PUERTO RICO | BUSINESS / PEOPLE. From a Home Garage to Her Own Factory: The Puerto Rican Entrepreneur Behind Mikokos
Kimberly Ramos started making solid shampoo from the carport of her home. What began with about $1,000 and a desire to reduce plastic waste has grown into a Puerto Rican personal-care brand with its own manufacturing operation and customers across the United States.
By BDZ News Desk
Published September 20, 2026
Once upon time, there was no factory.
No large team.
No sophisticated production line.
When Kimberly Ramos began building Mikokos in Puerto Rico, production happened in the garage of her home.
Ramos had left her job as a nurse during the COVID-19 pandemic because she didn't have childcare for her son. With roughly $1,000 remaining in her bank account, she purchased an online course and began learning how to build a business.
She learned e-commerce. She taught herself how to build a website and market products. Her mother, whom Ramos describes as extremely creative, had taught her how to make soap.
That combination eventually became Mikokos, a Puerto Rican company producing solid shampoos and other personal-care products designed around reducing plastic waste.
Six years after the company was founded, Mikokos has moved far beyond the home where it started.
The company now manufactures in Puerto Rico, sells directly to consumers and operates a wholesale program serving qualifying retailers in Puerto Rico and the mainland United States.
And one unlikely ingredient helped accelerate the transformation:
TikTok.
One Video Changed the Business
Ramos wasn't a natural social-media creator.
In fact, she told the Puerto Rico newspaper "El Nuevo Día" in 2023 that before starting the company, she barely used social media and didn't really know how to use Instagram.
Then she started posting videos.
One of them was remarkably simple.
She told people her story, including that she was working from the garage of her house and had created solid shampoos partly because she wanted to reduce plastic.
The video exploded.
At the time of the 2023 reporting, it had accumulated nearly 600,000 views and roughly 60,000 likes. Mikokos went from about 60 TikTok followers to nearly 55,000 in less than a year.
More importantly, people started buying.
Ramos said TikTok helped increase monthly sales from approximately $3,000 to around $20,000 during that period.
Suddenly, the little operation in the carport had a very different problem.
It couldn't make products fast enough.
Ramos recalled that she and her husband would stay awake extremely late trying to fulfill the influx of orders.
hat is the part of entrepreneurship people don't always see.
Going viral can create opportunity.
It can also create chaos.
From the Garage to Manufacturing
As demand increased, Mikokos moved production out of Ramos' home and into a production studio in Barrio Jagüey in Aguada.
The company has continued to grow since then.
Current Puerto Rico business coverage describes Mikokos' evolution as going from making solid shampoos in a residential garage to having its own factory. Apparently, the brand now plans to move to a new, bigger factory in the town of Isabel, Puerto Rico.
The company's current operation centers on personal-care products made in Puerto Rico, particularly solid alternatives to products traditionally sold in plastic containers.
Its catalog includes shampoo and conditioner bars along with soaps and other personal-care products. Mikokos markets the products around sustainability, portability and reducing single-use plastic.
The concept is straightforward.
Take something consumers already use.
Remove the bottle.
Build a brand around it.
Mikokos says one of its shampoo bars can replace as many as three bottles of liquid shampoo, depending on usage.
And the products aren't simply being made for Puerto Rican consumers.
Mikokos currently operates a wholesale program for qualifying businesses in both Puerto Rico and the United States.
Ramos' story is becoming about something larger than selling shampoo.
It's about whether a product made in Puerto Rico can scale beyond Puerto Rico.
Puerto Rico Became Part of the Brand
Mikokos hasn't tried to hide where its products come from.
It emphasizes it.
Its current product descriptions repeatedly identify its products as handmade in Puerto Rico, and its wholesale materials describe its solid shampoos as products that were born on the island.
That local identity hasn't prevented the company from looking outward.
It may have helped.
Ramos said in 2023 that most Mikokos customers were in the United States, including many Latino customers who connected with the Puerto Rican company through social media.
The business has also received outside recognition.
In 2025, Mikokos was selected for the Change 100, an initiative highlighting sustainability-focused startups. Mikokos said it was selected from hundreds of candidates for its approach to sustainable personal care and reducing single-use plastic.
That same year, the Bravo Family Foundation recognized Mikokos with a Global Performance Award through its Rising Entrepreneurs Program. The foundation described the company as combining direct-to-consumer online sales with selected business partnerships.
The Internet Changed What a Puerto Rican Small Business Can Be
There is a larger business story hiding inside Ramos' experience.
A generation ago, a small consumer-products company starting in western Puerto Rico faced obvious geographic limitations.
Its immediate market was largely determined by where the product could physically reach.
E-commerce changed that.
Social media changed it again.
A business operating from a home in Puerto Rico can now put a product in front of someone in Pennsylvania, Florida, Texas or California without first convincing a national retailer to put it on a shelf.
That's essentially what happened to Mikokos.
Ramos wasn't using TikTok simply to advertise shampoo.
She was telling people why the business existed and who was making the products.
Consumers responded to the story.
The sales followed.
That doesn't mean TikTok automatically turns small businesses into successful companies. Viral attention disappears quickly if a business can't manufacture the product, fulfill orders, maintain quality and convince customers to return.
Mikokos had to make that transition.
From attention to sales.
From sales to production.
From production in a home to manufacturing at a larger scale.
That's a much harder transformation than getting views.
Starting Small Doesn't Mean Thinking Small
There's something particularly familiar about the garage in this story.
Across Puerto Rico, garages, kitchens, spare rooms and patios have served as unofficial headquarters for countless small businesses.
Someone starts making food.
Someone starts cutting hair.
Someone repairs cars.
Someone sells clothing.
Someone makes candles, desserts, crafts or beauty products.
Most never become factories.
But they still begin with the same fundamental idea:
Start with what you have.
For Ramos, that meant about $1,000, a home, skills she was still learning, and a product idea built around reducing plastic.
Today, Mikokos has become part of a growing conversation about Puerto Rican companies that aren't satisfied with remaining small local brands.
They're building in Puerto Rico while trying to sell beyond it.
Mikokos still describes its products with a distinctly Puerto Rican voice.
The difference is that the garage is no longer the factory.
And that may be the most interesting part of Kimberly Ramos' story.
She didn't wait until she had the perfect facility, a massive investment or a national retail contract before starting.
She started where she was.
Then the business outgrew the place it began in.
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