When Melissa Ben-Ishay was fired from her marketing job in 2008, she may have actually believed you if you told her she'd eventually turn her baking hobby into Baked by Melissa, a multimillion-dollar business that specializes in bite-sized cupcakes. After all, it takes that kind of self-belief to go from a job loss to spending 13 hours a day crafting recipes in a basement commercial kitchen.
But even she, as CEO of a dessert company, would probably be surprised that by 2021 she'd go viral for salad, rather than cupcakes.
Baked by Melissa has 2.4 million followers on its TikTok account, which features its founder, now 39, making recipes ranging from sweet treats to burgers to a green goddess salad that went viral on the platform — a January 2022 post on the Baked by Melissa website says the video had by then received more than 22 million views.
To some at her company, straying from desserts felt off-brand, Ben-Ishay said on Friday during a talk at the Atlantic Festival. But for the Melissa in Baked by Melissa, posting the way she does on TikTok is all part of making an authentic connection with her customers — one that you're unlikely to make if you're following corporate rules.
"If you have a social media strategy, you're f---ed," she said. "And the bigger the company, the harder it probably is, because they need to have a strategy. But you can't. You have to let your community tell you what they like. And what they respond to is what you apply to what you continue to do."
How Baked by Melissa built a following on TikTok
When Ben-Ishay saw the kinds of costumer outreach Baked by Melissa was enjoying on Facebook and Instagram, she vowed to be an early adopter of the next big social media channel that came out.
"Then TikTok happened … and it wasn't a focus for anyone at Baked by Melissa. As a growing business, there's always not enough bandwidth," she said. "We were posting content that I really didn't believe in."
Ben-Ishay knew her company could improve on this front. "I was like, 'Look, this person has so many more followers, and we're better. We could do that.' And nobody really listened."
When the Covid-19 pandemic began, Ben-Ishay had more time to dig into TikTok to see what was working on the platform. Soon, she felt like she'd found a lane to try out.
"I make dessert every night. I am the epitome of Baked by Melissa, and I just love food and sweets. And so I just would start taking videos and trying to figure it out," she said.
When those posts starting doing well, she began posting under the Baked by Melissa account, rather than her own handle, and never felt the need to stick to cupcake-adjacent content. "I was like, 'I'll just post this salad I'm making, because it's fun. I like scrapbooking and it's like a virtual scrapbook. And yeah, it just started going crazy," she said.
They key to Ben-Ishay's success, she said, was authenticity. "What people are responding to is my love and passion for what I'm doing. And I'm not trying to be anything that I'm not," she said. "I'm not looking at other accounts and being like, 'Oh, they're doing that, so I'm gonna try to do that.' I'm just being my authentic self. And I think that's what works on social media."
As it turned out, Ben-Ishay's intuition jibed with what her customers would go on to tell market researchers the company hired — that the notion that "Melissa is real" was one of the things that they loved most about the brand.
"It gave me the confidence I needed to stomp my feet when everyone on my team was like, 'What? No. We can't post salad.' Yes we can. Because our priority is to build a community and deliver consistent content that makes them come back."
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CHECK OUT: How Baked by Melissa’s founder bounced back from a layoff with a multimillion-dollar business
