When Taylor Capuano and her twin sister Casey Sarai each took $5,000 from their personal savings to start a side hustle in 2022, they had no inkling it would soon become their full-time jobs.
“We didn’t expect it to really turn into anything,” says Capuano, 33. “We just knew: ‘This is a simple solution that is helping us. I wonder if other people will find it useful.'”
Sarai and Capuano are the co-founders of Cakes Body, which makes silicone nipple covers for customers to wear under their clothing — meant to prevent chafing or avoid visible bra lines. Both sisters knew the embarrassment of experiencing a wardrobe malfunction while wearing poorly-fitted undergarments or cheap nipple covers that were uncomfortable or unflattering, Capuano says.
Helped by a December 2023 appearance on ABC’s “Shark Tank,” Cakes Body has amassed nearly a half of a million social media followers across TikTok and Instagram. Customers frequently tout the “grippy” silicone “boob solutions” for being more effective and of better quality than many other covers on the market.
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After topping $1 million in revenue in its first full year of business, Cakes Body brought in roughly $95 million in net sales in its most recent fiscal year, which ended in June. Initially bootstrapped, the business has been profitable since 2022, according to a company spokesperson.
Its only outside investment to date, according to Capuano: the deal the sisters struck on “Shark Tank” with Skims and Good American co-founder Emma Grede, $300,000 in funding for 10% of the company. The investment, which valued Cakes Body at $3 million, closed in December 2023, Capuano says.
“We just knew: ‘This is a simple solution that is helping us. I wonder if other people will find it useful,'” says Capuano, the company’s chief creative officer. Sarai is Cakes Body’s CEO.
Inspiration from ‘desperation’
Cakes Body was born from “desperation,” says Capuano.
In 2022, she and Sarai — marketing managers at apparel brand Life is Good and spirits company Pernod Ricard, respectively — both found themselves looking for new jobs. Pandemic-era layoffs had dwindled the size of Sarai’s team, and the birth of Capuano’s first child left her looking for flexibility that her job didn’t afford her, she says.
Both sisters “desperately needed a path” and, unable to find new jobs, “there was really nothing to lose,” says Capuano.
They brainstormed business ideas around specific pain points from their own lives. They’d both used silicone nipple covers — which use the body’s heat to adhere to skin, without any sticky substances — that they found unflattering and ineffective, Capuano says. A higher-quality, better-designed option could fit more seamlessly under clothing and solve a frustrating problem for women like them, they reasoned.
The sisters researched silicone manufacturers — doing “a lot of Googling,” Capuano says — chose one and ordered a batch of prototypes. With little design experience of their own, the sisters went “back and forth a handful of times” with the manufacturer to make sure the prototypes covered enough surface area, could stick to bare skin without adhesive and had tapered edges to fit seamlessly under clothing, says Capuano.
Once the prototypes were ready, the sisters wore them “every single day,” Capuano says. The result: “It was making our lives better. [And] if it’s solving a problem for us, it will be solving a problem for other people.”
In total, the sisters each spent $5,000 to launch Cakes Body, which included ordering prototypes, buying their first 500 units, buying social media advertisements and setting up an online store through Shopify, says Capuano.
‘Is this replicable?’
Still in their full-time jobs, both sisters worked on their side hustle in their limited free time. The name Cakes Body came from a previous entrepreneurial idea: Sarai had wanted to start a baking business, but never got it off the ground, says Capuano.
Sarai fulfilled orders from her kitchen while Capuano focused on building Cakes Body’s online following, making up to 100 TikTok videos featuring their products each month. Five months after launching, Cakes had its first viral moment, generating over 1 million views from one TikTok post and selling out their entire initial stock.
“It was very exciting and it gave [us] the first glimmer of hope,” says Capuano. But the co-founders remained reluctant to quit their day jobs, in case they couldn’t sustain a single moment of viral success.
A few more viral posts later — roughly one per month, each leading to sold-out stock — both sisters decided to focus on the business full-time. Capuano quit her job in June 2022, followed by Sarai in August.
Cakes Body unabashedly advertises quality over affordability: Its price, $33 per pair, is two-to-three times more expensive than most preexisting cheaper options. It faces competition from other pricey brands that make similar products, from startups Gatherall and ThirdLove to lingerie giant Victoria’s Secret.
The Cakes Body strategy for competition includes future international expansion, Capuano says, and a network of more than 25,000 affiliate content creators who regularly share social content about the company. The business took its first step into brick-and-mortar retail in August: a partnership with cosmetics giant Ulta Beauty that put Cakes Body products in 1,000 stores across the U.S.
Despite her initial fear that Cakes Body’s success wouldn’t last, Capuano now tells other first-time business founders to just get started turning a good idea into a viable business. If you have a product that solves a problem in a market that’s big enough to support your business, with “enough margin for you to make your financial goals happen,” then it’s worth plowing ahead, she says.
“There is a moment where you have to take a leap of faith of either ordering the inventory or putting out the first Instagram post,” says Capuano.
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