For Cakes Body, the next phase of its founder

When you build your brand’s marketing around the experience of building the brand itself, where do you go once the construction’s complete?

Founder-led marketing has captivated audiences on social media, particularly on short-form platforms, where personal business stories can drive engagement. According to research from Evolve Media Agency, founder-led content can result in engagement rates 2x–4x higher than other brand content; compared to UGC, it can also lead to increased brand trust and conversion, per an analysis from Conbersa, an agentic hardware infrastructure for social media.

Perhaps no company knows this better than Cakes Body, an undergarment brand started in 2022 by twin sisters and co-founders Taylor Capuano and Casey Sarai.

The brand, which primarily sells nonadhesive nipple covers but has branched into adhesive tapes and training bras, began with a $5,000 investment from each of its co-founders’ personal savings, Capuano told us. That cash infusion covered initial inventory and basic product photography, but there was no budget left over for any other form of marketing, so Capuano became the face of the brand on social media, where she documented the process of building the brand in real time and trying to get the product into as many hands as possible.

It’s been about four years since Cakes entered the scene, and the company now has seen $100 million in gross revenue per year for the last two years and is in the top 1% of sellers on TikTok Shop, per Capuano and the company’s internal data.

So what now? Letting the audience into the day-to-day of building a company is part of Cakes’s brand DNA, but the brand is now squarely beyond the scrappy start-up phase—and its founders have storytelling ambitions beyond the average TikTok user’s attention span.

In September, Cakes Body expanded with Cakes Media, a media company focused on owned entertainment, original programming, and social-first content. Its first piece, a feature-length documentary on YouTube called Viral: The New American Dream, released this week, tells the founding story of how Cakes came to be and is aimed at laying the groundwork for where the brand’s content goes next.

“The thesis is people follow people, not brands,” Capuano said. “Top-of-funnel growth, that’s all about awareness, and that’s all about connecting with people. You don’t need a Super Bowl ad or a big billboard campaign necessarily to do that. I actually think you can do that in a more effective way if it’s through authentic content.”

Baking Cakes Media

Capuano said moving into owned entertainment is not about directly driving more revenue. Instead, it’s about taking steps toward wider audience connection and further building Cakes’s brand reputation—which, based on brand history, could very well lead to increased sales.

“We’ve seen our most viral content for the last three years be mission-driven content, completely unrelated to product, and all ships rise when that happens,” she said. “We see all of our sales metrics go up, and retailers be more interested in working with us, and talent more attracted to working with us, so I think that will be a natural byproduct of the success of this.”

To build Cakes Media’s strategy, the company brought on social media consultant Caley Wildermuth as head of content, who previously was a social producer at Red Bull. Wildermuth told us she sees Cakes’s roots in organic social content as the company’s differentiator, and the key to broader content strategy.

“There’s so few brands where you can actually say, ‘Our story started because of social media,’” Wildermuth told us. “Everything has that throughline of, what is working on organic social, and how can we own it? Because we actually already are in this space.”

Wildermuth is considering concepts like reality series and man-on-the-street formats, she said, which mark a tonal shift from the comparatively dramatic Viral. The documentary highlights the ups and downs of building Cakes, including vulnerable insights ranging from Capuano’s emotional reactions to social media negativity to the effects of the 2025 Palisades Fire. The story of the brand’s founding was the “logical place to start and necessary context” for any future content about and by the brand, Capuano said, but future formats and subject matter will go beyond the founders themselves.

“There are so many amazing personalities at our brand, and I think that’s the thing I’m excited for too…being able to craft the content in a way that brings light to some of those other personalities,” Capuano said.

Own it

Cakes Media comes as the marketing industry increasingly turns to owned entertainment across brands both big and small. One of the most high-profile signals of the shift was Gap’s hiring of Pam Kaufman as its chief entertainment officer earlier this year; since Kaufman joined, the brand has released a short film and announced new partnerships like its most recent with emerging boy band Just Your Type. Brands like Red Bull, Dick’s Sporting Goods, and UPS are also investing in the entertainment space, with content ranging from dedicated social series to full-length features. Brands like Maybelline, Crocs, and Starbucks are also dabbling in soapy microdramas.

The landscape-wide effort indicates the importance of ownership and longevity in brand narratives—but if everyone’s doing it, big brand giants included, how does a smaller company like Cakes make its mark?

Capuano and WIldermuth believe the brand’s advantage lies in its agility and ability, particularly in making entertainment that bigger brands likely never will. As they approach the next phase for Cakes Media, which will showcase “some drama” within the business, Capuano believes the brand is positioned to make content that other companies wouldn’t. While that comes with some fears and risks, especially among others in the business community, that’s also what she believes sets them apart.

“At the end of the day, our No. 1 goal is to connect with people and consumers,” Capuano said, “so we’re really not shying away.”