some lessons from her anecdotes and advice, so can you! Take a listen.

Honor yourself.

“I would like to impart the audience with: entrepreneurship, or even building a great career, a lot has to do with yourself, where you are in your life, what you believe, your values, and how hard you are willing to work. I have friends who are in the VP suite in corporate, and we exchange experiences, and we're kind of going through a lot of similar things. The difference is, I'm doing it for myself, and they're doing it for other people.

Listen to yourself, meditate, honor yourself. And at the end of the day, everyone owes themselves to find their true passion—to live their wildest dreams. But there's no pressure if your dream is different from mine. Your dreams should be very unique to you. Because at the end of the day, when you're in alignment with yourself, that's where the magic happens.” – Mabel Frías

Do what’s best for you.

“At the end of the day… ask yourself what kind of life you want to live. What do I mean by that? What kind of balance do you want to have? If you have children, are you in the financial position to go on that journey and take the financial risk? Do you have the right support system, whether it be family, husband, cousins, friends, or whatever? I think you have to ask yourself those questions… I'm an all-or-nothing kind of person, which is why I'm in an all-or-nothing kind of situation. But not everybody is that way. So, my advice is do what's best for you…” – Mabel Frías

Take charge of your destiny.

“My journey started with starting my career in corporate America. Now that I really actually think about it, the journey started in my household. I grew up in a family where women were entrepreneurs. Women took charge of their destiny, if you will. My grandmother and my mother owned a small healing store in the Virgin Islands. We would help them with packing candles and putting things on the shelves and, every once in a while, ringing up customers at the register.

So early on, we saw our mother and grandmother take on kind of an entrepreneurial way of supporting the family. So, between that experience of seeing women in my family working hard, really going after what they wanted, and then my official training through corporate America, [I] mustered the courage and tons of inspiration, along with my sister, to go on this path of launching a global multimillion dollar cosmetics company.” – Mabel Frías

You need grit, curiosity, and stamina.

“The good news, through my working for others experience, I worked in a series of high-growth startups and/or was always tasked to help build new departments. So, that level of curiosity—I love to build things from scratch. I love to think. I love to build people. All of those things, in hindsight, I didn't realize, made me really ready to take on launching a company and a brand from scratch. What I will say, though, that launching a company from scratch, it's different. Because when you're inside of an organization, you have a lot more resources, a lot more people, a lot more maybe functional experts across legal, accounting, HR. Now, as a business owner, a lot of that has fallen on us…

Having a level of curiosity is an understatement. I learn something new every single day. The good news is I love learning… That is something that you have to have: a level of grit, a level of curiosity, and a level of personal stamina to really learn things quickly, apply them quickly when you decide to start your own company.” – Mabel Frías

Bring all the pieces of yourself.

“Things that have changed the trajectory of my life is going into business with my sister, my family. That has changed because I've had to learn. Now, when I was working in corporate, I had a very fragmented existence, if you will. I was a corporate Mabel, and then I was a personal Mabel… Now there's a movement around bringing your whole self to work, but that wasn't the case when I was building the early stages of my career.

Here now, working for myself, I get to bring all pieces of myself, and I also get to drive a lot of the cool things that we're working on and build a company culture that is unique to our business, and we bring along people who are excited genuinely by what we do… It definitely did change the course of my life, because I feel very fortunate that I get to blend all these areas of myself to bring personal purpose along with tangible results, to keep pushing the envelope within the beauty industry.” – Mabel Frías

Walk, think, and act like the big guys.

“One advice that I give up-and-coming entrepreneurs, especially entrepreneurs of color, as women of color is: where we lack in marketing dollars and hundreds of thousands of budgets and resources, we over index in a lot of creativity. So, I'm not afraid of being an incumbent. We are a brand for the future, and we are brand of the future, and we're growing, but we position ourselves: we walk, think, and act like one of the big guys.

So, I think it's important for people to understand that when they go on the journey for themselves, that there's a level of manifestation, there's a level of authority that you need to bring into any room that you enter, regardless of who you're speaking to, to let them know how serious you are about taking your company all the way.” – Mabel Frías

Challenges are opportunities.

“We've definitely have had challenges. You know, the good news about challenges is I see them as lessons and opportunities. Whether you decide to do your own business or go climb a corporate ladder, you will always be met with some level of learning opportunity, or you wish things could be a certain kind of way. So, I don't think I see things as like, ‘Oh my God, woe is me.’ I see things as, ‘What am I meant to learn here?’” – Mabel Frías

Build relationships for the future.

“I'm a firm believer that I create every luck I have. And some people have to be whacked in the face before they kind of have a eureka moment. I think that little things add up to big things. So, I'm always curious. I'm always chasing the next connection or building relationships with people authentically—not for today, but for tomorrow. Because when you're in the business of working for yourself, no one is really thinking about your business but you. So, I've had to learn those aha moments of building relationships for the future.” – Mabel Frías

We’re honored to have Mabel’s amazing wisdom to draw on. Are you ready for more life-changing advice? Check out more Pass the Mic content.