Making her way from foster care in the Lower East Side to creating a beauty business valued at $25 million, entrepreneur Nadine Ramos credits New York City for being the city that made her.
“The concrete jungle, as they say, will either make you or break you,” the 45-year-old native New Yorker told The Post.
Ramos’ mother and grandparents came from Puerto Rico in the late 50s “with just the clothes on their backs and a whole lot of determination to make a life for themselves in New York.”
Now the owner of Blessed Bananas Hair Care and Lasio Professional Hair Care, Ramos grew up in the projects in the Lower East Side with her single mother and two sisters. Her mother struggled with several issues, including drug addiction, which led Ramos to be placed in foster care from the ages of 7 to 10.
Even after being reunited with her family, life wasn’t easy.
“I dealt with a lot,” she bluntly stated.
But when her beloved mother passed away in 2000, Ramos was living in public housing and starting to go down a bad path.
“The year that I lost her, I had a choice to either do something great and risky with my life or fall victim and become a statistic of my surroundings,” she recounted.
That was around the time she saw a Brazilian man giving keratin hair treatments to local ladies out of his apartment.
Ramos instantly recognized the magic of keratin — a treatment not yet popularized in the US — and knew she had to do something.
“I’ve always been a lover of everything beauty and fashion. Looking good made me feel good despite my circumstances and the hardships we were living in,” Ramos said. “So when I saw the transformation that this treatment did to the client, I knew instantly. The light bulb went off. I had to make it mine.”
The Brazilian man refused to share his secret, so Ramos boldly determined that she would raise money from family and friends, go to Brazil and discover the secret of keratin herself.
She set off on her first international trip in 2001, found a formula and brought it back to NYC where she worked with a chemist to perfect it and meet US regulations. After that, she spent the next five years pouring all her time and money into creating a line of hair products.
“I went through every type of emotion but I was in so far there was no turning back,” Ramos admitted.
“When you grow up in the New York City projects, you have to develop a sense of toughness, to you. And I believe that that toughness has helped me to develop grit, which allows me to not give up. That allows me to not take no for an answer.”
“I believe that every no can turn into a maybe and then a yes. And it’s important in business to be able to have that skill set of not easily folding.”
That determination led Ramos to make over $1 million in her first year in business with Lasio Professional Hair Care, now valued at $25 million. She also was able to expand her offerings: Her Blessed Bananas Hair Care line uses US-grown pure banana oil as its secret for beautiful tresses.
“I feel that my neighborhood, a community of young individuals struggling in the same exact atmosphere and coming together and supporting each other, made all the difference for me,” Ramos said.
“Believe it or not, it was. It was that community that I found in New York City in the Lower East Side, that helped me to to run after my dreams.”
