Artist Susie Jaramillo Built an Empire Around Storytelling and Latinx Culture

Susie Jaramillo refused to be put into a box. When the Latina artist and entrepreneur was in art school, professors told her that she had to choose one thing and pursue it. They wanted her to pick a particular style to avoid commercialism — to become an artist's artist. But Jaramillo always knew she could make a bigger impact if she followed her heart and made art for everyone. Decades later, she's the founder, president, and chief story officer of Encantos. The story-teaching platform uses Jaramillo's art to create books, games, digital content, and other resources to help kids — particularly Spanish-and-English-speaking bilingual kids — think critically and creatively.

In art school, Jaramillo noticed a streak of anticommercialism. It motivated her to find herself as an artist and figure out what she was meant to do. "I didn't have clear career goals," she tells POPSUGAR. "I always had a sense that I was a diamond in the rough. I always had a sense that I had a purpose and that I just had to figure out what I was supposed to do. I knew it wasn't going to be the same path that everybody else was taking." Jaramillo, who is of Ecuadorian and Irish descent on her mother's side and Venezuelan on her father's side, has always liked to explore cultures and create different worlds. So when her professors at New York City's Pratt Institute of Fine Arts told her she needed to establish herself as an artist with one style, it didn't sit well with her.

"I used to tell my professor, 'Why can't you just have style in everything you do instead of having a style?'" she says. When she graduated, she worked as a freelance artist for various animation studios but eventually realized she wanted to become a creative director. By chance, she discovered the burgeoning US-Latino market, which at the time was something that was just beginning to draw interest. Jaramillo ended up meeting and connecting with a group of Latinx professionals that her sister worked with, and she joined a few of them in starting their own advertising agency. They wanted to take the market into their own hands and showcase Latino culture more authentically. With that, Jaramillo, the creative director, was born. She was 26 at the time and starting a career in a field she knew nothing about. But she forged ahead anyway.

At the time, many company execs Jaramillo encountered couldn't understand why Latinxs feel so strongly about culture and community. "Somebody needs to showcase it for them, and I'll be happy to do that," she says. "You spend a whole bunch of your life just figuring out 'Where's the need?' 'How can you serve? 'What are you supposed to do with your life?' 'What's your purpose?' 'How can you lean into what you do best in order to serve and make a living?'" Jaramillo explains. And it turns out her answer came several years later while she was on maternity leave. Bored at home, she and her husband created Canticos, a bilingual nursery-rhymes app that the larger platform, Encantos, was eventually born out of.

In 2012, Jaramillo sold the ad agency largely because she wasn't satisfied with the goals of her clients, many of whom were unwilling to take risks to represent Latinos authentically. She took a two-year sabbatical to figure out what was next. By then, she was a mom to two young children and immersed in the world of babies and toddlers, which translated into her art. She spent her free time drawing and writing and turned much of that into what would become her first children's books. Eventually, she took everything she had learned as an ad executive and then as a parent and created Encantos with the goal of helping Latino parents connect with their kids while teaching them about our culture.

"I've always felt strongly about owning your own intellectual property and creators owning your own story," she says. "It never made sense to me that creators — and Latino creators — could not be the stewards of their own visions." Jaramillo notes that in reality, she's always been an entrepreneur, even if her path took her in different directions along the way.

It started with nursery rhymes and bilingual books. Now, Jaramillo is a veritable powerhouse with an Emmy nomination under her belt. She has created everything from the "Canticos" series, an app, a slew of educational products for kids, and more than 20 children's books in publication, including a brand-new series called Skeletitos, which is based on her experience connecting with her inner spirituality to take control of her own dreams as a child.

Encantos currently entered into a strategic relationship with Ben Odell and Eugenio Derbez of 3Pas Studios. As a result, Jaramillo has been appointed CEO by Encantos's board, where she will continue the work she started in an even more meaningful leadership role. This will make her the first Latina CEO of a children's entertainment company that creates culturally inspired content for today's diverse kids.

"With this new partnership with 3Pas, we have celeb power and an A-list studio behind everything we do. And I have my cofounder and global chairman there to make all of this bigger," she says. "I'm incredibly humbled by the trust the board has shown me. I'm also committed to serving today's diverse kids with my superpowers."