Made in the 956: Valley business owners sell products across the country
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Empowering the Latin-X community is something that Jennifer Serrano and Veronica Vasquez are trying to do through their company.
They are the owners and founders of the life-style brand JZD, they went from selling in ETSY to selling in Target stores across the country.
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Latina power, those two words, is all it took to change Serrano's and Vasquez's lives. They are the founders of the queer, Latin-owned lifestyle brand, JZD, a brand that started on Etsy.
"I was hand-drawing on coffee mugs, and then I realized that there's no way I'm going to be able to scale this to grow as much as I wanted to, because I can only draw so many mugs," Serano said. "So that's when we started in t-shirts, screen-printing, and once we created Latina power shirt, that's really when the business started to take off. Once that happened, we went full-force and ever since then, almost all of our t-shirts are either in Spanish or Spanglish, or they have a message to power the Latino community."
The word quickly spread.
"When you are an online business, you're on social media, and you're talking, but people aren't usually talking back to you, right? So once we started with this t-shirt, that was the first time that people were sliding into our DMs and being like 'omg, I love this'", Vasquez said.
"I knew we needed representation, I felt it for myself, but I wasn't, I was like maybe this is all in my head, you know," Vasquez said. "But then you have this one person that doesn't even know you, they're on the internet, they're somewhere else, and they're telling you 'this is great, I appreciate you creating this,' and that's when I realized that this is something, yeah."
Target also realized the Serano and Vasquez were up to something, and reached out.
Initially, we thought it was a scam," Vasquez said. "So you better believe initially we were like FBI agents, like going on LinkedIn, like is this a real email, like could it be someone just trying to take our social security number, like what do they want from us?"
What Target wanted was Latina power.
"So we jumped on a call, pitched our brand," Serano said. "So the collection at Target is called Mas Que a Month, and it's really a way for Target to empower the Latino community, and for us to represent and show up for the community year-round."
Now, Serano and Vasquez are in more than 1,900 Target stores, but the road getting there wasn't always easy.
Jennifer Serrano and Veronica Vasquez: Made in the 956.
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