Going Viral on Tik Tok

In the last post I mentioned how I thought our small business might already be finished after Christmas. The Peddlers Mall booth slowed down, sales dried up, and I figured it had just been a fun experiment. I hear 50% of businesses fail in their first year, so I wasn't totally convinced we wouldn't add to that metric. Abbey and I weren’t ready to give up though, and we started thinking about what we could do differently, what could be next. We had a couple of ideas of what would be needed:

1. Had to be first to market (or close), something gaining popularity, not fading out

2. Had to be Unique, we couldn't compete with larger makers already in the space

3. Had to be detached from time of year, we had success with Christmas ornaments and decor, but that wouldn't last all year

Everywhere you looked, Stanley cups were the craze. People had them at work, at school, at the gym, and the keychains that looked like them were all over TikTok. But by the time we noticed, that ship had already sailed. There were too many people making them, and we knew we’d be buried in the noise. So we asked ourselves, what comes next? What could we get ahead on?

Fun Fact - We did sell Stanley Style keychains and make just a few hundred dollars, but it was clear the demand was not there for this product so we quickly moved on.

That’s when I thought of Owala bottles. Not only were they trending, Abbey and myself both had our own, we loved them, and use them every day. We figured if we could be the first ones to design a mini, inspired (not clone) version as a keychain, it might just work. We weren’t sure if anyone would even care, but we knew it was worth the shot.

Original Color Combos for the Mini Bottle Keychain

For the next month I lived in trial and error mode. Designing, re-designing, printing, scrapping, and starting over again. We wanted it to look right, to have that similar look and feel as the original but still be our own creation. We stripped away any hard branding and played with colors until it offered variety while still staying true to what people recognized. It was a lot of work for such a small thing, but we wanted it to be perfect.

When we finally launched it on TikTok, everything changed. We had the first experience of going viral on Tik Tok. The first videos blew up almost overnight. Suddenly our comments were full of excitement, the views were climbing into the hundreds of thousands, and best of all, orders started coming in without us spending a single cent on advertising. At the time I didn’t even realize how special that was, but we were selling more than we ever had before and it was all organic.

I remember one night, Abbey and I were watching orders roll in, and I turned to her and said,

“This must have been what the gold rush felt like.”

That’s exactly how it seemed. People were rushing to get them, and we were hanging on for the ride. We are now at over 5500 followers, over 400 thousand likes, and our posts have been viewed over 13 million times! In our first 8 months, we have gone from shaky business that's over with the holidays, to now doing logistics, purchasing extra machines, planning videos, planning products, and just straight up running a business.

The mini bottle keychains gave us some of the best highs of this business, but they also came with challenges. Competition started showing up fast, and production costs kept climbing. That side of the story deserves its own post, so next time I’ll break down the logistics and what we learned along the way.