Cakes Body has launched its own entertainment company, Cakes Media, to convert TikTok virality into an owned media business.

The new venture went live last week. Its mandate, in the words of Taylor Capuano, co-founder and chief creative officer at Cakes, is to "operationalize virality in a way that makes our overall business more profitable."

The move puts brand marketing capability inside a company that has spent almost nothing on it in the conventional sense. Capuano and her twin sister, co-founder Casey Sarai, built Cakes Body through founder-led storytelling and viral TikTok videos rather than paid brand campaigns. The strategy worked at scale: the company, which launched in 2022 and appeared on Shark Tank, grossed $100 million in sales within three years.

Cakes Body belongs to a cohort of brands — Bogg Bag and Stanley among them — that have taken over social feeds with founder-led content and creator material rather than traditional advertising. For these companies, the social account functions as the primary marketing channel, and the founder functions as the media property.

The launch of Cakes Media signals the next step in that logic. If virality built the brand, the argument goes, then virality should be run as a deliberate, revenue-bearing operation rather than treated as a lucky streak. Bringing entertainment production in-house gives Cakes Body control over the content engine that drove its growth, along with the potential to monetize it beyond selling product.

The bet carries weight given the numbers behind it. A $100 million gross in three years, achieved without the media budgets typical of beauty incumbents, makes Cakes Body a test case for whether organic social reach can be systematized. The company has already drawn attention for its contrarian approach to creator content, advising brands not to over-approve what their creators publish.

For the wider marketing industry, the Cakes Media launch is the latest signal that viral consumer brands see owned media as both an insurance policy and a growth lever. Platform algorithms change; owned audiences do not. Brands that started on TikTok now face the question of how to keep that attention working for them at higher margins — and Cakes Body is attempting to answer it by building the studio itself.

If Cakes Media proves that virality can be operationalized profitably, expect more founder-led brands to follow the same in-house route rather than handing their content strategies to agencies.