TIKTOK 4.8M VIEWS
TIKTOK 4.8M VIEWS
When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, businesses started shutting down, and everyone remained at home — bored.
Everything was uncertain. How long would the pandemic last? Could we weather the storm? Or would we have to shut down the company for good? Is there another pivot plan?
For the better part of 2 years, there were no clear answers to these questions. But there was TikTok — the perfect distraction of fun, organic & raw videos that had immense viral potential.
Like many others, I put my worries aside and devoted my attention to TikTok. I started making short educational videos that showed our dresses, and guided people through what to wear to weddings, bridal showers, events — and what not to wear.
My first viral video came fast and furious, with over 4.8M organic views, and over 10M views from reshares on other accounts. Every subsequent educational video on the wedding subject followed with millions of views or high hundred of thousands.
Making TikToks felt effortless and easy. My best ones were made in under 5 minutes.
Business Beyond the Views
That first viral video brought over 3000 unique visitors to my Ocurent website. It was thrilling to watch the live stats and see how many people were on my site at once and where they were in the world. Despite the excitement, the site barely converted. I realized that because I was renting and selling unique pieces (only one of each dress in only one size), my potential for scalability in this business was extremely dim.
I then tried to bring in other pieces aside from dresses, and I quickly learned that:
My niche was the dress & wedding market — selling items outside of this niche did not appeal to my customer avatar.
If I did want to try and sell outside of my niche, I would need to acquire an incredible volume of clothing in order for this business to be lucrative.
While these findings sound disappointing — it was actually quite a relief for me as an entrepreneur. I finally had some certainty, during this time of extreme uncertainty. I finally had direction on how to make my decision.
At this stage, I knew that it was time to close the chapter on Ocurent and move on to a business model that would be more scalable. I wondered if I could leverage my skill of creating viral TikTok videos to drive traffic to a different website — a website with a simple SKU that anyone could buy, regardless of their body size or personal taste. This is where the idea for creating home organization products and selling them on Amazon came to life.
I will share the details of this journey in another entry, but for the sake of rounding out this post, I will fast-forward several steps and share that I did launch a home organization brand called Homie Collection. I sold clear aesthetic organizer bins on Amazon.com (which were very much on trend as everyone was at home organizing), and I did create viral TikTok videos with over 1M views that drove traffic to my website. Full story to come.