Mabel Frías Is Writing Her Next Chapter in Scent
The Shark Tank alum and LUNA MAGIC co-founder is back with Read Fragrances, a literary-inspired fragrance house now on Target.com, and this time she is building with a clearer plan.
By Black Beauty Founders Staff
Some founders get one great story. Mabel Frías is on her second.
The first one, plenty of people already know. Mabel and her sister Shaira walked into ABC’s Shark Tank in January 2021 with LUNA MAGIC, a makeup brand rooted in their Dominican heritage, and Mabel went on to lead the team that scaled it into national distribution at Walmart, Target and CVS in 18 months. Along the way, the brand landed in Good Morning America, Allure, WWD, Cosmopolitan and People en Español.
The second story is just opening. Mabel is now the founder of Read Fragrances, a literary-inspired fragrance house built around scent, storytelling and social impact. The collection is live on Target.com, and Mabel calls this chapter the most personal thing she has built yet.
“I want people to see the full range of what I bring as a founder: commercial experience, creative vision and the ability to connect people and ideas,” she tells Black Beauty Founders. “This chapter gives me an opportunity to bring those experiences together around something deeply personal.”
She Has Seen Beauty From Every Side
Before she was a founder, Mabel was a merchant. She started her retail career in the Macy’s Executive Training program in New York, then built a track record executing merchandising strategy at Macy’s, One Kings Lane, Violet Grey, Nordstrom and Savage X Fenty. She also holds a history degree from NYU, a master’s in the history of decorative arts and design from Parsons and the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, and an MBA from UCLA Anderson as a Riordan fellow, plus executive education from Stanford and Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business.
That résumé matters, because it means she understands beauty from almost every seat at the table. “I’ve had the opportunity to understand beauty from several perspectives: what makes a customer stop and discover a product, what a retailer needs from a brand, and what it takes as a founder to deliver on that promise,” she says.
Corporate retail gave her an eye for merchandising, positioning and the customer experience. LUNA MAGIC taught her how tightly all of that has to connect to operations and execution. With Read, she is putting both lessons to work from day one. “A beautiful idea needs a clear customer, a compelling product and a business that can support it,” she says.
Why Fragrance, and Why Now
For Mabel, fragrance was the natural next move, because nothing else in beauty is so closely tied to memory. “A scent can bring you back to a person or a place before you even have the words to explain it,” she says. “That creates so much room for storytelling.”
That is where the literary idea comes in. Read treats fragrance the way a reader treats a good book: as a way to be transported, to try on a new perspective or to recognize something in yourself. The scent names suggest a mood rather than dictate one. Wild Mimosa, Bold Poppy and Radiant Rose make up the floral collection, and Oud Milk, now available for pre-order, joins them as the newest chapter.
Wild Mimosa opens with coconut and orange, settles into creamy mimosa and tuberose, and finishes with vanilla and musk, a sun-warmed scent made to move from day into night. Read’s eau de parfums carry a 15 to 20 percent fragrance concentration and are formulated without parabens, phthalates or sulfates.
“I want customers to have room to interpret those stories for themselves,” Mabel says. Read’s scented love letter experiences take that idea off the shelf: guests discover a fragrance, pause and put their own feelings into words. The brand also brings its scent bar to events, so people can find their fragrance in person.
Second-Time Founder, Sharper Instincts
Ask Mabel what she is doing differently this time, and the answer is pure founder wisdom. “With LUNA MAGIC, I learned how much work begins after you secure a retail opportunity,” she says. “You have to support the business, understand the customer and keep giving people a reason to come back.”
Now the hard questions come earlier. Does an opportunity make sense for the margins and the team’s capacity? What will it take to support it well? Does it strengthen the brand? “I still have the ambition, but I have more experience deciding where to put my energy,” she says. She is also letting customer feedback shape what comes next.
That thinking shaped the Target.com launch. Online, a shopper cannot smell a fragrance before buying, so the product, packaging, pricing, imagery and scent descriptions all had to work together to build confidence. Mabel went in thinking past launch day, about how Read would support discovery, serve customers and learn from performance. A discovery set lets new customers live with each scent before choosing a full bottle.
“Being live on Target.com is an exciting milestone,” she says, “and it gives us an opportunity to build a lasting relationship with a broader audience.”
Washington Heights in Every Bottle
Mabel was raised in Washington Heights in Manhattan by Dominican parents, and she calls that upbringing central to how she sees culture, beauty and self-expression. “Growing up in New York, I was surrounded by people whose identities held multiple stories at once,” she says. As an Afro-Latina, she wants Read to be a brand where people with layered identities feel seen and have space to tell their own stories.
Motherhood deepened that. Her daughter, Aalia, is Dominican American and African American, her own version of Afro-Latina. “I want her to feel proud of every part of who she is and to know that she can define herself on her own terms,” Mabel says.
New York retail sharpened the same instinct. On the sales floor, she learned that one product can mean something completely different to each customer. In fragrance, that is the whole point. A scent can connect someone to home, to family or to a particular chapter of their life, and Read leaves room for every customer to bring her own.
A Brand Called Read, Putting Books in Kids’ Hands
With a name like Read, the connection to books had to be real. Through a partnership with First Book, a portion of fragrance sales supports book donations and access to educational resources for children who need them most.
“What matters to me is the possibility that a story can open something up for a child: curiosity, imagination or a sense of what is possible,” Mabel says. Over time, she hopes to bring customers deeper into that mission through reading experiences and events, with the giving growing right alongside the brand.
What’s Next for Read
Mabel is building Read as a fragrance house with room to grow across personal scent, experiences and, eventually, the home. Looking toward 2027, her focus is deepening customer relationships, strengthening the retail business and giving more people a chance to experience the brand in person.
Fragrance is one of the most competitive categories in beauty, and Mabel knows it. Her answer is a clear point of view: scent, story and social impact in one bottle. “Whether someone discovers us through a bottle, a scent bar or a scented love letter,” she says, “I want there to be a personal connection they remember and want to revisit.”
She already wrote one founder story people still talk about. Read Fragrances is the next chapter, and Mabel is writing it with everything the first one taught her.
Shop Read Fragrances
Read Fragrances, including the floral discovery set with Wild Mimosa, Radiant Rose and Bold Poppy, is available at readfragrances.com and on Target.com. Oud Milk is available for pre-order. Follow the brand at @readfragrances.
Quick Links
Get The Insider Edit
The cover stories, launches and founder news shaping Black beauty, in your inbox.
Comments