Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2: In two thousand and eight, Leonard Schaltz moved to New
Speaker 2: York from Sweden. One of the things he missed most
Speaker 2: was Swedish candy culture, So in twenty seventeen, Leo and
Speaker 2: two of his friends decided to open their own shop
Speaker 2: in Lower Manhattan. They called it Bonbon.
Speaker 3: It's quirky.
Speaker 4: It's like a little nostalgics.
Speaker 2: Candy stores that you went to growing up.
Speaker 3: No, this looks like the candy store of my dreams.
Speaker 2: The walls are lined with bins filled with bright colored candies,
Speaker 2: twoty fruity rings, fizzy bottles, Swedish brands called PLoP and bubs.
Speaker 2: The store is what folks in the biz call pick
Speaker 2: and mix.
Speaker 3: Take a bag, you take a scoop. You have a
Speaker 3: large variety.
Speaker 2: Of options, upwards of two hundred options today, mostly gummy candies.
Speaker 3: We call them Swedish Swedish fish.
Speaker 2: Bon Bon was attracting a steady flow of customers in
Speaker 2: store and online with its Swedish Swedish fish and other
Speaker 2: sweet and sour treats. It was enough for Leo and
Speaker 2: his co founders to open new retail locations like the
Speaker 2: one in Williamsburg we visited. But then in January of
Speaker 2: this year, everything changed because of one video posted on
Speaker 2: TikTok Friday.
Speaker 5: Night around ten pm.
Speaker 6: I take a little walk to this place in Micha. Listen,
Speaker 6: I got a plethora a different gum me I like
Speaker 6: the ones that you feel like you're going to break
Speaker 6: your keythone.
Speaker 2: Within a couple of days, the video had more than
Speaker 2: a million views and Leo's life was about to change.
Speaker 3: So it was a bizarre moment.
Speaker 4: I was having a drink with one of my co
Speaker 4: founders and then I just the phone started going off,
Speaker 4: like with Shopify.
Speaker 2: Notifications, Shopify the platform Bonbon used to sell its candy online.
Speaker 3: I'm just like, Okay, it's weird. We don't get this
Speaker 3: many orders.
Speaker 2: What runs through your head?
Speaker 3: I think we've been hacked or like something is not right.
Speaker 4: But then I go in and I see that they're
Speaker 4: all sort of regular orders, and them slightly relieved by that,
Speaker 4: but also a little taken aback, and it's like, like,
Speaker 4: we got it.
Speaker 3: We all got to get back to the.
Speaker 2: Warehouse today on the show, so you went viral? Now
Speaker 2: what we visit small business owners in New York city
Speaker 2: that have experienced an Internet fueled overnight surge and popularity
Speaker 2: to understand how it upended their business models and how
Speaker 2: they learned to adapt. And we sit down with Bloomberg's
Speaker 2: Amanda Mall for an economics lesson on viral fame. One
Speaker 2: oh one. This is the big take from Bloomberg News.
Speaker 2: I'm Sarah Holder. Going viral. It's something many small business
Speaker 2: owners dream of, but when it finally happens, it can
Speaker 2: bring up a lot of other more complicated feelings.
Speaker 3: Anxiety, overwhelmed, like overwhelming, like we knew we.
Speaker 4: Had a good product, like other wise we wouldn't have
Speaker 4: started a business, Like we believe in the product, but
Speaker 4: couldn't We didn't imagine that we were going to have lines.
Speaker 3: You know, waiting in hours by candy.
Speaker 2: Leo wasn't just overwhelmed by all the new attention. He
Speaker 2: was actually super stressed about how he was going to
Speaker 2: be able to fill the orders flooding in online.
Speaker 4: There was a point where like, okay, well we like
Speaker 4: we ran out of candy and then we you know,
Speaker 4: called it distributor in Sweden, like well sorry, I don't
Speaker 4: have any so we call the factors like well sorry.
Speaker 3: I'm backed up. We literally don't have any candidself.
Speaker 5: Very few companies who go viral are like totally prepared
Speaker 5: for what that means.
Speaker 2: Amanda Mall reports on consumer culture for Bloomberg. She's someone
Speaker 2: who spends all day thinking critically about how brands get
Speaker 2: us hooked on their products, But that doesn't mean she's
Speaker 2: immune from being influenced by a viral trend.
Speaker 5: I know, I am so suceptible to them, Like I
Speaker 5: am wearing Birkinstock Boston clogs right now, which are like
Speaker 5: a viral shoe. I probably would not own any elf
Speaker 5: makeup if I had never opened TikTok. I'm wearing some
Speaker 5: on my face right now.
Speaker 2: Amanda says that TikTok is really good at fueling the
Speaker 2: kind of overnight success bonbon hat.
Speaker 5: TikTok is so algorithmically based, like TikTok is very good
Speaker 5: at suddenly surrounding you with an idea. Things that you
Speaker 5: had never thought about or seen before can show up
Speaker 5: in a way that makes them omnipresent to you. So
Speaker 5: are the best tacos in New York City?
Speaker 6: Hands down?
Speaker 3: Shout the new Stanley Pillar.
Speaker 5: We're gonna taste test a new ollipop.
Speaker 6: Flavor that I finally tried the Arawon Haley Beaver strawberry
Speaker 6: glay skin smoothie.
Speaker 5: And I think that that makes the scale of virality
Speaker 5: and the speed and intensity of it unprecedented. There's the
Speaker 5: potential for chaos.
Speaker 2: This kind of unprecedented intense interest can also create the
Speaker 2: sort of mismatch between supply and demand that Leo faced
Speaker 2: at Bonbon, and that can make your customers frustrated and
Speaker 2: even mad. Leo says, while he and his team were
Speaker 2: scrambling to restock their candy supply, new orders kept coming well.
Speaker 3: We literally didn't have enough free sources tooracht that moment.
Speaker 2: Leo had been thrust into a journey of online virality
Speaker 2: that no small business owner really plans for, but that
Speaker 2: some are having to learn to navigate step by step,
Speaker 2: like Tracy Campbell and Adrian Nappi, who run Brooklyn Charm
Speaker 2: and Make your Own Jewelry store. They sell customizable bracelets, earrings,
Speaker 2: and necklaces out of a shop in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, another
Speaker 2: in Ventura, California, and for years out of a booth
Speaker 2: in Manhattan's Chelsea Market.
Speaker 7: Come with me to make my own jewelry at Brooklyn
Speaker 7: Charm at Artisan Fleas inside of Chelsea Market in New
Speaker 7: York City.
Speaker 2: Last summer, this TikTok promoting their booth started getting a
Speaker 2: lot of eyeballs online.
Speaker 1: There were so many charms to choose from, and you
Speaker 1: could even make your.
Speaker 2: Own, which the business into stage one of going viral excitement.
Speaker 1: You know, it's like hitting the lottery.
Speaker 5: You are a business that has been trying to attract
Speaker 5: attention and attract customers, and the first thing you feel
Speaker 5: is just like, oh my god, it worked, Like our
Speaker 5: efforts are paying off. But I think that probably WANs
Speaker 5: pretty quickly for a lot of them, and what comes next,
Speaker 5: What comes next, I think is probably panic.
Speaker 2: Panic. That's stage two of viral fame.
Speaker 7: I mean, I'll be honest, it was the heartiest year
Speaker 7: of my life.
Speaker 1: That booth was seven by seven and it was just chaos,
Speaker 1: pure chaos. There staff peers, you know, like, yeah, line's
Speaker 1: getting angry because they couldn't be seen and then kind
Speaker 1: of taking it out on the staff, leaving bad reviews
Speaker 1: because of that. And we're just like we're just trying
Speaker 1: to manage this. And there's TikTok videos of people basically
Speaker 1: like you know, I came here and I thought I
Speaker 1: was going to be seen, and you'd think they'd want business.
Speaker 3: Was a four hour long way to Brooklyn Charm yesterday.
Speaker 3: Guys do not go well.
Speaker 1: Did they realize how long the process was going to take.
Speaker 6: I mean, if we took every order that they wanted
Speaker 6: as to take, we would never go home.
Speaker 1: Like in the beginning, there were some nights I was
Speaker 1: here till ten o'clock and I didn't finish the orders.
Speaker 1: We had to shut down online for a couple months
Speaker 1: because we were like three hundred and fifty orders deep,
Speaker 1: and a custom order takes about on average thirty minutes
Speaker 1: to an hour and a half to do one hundred.
Speaker 2: And fifty orders thirty minutes to an hour each, that's
Speaker 2: hundreds and hundreds of hours.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's what I'm saying. It took us months to
Speaker 1: catch up, and we were at like a ten week
Speaker 1: wait at one point.
Speaker 2: Customers weren't just complaining about the wait times. Some of
Speaker 2: them weren't satisfied with the product. It wasn't exactly what
Speaker 2: they'd imagined after seeing it on TikTok.
Speaker 1: I think people were so rushed to like jump on
Speaker 1: the trend that they didn't sit back to think about, like, well,
Speaker 1: what am I buying? You're buying an affordable costume jewelry, quality,
Speaker 1: customized piece of jewelry. So just because you'd spent sixty
Speaker 1: to seventy five dollars doesn't mean it's not going to tarnish.
Speaker 1: It just means that you've bought a lot of charms
Speaker 1: and of big, chunky chains.
Speaker 2: Bloomberg's Amanda Mule says this is a perfect example of
Speaker 2: the kind of context collapse that can happen when people
Speaker 2: hear about something online and decide to just buy it.
Speaker 5: Without knowing any history about it, or knowing anything about
Speaker 5: the people supplying it or about the thing that they found.
Speaker 5: In general, there's a lot of people with a lot
Speaker 5: of expectations of you that, like you, maybe couldn't anticipate.
Speaker 2: But how can a small business possibly manage all those
Speaker 2: expectations coming up, keeping new and old customers happy, and
Speaker 2: planning for what happens once the craze dies down. Okay,
Speaker 2: so you've gotten past the excitement and the panic of
Speaker 2: newfound success. Now comes the third stage of virality adaptation, the.
Speaker 5: Phase of of like trying to deal with it.
Speaker 2: That's Amanda Mole from Bloomberg.
Speaker 5: Anything businesses can do to sort of like manage expectations,
Speaker 5: then try to get the word out that like we're
Speaker 5: doing this as fast as we can. This is unprecedented,
Speaker 5: Please be patient, is like generally a very good idea.
Speaker 2: Christina Galifaro knows all about adaptation. She's been helping out
Speaker 2: at Milano Market, her family's Italian specialty food store, since
Speaker 2: she was seven. Now she runs it herself for years.
Speaker 2: Most of the people who came into Milano Market's Upper
Speaker 2: east Side store were from the neighborhood regulars.
Speaker 6: You never heard of people traveling from, you know, honestly
Speaker 6: all over. Now. I've met a couple from Australia last
Speaker 6: week that was on their honeymoon and they're like, oh,
Speaker 6: we put this on our list to come here to
Speaker 6: try it.
Speaker 2: It is their chicken caesar salad rap, which went viral
Speaker 2: on TikTok back in twenty twenty two.
Speaker 6: Guys, where can I get the best chicken caesar rap in.
Speaker 5: New York City?
Speaker 6: The girl who's looking for the best chicken caesar in
Speaker 6: New York City that it's at Milano Market.
Speaker 2: Christina wouldn't have predicted the chicken Caesar wrap to be
Speaker 2: the Milano Market menu item to go viral. But if
Speaker 2: she had to guess why, it could be the croutons.
Speaker 6: These are own seasoning on them, and we also cut
Speaker 6: them nice and tiny. You can see so if you haven't,
Speaker 6: the crotons are too big. It gets really sharp the
Speaker 6: edges of it. It's all about the details, guys.
Speaker 2: They just need to confirm that Milana Market, New York
Speaker 2: City is so worth the height.
Speaker 6: We did wait an hour in line to try the
Speaker 6: chicken Caesar rap.
Speaker 3: It's such a well construct rapp. It's fresh.
Speaker 7: The crutons are crunchy, literally filled with trussing it every bite.
Speaker 2: When Christina saw the first video, she sprang into action.
Speaker 6: I picked up like ten cases of wraps because I
Speaker 6: was like, I know how social media works, and like
Speaker 6: we need to have extra and long and behold. The
Speaker 6: next day we wound up selling like I think it
Speaker 6: was two hundred.
Speaker 2: She didn't just need more wraps, she needed more staff.
Speaker 6: Now during the lunch rush, we will start making them
Speaker 6: a bolt because it's just so maney. I mean, I
Speaker 6: have honestly one guy now that just like Caesar operations,
Speaker 6: just like prepping it all day prepping the cruisons, cutting
Speaker 6: the grilled chicken, chopping the lettuce.
Speaker 2: But not everyone can just run to a nearby store
Speaker 2: for supplies and a pinch LEO from Bonbon is importing
Speaker 2: his products from overseas. For a new candy shipment to
Speaker 2: arrive by boat from Sweden, it generally takes three weeks,
Speaker 2: so Bonbon started relying more on airshipping to get sweets
Speaker 2: on shelves sooner, communicating with customers about the delays and
Speaker 2: the shortages, and adding new crowd control measures to the
Speaker 2: retail shops to manage the three to four hour long lines.
Speaker 2: They even had what they called a candy bouncer on
Speaker 2: the weekends. We met the first one, an employee named
Speaker 2: Sage Gilbert.
Speaker 3: Drunk.
Speaker 2: People will come in and be like, I know that
Speaker 2: there's a speakeasy here, Like, where's the speakeasy.
Speaker 3: Showed me the speakeasy, and I'm like, literally, there's no speakeasy.
Speaker 3: Like that's not the type of business for the candy.
Speaker 2: But honestly, mysterious lines can also be a turn on
Speaker 2: for some customers, especially in New York. I asked Amanda,
Speaker 2: is scarcity always a bad thing?
Speaker 5: Scarcity is a very useful tool in marketing. Probably the
Speaker 5: best example of this is Ermez and It's handbags. You
Speaker 5: have never really been able to easily walk into an
Speaker 5: Ermez boutique and walk out with a Burkin or a
Speaker 5: Kelly bag. It has kept those bags in the consciousness
Speaker 5: of high net worth individuals for decades on end. But then,
Speaker 5: if the product that you're selling, which is often the
Speaker 5: case with viral products, doesn't have this sort of like
Speaker 5: built in story and allure as to why it would
Speaker 5: be scarce, when it becomes too scarce, people just move on.
Speaker 2: If the line's too long to get your sandwich, you're
Speaker 2: just going to buy a sandwich somewhere else.
Speaker 5: There are other sandwiches.
Speaker 2: Lucky for me and Julia Press, our producer, we managed
Speaker 2: to beat the lunch rush when we visited Milano Market
Speaker 2: on a Friday morning in September. Julia and I took
Speaker 2: our chicken Caesar wraps to a cafe around the corner
Speaker 2: to give them a taste. Look at that it's juicy.
Speaker 2: Let's going The person sitting next to us couldn't help it.
Speaker 2: Over here, she interrupted our taste test with an urgent message, I.
Speaker 7: Need you not to advertise Milana Market because as an
Speaker 7: Upper east Side native, it's been our treasure for years,
Speaker 7: and then TikTok started loving I found like a really
Speaker 7: old person. But now there's a line around the block
Speaker 7: every single weekend, and I can't just get my amour
Speaker 7: sandwich in five minutes like I used to.
Speaker 2: Maya Reuben was going to Milano way before their chicken
Speaker 2: Caesar wrap went viral, and it was never her typical order,
Speaker 2: though she has tried it.
Speaker 7: It's really good, there's a good crunch in there.
Speaker 2: She just wants to be able to walk in, get
Speaker 2: her a more sandwich, pershudo barrata, balsamic on shibata, and
Speaker 2: get out, not deal with throngs of crowds. And Amanda
Speaker 2: says this is a real risk of viral popularity alienating
Speaker 2: your most loyal fan base, the people who've been with
Speaker 2: you since day one.
Speaker 5: For the vast majority of businesses that experience it, you
Speaker 5: get a big spike and it goes back down, and
Speaker 5: it may not go back down to the previous level.
Speaker 5: It may settle at like a higher level overall. But
Speaker 5: there's also the possibility of having a viral moment and
Speaker 5: your product or service becoming so scarce and so difficult
Speaker 5: to get that like the customers who are paying your
Speaker 5: bills beforehand are like, never mind, I can't deal with this.
Speaker 5: It's ruined.
Speaker 2: And this brings us to stage four of going viral,
Speaker 2: establishing a new normal, which starts with realizing that the
Speaker 2: extreme highs of viral fame won't last forever.
Speaker 5: If in that moment of virality, you invest a bunch
Speaker 5: of capital in expansion, in new lines of business, in
Speaker 5: new supplies, in new space. If you do all of
Speaker 5: that and then you don't retain your long term customers,
Speaker 5: and then your new viral customers don't make up for
Speaker 5: those lost loyalists in the long term, you've got a
Speaker 5: real math problem on your hands.
Speaker 2: Over at Bonbon, Leo says that since that TikTok dropped,
Speaker 2: the company's revenue has grown six or sevenfold. Lines aren't
Speaker 2: down the block anymore, but he says selling candy at
Speaker 2: their own stores was never the ultimate goal. He's hoping
Speaker 2: to leverage the viral fame to get Bonbon brand candies
Speaker 2: onto the shelves of bigger stores.
Speaker 4: The obvious are your Whole Food or Target, CBS, Walmart.
Speaker 2: And now we've arrived at our final stage, the endgame.
Speaker 2: It can look different for each company. For some, virality
Speaker 2: could be a springboard to even bigger opportunities.
Speaker 5: If you have a viral product and it attracts a
Speaker 5: lot of attention, going viral shows that you understand the
Speaker 5: market and you understand how to respond to business changes.
Speaker 5: That attracts investors. It attracts people who are looking to
Speaker 5: make a buck. So if you were looking to sell,
Speaker 5: it is very good to have a product that becomes
Speaker 5: widely known to the general public. If you are looking
Speaker 5: for investment, it's equally good.
Speaker 2: Tracy and Adrian at Brooklyn Charm say they aren't angling
Speaker 2: for an acquisition right now, but they are hoping to
Speaker 2: use their recent success to open a few more jewelry stores,
Speaker 2: and they're going to try sourcing some more of their
Speaker 2: charms from new manufacturers overseas to help sustain their supply
Speaker 2: of bracelet making materials. I asked them what advice they
Speaker 2: have for other small businesses who are dealing with their
Speaker 2: own viral moment right now, take a.
Speaker 1: Big, deep breath, make sure you drink lots of water,
Speaker 1: and get a therapist.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is the big take from Bloomberg News. I'm
Speaker 2: Sarah Holder. This episode was produced by Julia Press. It
Speaker 2: was edited by Caitlin Kenny and Laura Bliss. It was
Speaker 2: mixed by Alex Sugiura. It was fact checked by Adriana Tatia.
Speaker 2: Our senior producer is Naomi Shaven. Our senior editor is
Speaker 2: Elizabeth Ponso. Our executive producer is Nicole Beans. Sage Bauman
Speaker 2: is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. Thanks for listening. We'll be
Speaker 2: back next week. Hey, everyone, Bloomberg wants to hear from you.
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