Raquel Baldelomar
Topics of Interest: Quaintise, HPD Rx, Luxury Travel Magazine, Entrepreneurship, E-commerce, Creative Mind,
After moving from Bolivia to Texas when she was 10 years old, Raquel Baldelomar began to cultivate her interest in pursuing a career in business. The Canfield Business Honors Program offered her a great opportunity to do just that, and she began studying finance along with her CBHP degree during her time at UT Austin. However, it was actually a course outside of McCombs that really inspired Baldelomar and helped unlock the more creative side of her brain. She took several rhetoric and philosophy courses, and she remembers one in particular that focused on Aristotle that taught her “the art of persuasion.” Baldelomar continued the track of investment banking at the time, but this class was the biggest reason why she decided to pursue a more entrepreneurial career later on.
Read on to learn more about Raquel’s entrepreneurial ventures beyond her time on the 40 Acres!
After working at JP Morgan as a financial analyst for two years after her time in CBHP, Baldelomar had a big decision to make. “I had to make a decision on whether or not to go on the MBA track after my analyst program, or really do what I wanted to do. I really liked business, but I felt like I wasn’t using part of my creative brain.” It was at this point that Baldelomar began her own ad agency at the age of 24. She recalls that she had “the one skill that is necessary for all young entrepreneurs: naïveté.” She was ready to take on all the challenges that go into making a business profitable and hasn’t looked back since. Her company Quaintise has now been operating for 18 years and currently has two main verticals related to healthcare and hospitality (www.quaintise.com, https://quaintisehospitality.com/). Baldelomar has focused on the health sector because it was simply an underserved market at the time of her company’s founding. She has also focused on hospitality because of an experience she had with her neighbor’s own magazine called Luxury Travel Magazine. After investing in this company, Raquel began to build her network with professionals in the hotel industry, and she soon leveraged these connections to help them with their marketing and branding.
More recently, Raquel has also started her own e-commerce business, HPD Rx. Her company manufactures and sells its own line of vitamins and supplements, particularly focused on women’s health. Unlike service-based businesses, Raquel notes the importance of creating a business like hers around proprietary assets. With her own line of manufactured supplements, Raquel has been able to build up her e-commerce business based on this concept, and it’s doing very well. “Service based businesses are much more commoditized. There are many other competitors who can compete with you on price. When you actually have a tangible product to sell, you can compete on many other things other than price.” With the recent wave of online shopping, HPD Rx has been steadily growing, especially during the age of the pandemic.
One of the biggest pieces of advice that Baldelomar has for current CBHP students is to take other classes outside of business. “Businesses classes really teach a specific side of your brain, so you should take some other classes to complete your brain development. You want to use all sides of your brain as much as possible.” Some of the liberal arts courses that Baldelomar took were really what inspired her to venture out beyond just business, and she recommends that students do the same. Another piece of advice that Baldelomar offers is to not only focus on being a consumer of content, but also a producer. As social media becomes increasingly more prevalent, being able to produce your own content is a great way to get yourself out there and create new opportunities.
Baldelomar and her companies are always looking to find new, young talent, and she looks forward to connecting with current CBHP students to help guide them on their career journeys.