When Untouched Blooms founder Max Summersett started selling handcrafted phone grips on Etsy in 2024 she made a couple of orders every day. Then, within a year of launching on Shopify, she sold 10,000 products (without a single paid ad).
She launched using a few hundred dollars saved from cycling around Miami Beach selling flowers. Today, the brand’s used by influencers like Alix Earle and Morgan Riddle, and is best known for turning pet photos into phone grips.
Right around when Max launched, a different brand was going viral on TikTok with a similar product.
They were racking up 600,000 to 800,000 views but didn’t ship to the US. TikTok kept serving those videos to US audiences anyway, and people looked for a local alternative. Max’s product appeared in the search bar, and because she could actually fulfil the order, the sales started flowing to her. Orders jumped from a handful a day to 35, then 60. The lesson she took from it: if something is trending in another market and isn’t available locally, you can capitalize on the search traffic.
Once Max saw that demand was real, she moved from Etsy to Shopify to start selling on a platform she owned, and stop handing over a portion of sales to Etsy.
Max built on the momentum with influencer gifting. She doesn’t have a PR agency or huge budgets for elaborate mailers, so DMs creators and focuses on making every package feel like it was created by a friend. She bedazzles the boxes, includes photos and spends energy making the PR look like it’s from a human, not a brand. Every influencer who has posted about her has mentioned the packaging.
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