Rachel Gomez founded Viva La Bonita in 2015 with a few hundred dollars, some custom-printed T-shirts, and a mission to empower the Latina community. In the five years since, the clothing and lifestyle brand has built a loyal community of nearly 300k Instagram followers and collaborated with brands like Footlocker and Zumiez, all while keeping the fearless women they design for at the forefront of their brand.
Viva La Bonita is known across the internet for their vibe-y videos that showcase their apparel and brand POV. The kicker? They make the majority of their video content in-house. In fact, Viva La Bonita's videos are often spearheaded by Rachel and her husband Fredo Tovar (a Staff-Picked filmmaker in his own right) under the moniker By Bonita. “Video helps us accomplish our business goals by getting our message and vibe across to our customers,” says Fredo.
We stumbled across Fredo and Rachel’s stunning video content right here on Vimeo, and knew we had to catch up with the VLB team to find out more about how they bring their creative vision to life.
Tell us about you and your company! What's your mission?
Viva La Bonita is a women’s streetwear apparel brand rooted in self-empowerment with an emphasis on the Latina community. Our mission is to uplift our community through our clothing and dope content. Our team is small but mighty, six of us hold it down.
What’s your biggest challenge when it comes to growing your business?
Our biggest challenge to growing our business has been stepping outside of our creative nature and homing down our business skills. We're creatives at our core, but without strengthening our business skills and our brand, we would not have grown to the place we are today.
Tell us a little bit about how and why Viva La Bonita uses video.
We usually make and share 3- 4 videos a month with a mixture of high-production-value shoots and some on-the-fly iPhone videos. Our video marketing goals are to continue to push our brand narrative to as many people as possible. We have received a great response to our work, and video only helps to grow that more.
Culture is at the heart of our brand. Video is a great way to showcase our product and our neighborhoods. There are so many culturally rich parts of our neighborhoods that usually get overlooked or misrepresented. We decided that video would be a high priority for our brand because it helps to expose the beauty we see every day.
How has the pandemic changed your approach to content?
For us, it made us pivot, but we did not lose momentum. We switched up our style of shooting and got creative. For one shoot, the location was our model’s house. We shot entirely from inside the car with a zoom lens, and all the model had to do was step outside her front door.
What advice do you have for small businesses trying to make more videos?
Work with what you have access to. We began shooting all of our videos on the iPhone, and from time to time, we still do. That approach is great, because you can shoot guerrilla-style around your city without fear of being stopped for filming. Once your business grows and you have steadier income, you can allocate more budget for your productions.
More video marketing stories
If you want to tell your brand story, you can explore how Vimeo can help you make, share, and manage videos. Learn more about features like livestreaming, video hosting, screen recording, our video teleprompter, video analytics, and more.
