Cakes Body turns TikTok virality into an owned media arm
Cakes Body built $100 million in sales on TikTok virality. Now it has launched Cakes Media to own its audience, not rent it. Here's the brand lesson.
Viral reach is rented, not owned. Cakes Body—the beauty brand that launched in 2022 and grossed $100 million in sales in three years—is now trying to convert its TikTok moment into an audience it can reach on its own terms.
Why Cakes is building a media arm
Last week the brand unveiled Cakes Media, an in-house entertainment company. Co-founder and chief creative officer Taylor Capuano framed the move as a profitability play: the aim is to “operationalize virality in a way that makes our overall business more profitable.” The first output is a 57-minute YouTube documentary that had already passed 371,600 views when Digiday reported on it.
Cakes Body appeared on Shark Tank and grew largely through founder-led storytelling and TikTok videos rather than traditional brand marketing. The founders, twin sisters Capuano and Casey Sarai, have now hired former Red Bull executive Caley Wildermuth as head of content. Control is the point.
The limits of rented attention
For brand managers, this is the strategic question underneath the launch: if the algorithm delivered your audience, do you really have an audience? Organic virality created what Capuano called a halo effect, improving media efficiency, awareness, consideration and profitability. But that attention remains platform-dependent, and rising digital ad costs make buying the same reach more expensive every quarter.
That is why Cakes Media sits in the brand’s top-of-funnel budget. The plan is to build long-term audience engagement through entertainment rather than hard-sell advertising, then mine full-length episodes into short-form clips. It is the Red Bull Media House playbook applied to a direct-to-consumer beauty brand.
What the move really changes
- Long-form documentaries get cut into short-form assets for TikTok and Reels.
- Founder-led content stays in-house, preserving tone and personality.
- Cakes Media is funded as brand marketing, not performance marketing.
Daryl Giannantonio, chief strategy officer at VML, put the broader shift bluntly: “Entertainment has become the new price of admission. Brands must earn attention by offering entertaining content.”
Watch what happens in the test-and-learn phase
The real proof will be whether audiences show up for a beauty brand’s media when they are not being served it by an algorithm. Cakes Media is in test-and-learn mode, with a second season in development and creator-led programming on the roadmap. Capuano’s stated focus is building the audience first and using it as a vehicle for top-of-funnel brand building.
For marketers, the takeaway is not that every brand needs a documentary studio. It is that virality is a distribution event, not a relationship. Owned media is one way to turn a spike into a system.
Source: Digiday
