Why it matters:
- Startup home care line Preston Lane built a brand following by allowing the owner’s existing personal audience a peek behind the (brand) curtain to build anticipation.
- Influencer-driven viral attention and early adoption of TikTok Shop have skin care brand Pure Daily Care experiencing fivefold sales increases on the platform and over 100 million social views.
- A social strategy that let the person behind the Baked by Melissa brand shine garnered a 6,000% increase in followers in the past five years.
Founders and marketers from a startup, scaling, and established company, respectively, shared with CO— how they maximized their social content, visibility, and customer reach to power sales.
Preston Lane: Leveraging a personal following to raise startup brand excitement
Preston Lane, a brand of luxury plant-based scented home care products, had the benefit of a built-in audience when it launched a year ago from Preston Konrad, Co-Founder and Chief Brand Officer. Konrad, a lifestyle expert and TV personality who directed styling at Ralph Lauren and American Eagle Outfitters, among other companies, built a large personal social media following on Instagram and TikTok.
When he sought to develop a brand that democratized affordable, stylish home products, he teamed with longtime associate Lisa Manice, Co-Founder and CEO. After working together for many years growing other big-name consumer packaged goods brands, the pair developed the Preston Lane line of European-made candles, all-purpose cleaner, dish soap, hand soap and cream, and now room spray, that evoke a mix of refined scented brands like Le Labo and mass cleaning lines like Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day.
“We wanted to put high-end fragrances in everyday items,” Konrad explains. Products are available in four scents: Highrise, Mayfair, Doheny Drive, and Terrace View, with some sold in sets.
“I am a big believer in scentscapes as an easy way to transform a home,” he adds.
The formulas and scents are made in Venice, Italy (with the candles and room spray made in the United States), which provided a compelling story to intrigue social media followers. Leading up to launch, Konrad and Manice tapped into his existing audience.
"We brought followers along the journey, showing behind-the-scenes videos of us in Italy, sourcing products, picking bottles,” he continues. “We did this for about a year, and they were awaiting the brand while we built new channels for the brand itself.”
For launch, the team created a direct-to-consumer website and Instagram and TikTok accounts under the Preston Lane banner as marketing channels. A few months later, it began to sell via Meta (Instagram and Facebook) and with select products on TikTok Shop, the e-commerce platform within the TikTok app that allows users to shop directly from videos, profiles, and live streams.
Though Preston Lane began as an online brand, it eventually expanded into retail via upscale department stores.
“Three to four months into the launch, we entered Nordstrom and are in its top 20 stores nationwide,” says Manice.
Preston Lane also has a small pop-up store in New York City’s Hudson Yards, which was originally intended to be temporary.
“We put our blood, sweat, and tears into it, and we didn’t want it to close in a few months,” explains Konrad. “Besides, it’s a big world and no matter how big your online audience is, it’s important to get in front of new people.”
Most sales are via Amazon and direct to consumer. Department stores and other retail bring with them their own audience, but often reordering occurs online, Konrad said. Products retail under $20, with only the candle priced at $34.
A digital-first strategy has its own challenges, Konrad notes. “You are building a house on land you don’t own. You have no control over the algorithm, and you need to engage followers at the right time while understanding that the way content exposes itself to your audience changes every day,” he said. “It’s a challenge constantly gaining eyes.”
Assess the value of each platform and decide quickly your creator strategy. Creators are like CMOs. We learn from them.Jonathan Cohen, Chief Marketing Officer for Pure Daily Care and AquaSonic
The challenge is paying off. Currently, social media followers are closing in on 1 million with Preston Lane and Konrad’s combined audiences on Instagram and TikTok and 9 million views on Konrad’s personal TikTok. The two feed one another, he says.
Konrad acts as the face of the brand and uses about five influencers with small to midsize followings. That strategy will be augmented with a line extension planned in the coming months. Content development for Instagram and TikTok marketing is already underway.
“Brand owners have to think this way, planning shots and videos for social,” said Konrad. “It’s not the 100-person photo shoot that it used to be.”
[Read more: Trend Forecasters on the 6 Consumer Trends Set to Impact Business in 2025]
Pure Daily Care: Maximizing creators and affiliates to drive TikTok Shop success
An Amazon-first strategy benefited two brands launched by Dave Dama and Arsalan Rahbarpoor under parent company Onyx Global Group: Pure Daily Care, professional-grade home skin care, and AquaSonic, affordable, high-quality oral care.
But pandemic-era stay-at-home behavior shifts are what really propelled Pure Daily Care into a TikTok viral sensation with its flagship product, the NuDerma High Frequency Wand. With spa or dermatologist visits ground to a halt, people who were embracing at-home skin care posted videos of themselves using the wand (available in anti-acne, anti-aging, professional, and clinical models) designed to firm and rejuvenate skin. By early 2021, the brand had amassed 15 million views.
When Jonathan Cohen, Chief Marketing Officer for Pure Daily Care and AquaSonic, joined the team in 2021, bringing a background in e-commerce and marketing with companies like Dermalogica and Lancer Skincare, he set out to amplify the buzz. (This predated TikTok Shop or whitelisting, a now common practice where an influencer grants a brand permission to access and promote content directly from the influencer’s handle as a paid ad campaign to reach new audiences.)
So, Cohen got creative, scripting and developing his own videos that mimicked the viral ones.
“We created a second-wave viral, but controlled it,” explained Cohen, who wrote scripts with common phrases and sound bites from the most-viewed Pure Daily Care viral content. “We knew it was unique and hadn’t been done before.”
Cohen also recognized the halo effect of more TikTok views boosting Amazon sales. As the brand’s social media presence grew, the customer base grew beyond people in their 20s and 30s to include those over 40. (NuDerma is for anyone who gets facials, regardless of age, Cohen emphasizes.)
TikTok Shop, opened in September 2023, was the next logical step to scale sales. Pure Daily launched as one of the platform's first brands, experiencing several growth spurts during key promotional periods. Most recently, it saw a fivefold sales increase in July 2025 over the previous month — ranking among the top 10 personal care shops. TikTok Shop is now Pure Daily Care’s No. 2 sales channel, after Amazon.
Working with creators and affiliates advances success on TikTok Shop, which wants brands to release hundreds of new video content pieces weekly. Pure Daily Care now collaborates with over 500,000 creators, plus a new affiliate agency that helped initiate 700 new partnerships with high-impact influencers. Since 2020, NuDerma’s views on TikTok have reached over 1 billion for all videos, products, and livestreams combined.
Cohen also uses on TikTok Spark Ad codes to augment content output without having to create all of it in-house. Instead, content creators provide a unique authorization code that allows brands to run creators’ videos as a TikTok ad.
Cohen recommends that anything not earning incremental revenue be back-burnered, including organic social.
“Don’t follow a traditional playbook. Assess the value of each platform and decide quickly your creator strategy,” he emphasized. “Creators are like CMOs. We learn from them.”
Baked by Melissa: A pivot to personal posts — like day-in-the videos from the cupcake giant’s founder — uncorks new revenue streams
Baked by Melissa, which carved a niche in the cupcake market nearly 17 years ago with bite-sized treats in offbeat flavors and a distinctive tie-dye design, found new life in a revamped social strategy. A more authentic approach to content saw followers surge 6,000% in five years, reports Melissa Ben-Ishay, Founder and CEO.
Content broadened to accentuate the personality of Ben-Ishay who, after all, was the Melissa behind Melissa’s. At age 24, she was baking her unique cupcakes for friends and family in her Murray Hill, Manhattan, apartment while unemployed. She soon partnered with her brother, Brian Bushell, to create a business for the baked goods, starting with catering orders and eventually opening a retail location — a pick-up window in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood.
Bushell served as CEO until 2015, followed by Seth Horowitz, formerly of Everlast Worldwide and Modell’s Sporting Goods. Ben-Ishay assumed that helm in December 2019, just prior to the pandemic, which would ultimately act as an impetus for a new social strategy.
Until then, Baked by Melissa’s TikTok content consisted of cupcake-focused videos and dessert recipes. Performance was stagnant. But during stay-at-home mandates, Ben-Ishay spent time cooking meals for her family and began posting videos of those recipes on her personal TikTok, where they received strong engagement. She decided to test them on the Baked by Melissa account.
“Engagement increased immediately, then various salad videos quickly went viral, including my Green Goddess, with over 25 million views,” she recalled.
Then cupcake sales moved 100% online amid the pandemic, and a more engaging social presence helped draw in more consumers to meet, or take a fresh look at, the brand.
“I knew it was important to build a community of people who trust us and consistently come back for quality content, so I continued to post more of what worked: nourishing meals designed to deliver the perfect bite, just like our cupcakes. This is what propelled our social growth,” Ben-Ishay said.
Growth, in fact, has skyrocketed. The company’s social media following across channels has hit over 4 million, a 6,000% surge since 2020. TikTok alone has grown from 26,000 followers to 2.5 million in the past five years.
Today, the baked goods giant is estimated to have sold 400 million cupcakes since its inception. Heightened brand awareness is helping uncork new revenue streams in the form of sponsored content and paid brand partnerships. In recent years, the company has partnered with companies like Tabasco, Cabot Creamery, and Squishmallows to create attention-getting cupcake flavors, with more planned.
Baked by Melissa expects to continue its successful social media strategy of authentic content.
“As the face behind the Baked by Melissa brand, it feels natural to share behind-the-scenes clips, product launches, and day-in-the-life videos,” says Ben-Ishay. “It humanizes the brand and furthers a genuine connection to our audience.”
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