Agency Guacamole, a Los Angeles-based communications agency supporting leading beauty and lifestyle brands, announces its fifth Beauty, Lifestyle and Nurturing Diversity (B.L.N.D.) event will take place in Los Angeles on Aug. 31, 2022. The event initially sold out but the company has been able to increase capacity and add additional seats to meet the demand.
The L.A. B.L.N.D. event will focus on the theme of Beauty Entrepreneurship as an Entrepreneur of Color and will bring together five leaders in the beauty space to talk about building a beauty brand as a POC — the challenges, opportunities and inspiration.
“I’m so excited to host and moderate our fifth B.L.N.D. event — and in our hometown!” said Bilal Kaiser, founder and principal at Agency Guacamole. “This initiative — and especially this year’s theme — holds so much meaning to me personally, and I can’t wait to be on stage with each of our wonderful panelists to chat about our experiences in the beauty business.”
Agency Guacamole’s Beauty, Lifestyle and Nurturing Diversity (B.L.N.D.) initiative, which started in 2018 and has taken place in New York City, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and virtually in 2020, is back in L.A. for 2022 as the city’s influence on beauty continues to skyrocket. The panel and networking event aims to bring together key opinion leaders, industry execs, content creators/influencers and editors to talk about diversity, inclusion and belonging specifically in the beauty and lifestyle industries. Previous themes have included race/ethnicity and ageism.
This year’s B.L.N.D. panelists include:
- Akilah Releford (@akilahreleford), founder and CEO of Mary Louise Cosmetics, a Gen Z makeup brand. Mary Louise Cosmetics boasts clean formulas and aims to help its Gen Z audience redefine beauty on their own terms. Akilah created the brand in 2017 from her college dorm room at Howard University with the intention of creating playful and easy-to-use beauty products for the masses.
- Margarita Arriagada (@MargaritaArriagada), founder of Valdé Beauty. Margarita is a first-generation Peruvian American with an extensive beauty resume, including serving as the Chief Merchant of Sephora USA. In 2020, she founded Valdé Beauty, which is a refillable lip collection featuring richly pigmented shades, impossibly sensual textures, and clean, cruelty-free and vegan formulas.
- Michelle Ranavat (@MichelleRanavat), founder of Ranavat, an all-natural ayurvedic skin and hair care brand. Michelle leveraged her expertise in the pharmaceutical industry and her background in engineering to create a line of beautiful skin and hair treatments that honors her South Asian heritage. Each formulation is composed of the highest caliber Ayurvedic ingredients for transformative skin and hair care results across all skin and hair types.
- Nayamka Roberts-Smith (@labeautyologist), founder of her own esthetics business and an award-winning licensed esthetician, entrepreneur, skincare expert and content creator. Nayamka’s viral creation #The60SecondRule gained global recognition for its intuitive and simple methodology of skin cleansing.
Over the past six years, Agency Guacamole has been a key partner to top beauty and lifestyle brands, concepting and executing countless successful public relations campaigns, influencer marketing programs and events/activations across the country. The LA-based agency’s work has won numerous industry awards including the 2022 Communicator Awards, PR Daily’s Social Media & Digital Awards and the Muse Creative Awards. The company’s founder and principal Bilal Kaiser received the prestigious Joseph Roos Community Service Award from the Los Angeles Chapter of Public Relations Society of America (PRSA-LA) in 2019.
“We’re incredibly grateful that we’re able to continue producing the B.L.N.D. event series and bringing together our peers, clients and supporters,” Kaiser added. “This event is always the highlight of my year, and I look forward to exploring additional areas of DE&I in our industry in the years to come.”
