Cici Meadows has survived a lot, ovarian cancer, domestic abuse, a period where she and her kids were homeless.

Today, she runs a makeup line, Prado's Beauty, and as you're going to

hear the telling of her story, all of that hardship and all of that struggle, only doubled

Cece's commitment to giving back. Cece shares how her indigenous roots inform her vision of

beauty, the financial mechanics of fulfilling huge product orders, and how her retail

partnership with e-commerce site 13 Lune and JCPenny

catapulted Prado's beauty into profitability.

Cece, thank you so much for being here.

Thank you for having me.

So, Cece, you grow up outside of Yuma, Arizona, the eldest of four children, and you describe it as a pretty rough upbringing.

Can you give me a sense of what that looked like and the lessons that you were

growing up with? My parents were fairly young. I think my mom was 17 when she had me. My dad was

like a cowboy on a cattle ranch. He started working there when he was like 14. He didn't really have a lot. I remember my parents telling us that we were rich in love because we had each other. And I think that that's like a normal thing that you say to kids like because you literally have nothing. My grandparents were a big, big part of my childhood growing up. I actually didn't even speak

English when I went to kindergarten because I was raised, you know, pretty much in my grandparents'

home and they only spoke Spanish and like traditional Yomi language. But I loved school because, you know, we had breakfast and lunch

and then eat dinner at my grandparents' house. And it's always friolitos and rice and squash.

I hated squash for the longest time because I ate it so much as a kid. But, you know,

we didn't really have a lot.

It was really rough.

The way you tell it, I mean, it feels to me like your life sort of took off like a rocket ship

in the sense that like a lot of kids who are living in homes that are under resource

school for you becomes a refuge and you do really well in school. And school is a place where you thrive. You even become the first person in your family to

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