What happens to business when the cultural center of gravity moves?
Mainstream isn't a headcount. It's a decision somebody made, usually a long time ago, about who the “normal” customer was.
In 2020, Target launched a Latina haircare category. The products existed, the customers existed, and the money existed, but the shelf map didn't have a place to put any of it.
One of the brands helping to expose that gap was Rizos Curls, started in a garage by Julissa Prado and her brother Tony, self-funded from day one. A year later, Rizos Curls expanded to Ulta, becoming the first Latina-owned curly haircare brand on those shelves. Today, they're in all 1,300 Ulta locations, still with no outside investors.
Prado didn't find a gap in the market. She found a gap in somebody's map of the market.
The Customer Existed Before the Category Did
Prado has said her brother ran the market research before they launched and couldn't believe a product like theirs didn't already exist.
That's the new mainstream in one sentence: demand sitting in plain sight, unserved, because the people making the shelf decisions were working off a map that hadn't caught up with the customer.
The Latino Donor Collaborative's 2026 economic impact report, researched by ASU's Seidman Institute, found that Latinos generated 28.2% of U.S. economic growth in 2024 while representing roughly one-fifth of the population. The U.S. Latino economy reached $4.4 trillion that year; Latino household consumption alone was $2.8 trillion.
What Breaks When the Center Moves
When the customer base changes, the campaigns aren't what breaks first. It's often the infrastructure holding them up: the shelf plan, the media buy, and the person on the team who gets asked to weigh in on multicultural work as a side project on top of their real job.
None of those were built as values statements. They were built as defaults, based on assumptions that may have made sense years ago but were never revisited. The system kept running because nothing forced anyone to stop and ask whether the assumption still held.
Defaults are where the money is, and defaults are often the last thing anyone audits.
The Customers Made the Argument
How did Rizos Curls get into Ulta in the first place? It wasn't a deck. Its customers — who call themselves rizos reinas — kept tagging the retailer publicly and telling it what to stock. A company that couldn't see the demand clearly in its own data was suddenly seeing it everywhere in its mentions.
The community made the distribution argument, and it worked.
And it isn't one lucky brand. The National Urban League's State of Black America special section, published in July, found that demand for culturally relevant goods and services continues to outrun supply — and that nearly half of Black consumers cut spending or go elsewhere when a brand walks back its commitments, the widest gap between Black and non-Black consumers anywhere in the study.
Communities are already voting. Most companies just aren't counting the votes.
Ask Who Drew Your Line
If you’re a leader navigating these shifts, don't start with a rebrand. Start with the map.
Find out who decided which customers count as the “main” ones. Somebody made that call, probably years ago, and most companies can't name the person or the year.
That decision may still be routing budget, shaping which products get funded, and deciding who the brand talks to all year.
Prado didn't redraw Ulta’s map on her own. She built something worth demanding, and her community made that demand impossible to ignore.
Most companies have customers who already know where the map is wrong. The question is whether the right people inside the company are listening closely enough to redraw it.
