Toni Bravo Left A Career At Rare Beauty To Become A Full-Time Content Creator And Has Landed Beauty Partnerships With Tower 28 And More
Toni Bravo grew up playing with makeup and is now finding success as a beauty creator.
The Long Beach, CA, native’s foray into the industry was not an overnight switch. She attended the University of California, Irvine, to pursue film and media studies and at the time she did not have a big interest in beauty, she told AFROTECH™. However, she did begin ramping up content and sharing it online during her sophomore year, which she attributes to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. She moved home from college in spring 2020, per Buffer.
Her family has played a major role in her interests as well, from her dabbling in her mother’s makeup with her fraternal twin sister to roller skating. In 2020, she started sharing videos of her roller skating on TikTok.
“As I became an adult and got into roller skating and documenting it for the internet, that was fully my thing,” Bravo recalled.
@bonitravo Replying to @Mel Oliva yes i am a sagittarius who has lived a million lives!!❤️ #rollerskating
Time At BuzzFeed
Understanding how to exist on the internet led Bravo to BuzzFeed during her junior year of college in 2021. She worked as a talent resident under its Cocoa Butter team, working alongside their platforms on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram.
“I learned, mainly just for myself, what my boundaries look like with social media, with consuming and creating. I learned a lot more about what it meant to build a sustainable career and also a relationship with your audience online,” she said.
Bravo’s other touchpoints in beauty included a viral video of her trying purple blush in a car that received 1.2 million views and has garnered 183,400 likes (at the time of this writing). From then on, via TikTok, she began experimenting more and more with makeup that wasn’t from a nearby CVS drugstore.
@bonitravo went through all 7 stages of grief in this video #rarebeauty #purpleblush #fallblush #blush
“I think there was just a curiosity when I was able to expand what beauty meant and looked like for me and just having fun with it,” Bravo said. “I think that made it feel less intimidating… But it was genuine, just curiosity. And also, I think, with the rise of short form, there was just so many more opportunities to be introduced to different worlds of beauty. So I think I was kind of starting to get a little more curious.”
Working For Rare Beauty
Bravo later secured a two-month summer internship at Rare Beauty, which also led to a full-time position with the company a week after graduating from college, she confirmed in a TikTok video. She was hired as a social media coordinator for the beauty company founded by Selena Gomez, and she wore several hats.
“I was building decks, I was going through and interacting with communities, I was on lives, I was at events helping with brand trips. We would have weekly social trend reports that I’d be sending out to Sephora teams via email and also in-person meetings,” she recalled. “And then I was also on top of that creating content weekly, daily for the social media pages. So there was a lot of balancing.”
She continued, “It was really, really helpful to learn how much work goes into building a community, a brand, and understanding what felt for me the most authentic, organic, and sustainable was really, really helpful.”
Bravo remained at Rare Beauty for six months. She admitted that working with other brands as a creator while being at a company in a front-facing role reached a crossroads, and she recognized there was more room to grow and explore.
@rarebeauty Consider this a little love letter to @toni bravo 💌 We miss you, but we are so excited for what’s next and couldn’t be happier for you! Toni 4ever 💘
By 2023, she went from having a full-time role at the beauty company to being a full-time creator with over 916,000 followers and at least 38.2 million likes on Instagram and TikTok combined (at the time of this writing).
“I was already organically creating relationships with other beauty brands as I was creating content, so it felt very organic, and it felt like a nice move,” Bravo expressed.
Bravo also signed on with a team and hired a manager — a step up from when she would consult peers to learn how to negotiate the deals she received in the skating world. They went in “headfirst,” and soon, she was doing five different brand deals a week, with 90% being in the beauty space, she shared.
“Great to start running, but honestly I think it was less about the numbers for me, more about the experience… Even if it was with the same brand and we had five different campaigns we were working on in the span of five, six months, every single one had a different brief, every single one had different deliverables, every single one had a different product,” Bravo recalled.
“So for me, that first year, that first six months even, was really less about how many brand deals I was able to get, but more about using every single opportunity to learn what I liked, what I didn’t like,” she continued.
Bravo said her process with brand campaigns has become streamlined and credits her manager at the talent agency DBA (Digital Brand Architects), as well as her coordinator and financial teams.
“They’ve been, I think, so paramount to my ability to be able to scale in the last year,” Bravo admitted.
@bonitravo #ad added a test because whimsy is important. using #UDAllNighter matte setting spray <3 #UrbanDecayPartner @urban decay
When asked about navigating her worth as a creator, Bravo acknowledged that most creators have been lowballed to some degree when considering the various offers likely sitting in their direct message for as little as $5.
“I’m sure everybody, no matter how big or how small you are, gets those emails or DMs often, whether they’re spam or not, you never really know,” she said.
However, with the brands she has cultivated relationships with, she has never felt lowballed, and she credited her team for remaining transparent about budgets and what they are advocating for on her behalf.
She advised creators to know their analytics so they can have a clear understanding of their value.
“Your creativity obviously is priceless and your perspective is priceless,” she mentioned. “But obviously when it comes to deals and partnerships, I think the best way to learn more about what I guess you should charge or what your rate should be, if you don’t have a team that’s helping you assess that on your own, I think the best thing you can actually do is definitely learning more about your own numbers, your own analytics, and studying those and getting familiar with those, I think, from the very beginning.”
Tower 28
As for what’s been on the horizon for Bravo, also nicknamed the “CEO of Blush,” has landed a full-circle moment in her partnership with Tower 28. She launched two blushes, formulated for sensitive skin, with the beauty brand for a set titled GetSet Blush, according to information shared with AFROTECH™.
This also marks the first collaboration with a creator for Tower 28, according to Forbes.
“Blush was where it all started for me. That was the first beauty video I posted. That was the first beauty video that I think really resonated with my now audience and I continue to post about blush every single week since that video,” she said. “So blush is honestly such an interesting anchor in my beauty career. So, it felt very full circle for that to be my first ever beauty edit and Tower 28 being also a brand born and raised here in LA.”
@bonitravo more blush & MORE blush???!!⭐️ yes…please. & i thought i couldn’t become even more obsessed #blackgirlmakeup #blush
