Social media has the power to change a person’s professional trajectory—but does a creating an internet-popular product translate to success IRL?
Allie Harrison’s Homebody chair had been a fixture in her home for a couple of years before the TikTok that made it go viral. The video was simple: Harrison demonstrates several ways she sits in the piece of her own design and creation, set to a snippet from a live performance of Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Club,” with a caption about “the feminine urge to design and build a chair perfectly fit to your body” in a world designed for the average man’s proportions, rather than Harrison’s five feet and three inches. Turns out, that struck a major chord, and suddenly more than a million people had seen her chair.
Allie Harrison’s Homebody chair is an interpretation of the gossip bench, influenced in part by Donald Judd.
Courtesy of Allie Harrison
If there’s one thing social media can do, it’s get a lot of eyes on something very, very quickly. Such a visual medium has created a teeming hive of creatives and designers and curious browsers just a phone screen away, primed for the next interesting and eye-catching object. That creates the opportunity to go suddenly viral—and the question of what to do next.
For artist Anastasia Inciardi, it all started with a quarter shortage. It was 2020, and she never seemed to have enough to do her laundry—a big problem, for a household composed of an artist and a farmer. (“Our clothing was always disgusting,” she says.) Her mind returned to a little vending machine that dispensed tattoos and stickers at a Brooklyn Key Food when she was a kid. “I was doing a lot of farmers markers and art markets, and I thought to myself, what if I created a little art vending machine where people would put quarters in, and then I could do my laundry?”
It took a couple of years, but in 2023, she finally got the idea off the ground on a permanent basis, installing a machine at Soleil, a beautifully curated store in downtown Portland, Maine, and filling it with small prints of her charming food art, enticing images like sardines, pickles, and tomatoes. Naturally, she created an Instagram Reel to spread the word. Two years and 17 million views later, she has 65 machines across the country—including at the Whitney and Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art—and has partnered with brands from Warby Parker to the New York Liberty. And those little machines are selling tens of thousands of prints a month. “I still am shocked, most days, I’d say,” Inciardi admits.
The path to his own business was a little rockier for Tony Piloseno, who initially built up a TikTok following in 2020, posting himself mixing paints at his part-time job at Sherwin Williams—until he was let go by the company. So in early 2021, he created Tonester Paints, specializing in a dark, rich, moody color palette, funding its growth by selling direct to consumers garnered from social media. He made a purposeful decision to pivot from an influencer-type path, though he still uses the popularity of the format in his own way: “I’m essentially an influencer for my own brand,” he says. “I can showcase my own product, what I’ve made, and generate sales and income from that.” More than four years later, Piloseno says, it’s probably been a while since most people associated Tonester with the initial viral Sherwin Williams story.
Harrison created her Homebody chair while getting her masters in interior architecture at the University of Oregon. “The prompt was to design a chair that fit you and your needs and your body,” she says. She decided to build her ideal morning chair, perfectly suited to her early-riser routine. That meant a little storage space and a spot where she could rest a book or a cup of coffee. She also likes to keep her feet propped up. The result was a cousin to the telephone benches of the mid-20th century, with heavy aesthetic influence from furniture by Donald Judd. Included is a little removable table that can serve as a built-in side table or a coffee table/footstool. The TikTok came a couple of years later, after Harrison had graduated and moved back to Nashville. She was working nine to five at an interior design and architecture firm and wanted a creative outlet outside of her day job, so she started playing around with the platform.
It’s hard to say exactly why lightning strikes. Piloseno points out the value of sheer consistency, for one thing, as well as being organic and authentic. Inciardi doesn’t know exactly why her Reel took off so massively. She used trending audio (by a band she happened to love), plus the experience is nostalgic and offers the rare $1 treat. “And hopefully my art is cute and people like it,” she adds.
“Anyone who posts on TikTok I feel like says this, but it’s always the most random video that you think of in a second and slap a random sound on and say something random that goes viral,” says Harrison. “My friend who’s a full-time content creator was like, that is so lucky that that is the video that went off.”
Of course, after the attention comes the tough part: capitalizing on it. Inciardi quickly found herself deluged: “I was getting hundreds of requests for vending machines, and I was really overwhelmed,” says Inciardi. “I’d been selling my prints online, and they were doing well, the linocuts. But this was a whole other beast.” So she reached out to a friend’s boyfriend with a head for business. He’s now her partner in the enterprise and they have six employees, including a new social media manager, lifting Instagram responsibilities off Inciardi’s shoulders.
Furniture is particularly complicated, and so initially at least, Harrison decided to simply sell the plans on Etsy. That required a little retro engineering, as it turned out, because the first time she built the chair, she wasn’t focused on creating instructions others could follow.
“That was where I was feeling the most frazzled,” Harrison explains—that moment between the initial interest and when she could offer something for sale. “I have to keep the momentum up, because I have people caring about it, and keep posting, but I’m also not done with the instructions yet so I’m posting just to post, not because I have anything to give anyone.” She and her husband are currently in the process of seeing if they can figure out how to build a limited run of the chairs themselves; she’s reached out to local manufacturers, but the numbers just don’t make sense for them.
“If that goes okay, which I think it will,” says Harrison, “at the end of the summer, we’ll release a drop almost—just saying we’re selling five chairs, here’s the link, if you want one, get one.”
Now that Tonester has been up and running for several years, social media’s place in his business and overall strategy has shifted. While going viral was certainly part of his initial plans, Piloseno says, his content has necessarily changed as the brand has grown and established itself: “Tonester has built its community to a point where we can make content that’s geared specifically to the community that we already have.” Now he focuses more on informational content to serve his existing audience and customers, and much of his attention goes to the nuts and bolts of running the business. “Social media is a great way to kickstart things and get your name out there,” he adds, admitting that he wouldn’t be on this path without the part played by TikTok. “But over time, focusing more on the actual in-depth part of the business and the operational and sales part is more important.”
But the sheer validation of it can be valuable for designers, too: “Being in the design industry, sometimes you just get so in your head,” says Harrison. “Does anyone like what I do? Does anyone care what I do? It’s just such a vulnerable position to be in, so it was really awesome to see everyone being so supportive.”
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