So Your Business Went Viral. Now What?

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In two thousand and eight, Leonard Schaltz moved to New York from Sweden. One of the things he missed most was Swedish candy culture, So in twenty seventeen, Leo and two of his friends decided to open their own shop in Lower Manhattan. They called it Bonbon.

It's quirky.

It's like a little nostalgics.

Candy stores that you went to growing up.

No, this looks like the candy store of my dreams.

The walls are lined with bins filled with bright colored candies, twoty fruity rings, fizzy bottles, Swedish brands called PLoP and bubs. The store is what folks in the biz call pick and mix.

Take a bag, you take a scoop. You have a large variety.

Of options, upwards of two hundred options today, mostly gummy candies.

We call them Swedish Swedish fish.

Bon Bon was attracting a steady flow of customers in store and online with its Swedish Swedish fish and other sweet and sour treats. It was enough for Leo and his co founders to open new retail locations like the one in Williamsburg we visited. But then in January of this year, everything changed because of one video posted on TikTok Friday.

Night around ten pm.

I take a little walk to this place in Micha. Listen, I got a plethora a different gum me I like the ones that you feel like you're going to break your keythone.

Within a couple of days, the video had more than a million views and Leo's life was about to change.

So it was a bizarre moment.

I was having a drink with one of my co founders and then I just the phone started going off, like with Shopify.

Notifications, Shopify the platform Bonbon used to sell its candy online.

I'm just like, Okay, it's weird. We don't get this many orders.

What runs through your head?

I think we've been hacked or like something is not right.

But then I go in and I see that they're all sort of regular orders, and them slightly relieved by that, but also a little taken aback, and it's like, like, we got it.

We all got to get back to the.

Warehouse today on the show, so you went viral? Now what we visit small business owners in New York city that have experienced an Internet fueled overnight surge and popularity to understand how it upended their business models and how they learned to adapt. And we sit down with Bloomberg's Amanda Mall for an economics lesson on viral fame. One oh one. This is the big take from Bloomberg News.

Anxiety, overwhelmed, like overwhelming, like we knew we.

Had a good product, like other wise we wouldn't have started a business, Like we believe in the product, but couldn't We didn't imagine that we were going to have lines.

You know, waiting in hours by candy.

Leo wasn't just overwhelmed by all the new attention. He was actually super stressed about how he was going to be able to fill the orders flooding in online.

There was a point where like, okay, well we like we ran out of candy and then we you know, called it distributor in Sweden, like well sorry, I don't have any so we call the factors like well sorry.

I'm backed up. We literally don't have any candidself.

Very few companies who go viral are like totally prepared for what that means.

Amanda Mall reports on consumer culture for Bloomberg. She's someone who spends all day thinking critically about how brands get us hooked on their products, But that doesn't mean she's immune from being influenced by a viral trend.

I know, I am so suceptible to them, Like I am wearing Birkinstock Boston clogs right now, which are like a viral shoe. I probably would not own any elf makeup if I had never opened TikTok. I'm wearing some on my face right now.

Amanda says that TikTok is really good at fueling the kind of overnight success bonbon hat.

TikTok is so algorithmically based, like TikTok is very good at suddenly surrounding you with an idea. Things that you had never thought about or seen before can show up in a way that makes them omnipresent to you. So are the best tacos in New York City?

Hands down?

Shout the new Stanley Pillar.

We're gonna taste test a new ollipop.

Flavor that I finally tried the Arawon Haley Beaver strawberry glay skin smoothie.

And I think that that makes the scale of virality and the speed and intensity of it unprecedented. There's the potential for chaos.

This kind of unprecedented intense interest can also create the sort of mismatch between supply and demand that Leo faced at Bonbon, and that can make your customers frustrated and even mad. Leo says, while he and his team were scrambling to restock their candy supply, new orders kept coming well.

We literally didn't have enough free sources tooracht that moment.

Leo had been thrust into a journey of online virality that no small business owner really plans for, but that some are having to learn to navigate step by step, like Tracy Campbell and Adrian Nappi, who run Brooklyn Charm and Make your Own Jewelry store. They sell customizable bracelets, earrings, and necklaces out of a shop in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, another in Ventura, California, and for years out of a booth in Manhattan's Chelsea Market.

Come with me to make my own jewelry at Brooklyn Charm at Artisan Fleas inside of Chelsea Market in New York City.

Last summer, this TikTok promoting their booth started getting a lot of eyeballs online.

There were so many charms to choose from, and you could even make your.

Own, which the business into stage one of going viral excitement.

You know, it's like hitting the lottery.

You are a business that has been trying to attract attention and attract customers, and the first thing you feel is just like, oh my god, it worked, Like our efforts are paying off. But I think that probably WANs pretty quickly for a lot of them, and what comes next, What comes next, I think is probably panic.

Panic. That's stage two of viral fame.

I mean, I'll be honest, it was the heartiest year of my life.

That booth was seven by seven and it was just chaos, pure chaos. There staff peers, you know, like, yeah, line's getting angry because they couldn't be seen and then kind of taking it out on the staff, leaving bad reviews because of that. And we're just like we're just trying to manage this. And there's TikTok videos of people basically like you know, I came here and I thought I was going to be seen, and you'd think they'd want business.

Was a four hour long way to Brooklyn Charm yesterday. Guys do not go well.

Did they realize how long the process was going to take.

I mean, if we took every order that they wanted as to take, we would never go home.

Like in the beginning, there were some nights I was here till ten o'clock and I didn't finish the orders. We had to shut down online for a couple months because we were like three hundred and fifty orders deep, and a custom order takes about on average thirty minutes to an hour and a half to do one hundred.

And fifty orders thirty minutes to an hour each, that's hundreds and hundreds of hours.

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. It took us months to catch up, and we were at like a ten week wait at one point.

Customers weren't just complaining about the wait times. Some of them weren't satisfied with the product. It wasn't exactly what they'd imagined after seeing it on TikTok.

I think people were so rushed to like jump on the trend that they didn't sit back to think about, like, well, what am I buying? You're buying an affordable costume jewelry, quality, customized piece of jewelry. So just because you'd spent sixty to seventy five dollars doesn't mean it's not going to tarnish. It just means that you've bought a lot of charms and of big, chunky chains.

Bloomberg's Amanda Mule says this is a perfect example of the kind of context collapse that can happen when people hear about something online and decide to just buy it.

Without knowing any history about it, or knowing anything about the people supplying it or about the thing that they found. In general, there's a lot of people with a lot of expectations of you that, like you, maybe couldn't anticipate.

But how can a small business possibly manage all those expectations coming up, keeping new and old customers happy, and planning for what happens once the craze dies down. Okay, so you've gotten past the excitement and the panic of newfound success. Now comes the third stage of virality adaptation, the.

Phase of of like trying to deal with it.

That's Amanda Mole from Bloomberg.

Anything businesses can do to sort of like manage expectations, then try to get the word out that like we're doing this as fast as we can. This is unprecedented, Please be patient, is like generally a very good idea.

Christina Galifaro knows all about adaptation. She's been helping out at Milano Market, her family's Italian specialty food store, since she was seven. Now she runs it herself for years. Most of the people who came into Milano Market's Upper east Side store were from the neighborhood regulars.

You never heard of people traveling from, you know, honestly all over. Now. I've met a couple from Australia last week that was on their honeymoon and they're like, oh, we put this on our list to come here to try it.

It is their chicken caesar salad rap, which went viral on TikTok back in twenty twenty two.

Guys, where can I get the best chicken caesar rap in.

New York City?

The girl who's looking for the best chicken caesar in New York City that it's at Milano Market.

Christina wouldn't have predicted the chicken Caesar wrap to be the Milano Market menu item to go viral. But if she had to guess why, it could be the croutons.

These are own seasoning on them, and we also cut them nice and tiny. You can see so if you haven't, the crotons are too big. It gets really sharp the edges of it. It's all about the details, guys.

They just need to confirm that Milana Market, New York City is so worth the height.

We did wait an hour in line to try the chicken Caesar rap.

It's such a well construct rapp. It's fresh.

The crutons are crunchy, literally filled with trussing it every bite.

When Christina saw the first video, she sprang into action.

I picked up like ten cases of wraps because I was like, I know how social media works, and like we need to have extra and long and behold. The next day we wound up selling like I think it was two hundred.

She didn't just need more wraps, she needed more staff.

Now during the lunch rush, we will start making them a bolt because it's just so maney. I mean, I have honestly one guy now that just like Caesar operations, just like prepping it all day prepping the cruisons, cutting the grilled chicken, chopping the lettuce.

But not everyone can just run to a nearby store for supplies and a pinch LEO from Bonbon is importing his products from overseas. For a new candy shipment to arrive by boat from Sweden, it generally takes three weeks, so Bonbon started relying more on airshipping to get sweets on shelves sooner, communicating with customers about the delays and the shortages, and adding new crowd control measures to the retail shops to manage the three to four hour long lines.

Drunk.

People will come in and be like, I know that there's a speakeasy here, Like, where's the speakeasy.

Showed me the speakeasy, and I'm like, literally, there's no speakeasy. Like that's not the type of business for the candy.

But honestly, mysterious lines can also be a turn on for some customers, especially in New York. I asked Amanda, is scarcity always a bad thing?

Scarcity is a very useful tool in marketing. Probably the best example of this is Ermez and It's handbags. You have never really been able to easily walk into an Ermez boutique and walk out with a Burkin or a Kelly bag. It has kept those bags in the consciousness

If the line's too long to get your sandwich, you're just going to buy a sandwich somewhere else.

There are other sandwiches.

Lucky for me and Julia Press, our producer, we managed to beat the lunch rush when we visited Milano Market on a Friday morning in September. Julia and I took our chicken Caesar wraps to a cafe around the corner to give them a taste. Look at that it's juicy. Let's going The person sitting next to us couldn't help it. Over here, she interrupted our taste test with an urgent message, I.

Need you not to advertise Milana Market because as an Upper east Side native, it's been our treasure for years, and then TikTok started loving I found like a really old person. But now there's a line around the block every single weekend, and I can't just get my amour sandwich in five minutes like I used to.

Maya Reuben was going to Milano way before their chicken Caesar wrap went viral, and it was never her typical order, though she has tried it.

It's really good, there's a good crunch in there.

She just wants to be able to walk in, get her a more sandwich, pershudo barrata, balsamic on shibata, and get out, not deal with throngs of crowds. And Amanda says this is a real risk of viral popularity alienating your most loyal fan base, the people who've been with you since day one.

For the vast majority of businesses that experience it, you get a big spike and it goes back down, and it may not go back down to the previous level. It may settle at like a higher level overall. But there's also the possibility of having a viral moment and your product or service becoming so scarce and so difficult to get that like the customers who are paying your bills beforehand are like, never mind, I can't deal with this. It's ruined.

And this brings us to stage four of going viral, establishing a new normal, which starts with realizing that the extreme highs of viral fame won't last forever.

If in that moment of virality, you invest a bunch of capital in expansion, in new lines of business, in new supplies, in new space. If you do all of that and then you don't retain your long term customers, and then your new viral customers don't make up for those lost loyalists in the long term, you've got a real math problem on your hands.

Over at Bonbon, Leo says that since that TikTok dropped, the company's revenue has grown six or sevenfold. Lines aren't down the block anymore, but he says selling candy at their own stores was never the ultimate goal. He's hoping to leverage the viral fame to get Bonbon brand candies onto the shelves of bigger stores.

The obvious are your Whole Food or Target, CBS, Walmart.

And now we've arrived at our final stage, the endgame. It can look different for each company. For some, virality could be a springboard to even bigger opportunities.

If you have a viral product and it attracts a lot of attention, going viral shows that you understand the market and you understand how to respond to business changes. That attracts investors. It attracts people who are looking to make a buck. So if you were looking to sell, it is very good to have a product that becomes widely known to the general public. If you are looking for investment, it's equally good.

Tracy and Adrian at Brooklyn Charm say they aren't angling for an acquisition right now, but they are hoping to use their recent success to open a few more jewelry stores, and they're going to try sourcing some more of their charms from new manufacturers overseas to help sustain their supply of bracelet making materials. I asked them what advice they have for other small businesses who are dealing with their own viral moment right now, take a.

Big, deep breath, make sure you drink lots of water, and get a therapist.

Yeah, this is the big take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder. This episode was produced by Julia Press. It was edited by Caitlin Kenny and Laura Bliss. It was mixed by Alex Sugiura. It was fact checked by Adriana Tatia. Our senior producer is Naomi Shaven. Our senior editor is Elizabeth Ponso. Our executive producer is Nicole Beans. Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next week. Hey, everyone, Bloomberg wants to hear from you.