Cakes Body bills itself as wanting “to do for boobs what Spanx did for butts.” All signs indicate it’s well on its way.
The 2-year-old company grew from a $1 million company in its first year, to making $10 million last year and a projected $50 million in 2024. That was all done without outside investment, only an initial $10,000 supplied by co-founders and sisters Casey and Taylor Capuano. Its single product, a medical grade silicone nipple cover, has been recommended in media from The Wirecutter to “Shark Tank.”
The key to Cakes Body’s growth, the sisters said, has been a relentless focus on organic content.
“We had zero dollars for the marketing budget,” Taylor Capuano said. “We just went at it for 30 days, posting on TikTok every day until one finally took off. And you wouldn’t think that a viral organic TikTok would directly translate to sales, since people have to leave the app and go look you up. But it really worked. We went from doing a couple hundred units a day to selling out 5,000 units overnight from that.”
Cakes Body’s rapid growth is a testament to the power of viral organic marketing on TikTok. But the looming TikTok ban as well as a need for diversification is pushing Cakes Body to invest more in other platforms. But as brands look to move beyond just TikTok, they’ll have to deal with the fact that platforms like Instagram and YouTube require different strategies.
When Cakes Body was first starting, Taylor Capuano said a friend of hers who is a TikTok influencer gave her three pieces of advice for going viral: Post 3-5 times a day, lean into areas of tension and have a strong hook in the first two seconds. The Capuano sisters and their team of 15 employees make the content themselves, posting organic content every day, as well as paid ads with affiliate partners.
Over the last year, Cakes Body has been slowly shifting its marketing efforts away from a sole focus on TikTok. In 2022, the brand’s entire marketing focus was unpaid TikTok content, while in 2023 TikTok drove half of its revenue. This year, TikTok is only 20% of its revenue, while platforms like Meta and Google make up the rest.
But TikTok is still a big part of its business. Since joining TikTok Shop earlier this year, Cakes Body has become the top-performing undergarment brand on TikTok Shop, Casey Capuano said. While the TikTok ban made Cakes Body rethink having all of their eggs in one basket, Taylor Capuano said she’s not too worried about it at the moment and still advises brands to invest in TikTok if they aren’t already.
Diversifying its marketing channels without increasing its budget relied on efficient use of content. Often, Cakes Body will repurpose the same videos that performed well on TikTok for other channels, but with slight changes. For example, Taylor Capuano said that more polished and edited content does better on Instagram than on TikTok. So the brand will take a quick, unpolished video used on TikTok and add some B-roll and editing flourishes before uploading to Instagram.
Content is also being repurposed across time. Right now, Cakes Body is reusing videos shot last May which talk about the value of the product heading into the summer.
“Good organic content is the key to everything,” Casey said. “We’ve had people form billion-dollar brands come to us and ask about our social strategy because our customer acquisition costs are so low. We only pay around $5 per customer acquired, and efficient, organic content is key to that.”
Taylor Capuano said her best advice to other brands of all sizes that are looking to replicate that success is simply to loosen up control of the content.
“Our advice to brands is don’t approve content,” Taylor Capuano said. “Hire a young person, a Gen Z who gets the platform. Give them your guardrails but then just let them post without your approval. If they cross the line, you can give them that feedback later, but you don’t have to approve every single post. We do 100 pieces of content a month. We can’t be slow.”
