A lifelong passion for creating led the founders of MITH Media from a college courtship in their native Mexico to a personal and professional partnership that has spanned industries and countries.
Paloma Hecht and Charlie Guerrero met in their early 20s through friends. Always creative, the couple started working together early on, launching a magazine covering social life in Morelia, Mexico.
The magazine gained some traction, scoring interviews with artists like Paty Cantú, a singer, songwriter and actress, who rose to fame as one of the founding members of the pop duo Lu. Those interviews began to open up doors to the music world, which they grew through a parallel business launching creative campaigns under other agencies.
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Watch the full interview with Paloma Hecht and Charlie Guerrero in the video above.
Moving into music
Eventually their endeavors led them to a planned music festival in Guadalajara, where they were initially hired to design the look for the event.
The first-time festival turned into a mess, the couple remembers. They ended up taking over leadership of the entire festival, including booking and logistics. But -- most importantly -- they pulled it off and were empowered by the moment.
"Even though it was like kind of messy and everything, we learned so much, you know, and that's actually how we started linking to, you know, the industry and everything. So it was, it was a great experience," Guerrero said.
At around the same time as the Guadalajara festival, the pair meet Sofía Reyes for the first time. The future music star was then part of a young girl group, and their design firm was hired
Flash forward a couple years later, and the couple are working with Reyes and living in Los Angeles. Together, they planned out a career path outside of the traditional labels. At the time, Instagram wasn't a thing, but Facebook was booming and YouTube was showing it could build careers.
So, they take a page from the Justin Bieber playbook -- he was famously discovered on YouTube -- and start recording covers on the platform. Reyes gets some traction and eventually produces her first singles. “So Beautiful” is one of them.
Listening to their instinct
Early on, Reyes started recording Spanglish songs. It’s what feels right for Sofía, who is fully bilingual. Execs tell Hecht and Guerrero she should not do Spanglish, that the market won’t respond to that. They do it anyway. It feels right.
"[An executive] was like, 'you can't do Spanglish,'" Guerrero remembered. He was told it would ruin her career.
But Guerrero and Hecht felt like there was an audience that, like them, spoke Spanish but was also regularly listening to English-language music.
Things moved quickly after the "So Beautiful" release. The head of MTV Latin America called one day and asked the couple if they work with Reyes, because they’d like to nominate the “So Beautiful” video for an award. That award puts Sofía Reyes firmly on the map.
A big inflection point comes in 2017 when Reyes records "Muévelo" with Wisin, one of the top reggaetón voices of this generation.
They know the song does well, but it’s not until Reyes is booked to perform the song at a Spanish awards show and 10,000 people are singing it word-for-word that they realize she’s a hit.
Today, Sofía Reyes has over 3.55 million subscribers on YouTube and has recorded songs with Jason Derulo, Thalía, Sean Paul and Danna Paola.
The couple credit a lot of their success to listening to their own instinct, despite what traditional industry insiders told them.
Sixteen years after that first meeting between the now-married couple, they are the founders of MITH Media, working with other artists through their boutique representation agency in Los Angeles.
Guerrero and Hecht were interviewed for Bísness School, a series that tells the inspiring stories of Latino founders. Subscribe to Bísness School wherever you get your podcasts to get future episodes automatically. Remember, business school is expensive. Bísness School is free.
