My slime business has 4.5 million followers on TikTok and we've sold products to the Kardashians. He

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Andrea O, 25, is the founder of Peachybbies, a online slime store, and is based in Austin, Texas.
She started making and selling slime in 2017 and grew it into a business with 20 employees.
Here's how she used TikTok to build a following and attract customers, as told to writer Judy Brumley.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Andrea O., a 25-year-old entrepreneur, about running her slime business. Her name is partially anonymous to protect her privacy, but her identity and claims in this story have been verified by Insider. It has been edited for length and clarity.

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I always wanted to be a full-time content creator. I started my YouTube channel in 2014, making mostly fashion and lifestyle vlogs. In 2017, I noticed an uptick in slime videos and decided to make one of my own. I had a few thousand subscribers at the time, but my video making slime got hundreds of thousands of views overnight. I was completely shocked and decided to do it again, and before I knew it, all of my content was slime-focused.

People who watched my videos kept asking me if they could buy the slime I made, so I launched the Peachybbies brand in February 2017

Peachybbies' popular Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough and Frogger Jelly slimes. Courtesy Andrea O./Peachybbies

My mom and sister helped me run the business out of our house. I had no idea what I was doing, so there was a big learning curve. I created two slime textures, jelly and cloud-creme, and would add decorative charms and scents to them. Back then I sold them for around $17 each.

Restocks would sell out in a few minutes until mid-2019 when the slime trend seemed to die off and our sales plummeted. I decided to shut down the store because I wanted to focus on YouTube, and I relied on a handful of brand deals to pay my bills.

Shortly after that, I met my now-business partner, Tyler, who convinced me to give Peachybbies another go. Together we invested about $30,000 into redoing the logo and website, upgrading the packaging, getting a new mixer to make the slime, and stocking up on inventory. At the time, we were just working out of our living room.

Peachybbies relaunched on Black Friday in 2019. Business was slow but steady for the first 6 months.

In February 2020, we filed paperwork to establish an LLC.

I was still making YouTube videos but enjoyed it less and less — editing 10-minute videos takes a long time and I was getting burned out. When we relaunched the company, I started making TikToks instead, but didn't get much traction until the app blew up at the beginning of the pandemic.

We had about 20,000 followers when I began posting consistently in the summer of 2020, and by the end of the year we had one million. In September 2020, we signed a lease on a 1,300-square-foot warehouse to produce our slimes at a larger scale.

Freshly batched slime is store in large bins before being packaged into individual units to sell. Courtesy Andrea O./Peachybbies

TikTok seemed to give new life to slime; now, the majority of our sales come from the platform. Social media has been the biggest factor in our success, but as we get more exposure to new customers (we currently have 4.5 million followers on TikTok) it can also be challenging to scale the manufacturing arm of the business to keep up with demand.

When celebrities like Kim Kardashian and her daughter North share our product unexpectedly, sales skyrocket.

@kimandnorth

Love peachy bbies slime 🍑

♬ Bubblegum K.K. - DIMSVM

We moved into our current 5,000-square-foot warehouse in April 2021, but we're already looking for something with even more storage space. At the end of 2020, we had one employee. Now, we have 20 employees and are looking to hire more.

We can't keep up with demand — every restock sells out in minutes

Peachybbies' 5,000-foot warehouse stores all the ingredients needed to make the slimes, from glue and borax to charms and glitter decorations. Courtesy Andrea O./Peachybbies

In 2021, we sold more than 110,000 units of slime. It can take up to an hour to make a single batch, which produces about 100 individual units, and we make 50 to 75 batches a week.

The main ingredients are glue and an activator, which is borax. The borax acts as a binding agent that turns the glue into a slimy consistency. Over time, the slime turns back into a liquid glue, so we include an activator pen with each order. When the slime gets sticky, you simply mix in the activator to make it as good as new.

I think what sets Peachybbies apart from other slime stores is our aesthetic, packaging, and overall presentation of the products and brand. We put a lot of effort into creating exciting new content and adapting to current trends to entertain our followers.

We also use ingredients like fragrance oils, glycerin, fake snow to make the slime fluffy, and lots of sprinkles, charms, and glitter to bring our slimes to life.

When I'm not filming or editing videos for TikTok and Instagram, I'm creating new products

I design most of the slimes myself, but occasionally my staff and our followers will chime in with suggestions.

Many of the slimes are inspired by food, like Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough, Dunkaroo Dip, and My Butter Half, but we don't use real food as ingredients. The "ingredients" in our cooking-inspired TikTok videos are made with clay or slime, and then we put them in real packaging (like an I Can't Believe It's Not Butter box or a Betty Crocker Rainbow Chip Frosting container) to make it look more realistic.

We always try to keep things fresh in the shop, so each week I put together a list of 20 new slime ideas. After I narrow it down to five, I make test batches of the slime and design the packaging artwork and labels to take product photos for the website. Since it's impossible to keep the shop fully stocked, we stick to a consistent drop schedule (Fridays at 7 p.m. EST) so customers know exactly when new slime will be released. Currently, our slimes range in price from $14 to $17.

Creating a product that brings people joy has been such a rewarding experience. I love hearing how excited someone's daughter was to get our slime for her birthday or how playing with the slime helped a customer's anxiety, which is why we're working to expand the business so everyone who wants to buy slime from us is able to.

Judy Brumley is a freelance writer from Kentucky. She's written editorial and branded content stories across all verticals for brands like InStyle, Parents, PEOPLE, and Romper. You can follow her on Instagram and LinkedIn.

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