The cleaning tools company Scrub Daddy has taken over TikTok, which means the CEO spends hours each night reading comments on the social media platform.
The smiley face sponge is known on the app for its “edgier” presence than most brands, including a bizarre video where the Scrub Daddy and Duolingo mascots gave birth to tiny bird-shaped sponges.
Scrub Daddy president and CEO Aaron Krause credits the company’s $332m in retail sales last year to its unconventional social media presence. While speaking to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Krause explained he sleeps “like three hours a night” and reads every social media comment.
The video in question - which features the mascot of the language-learning app Duolingo mating with a life-sized Scrub Daddy - has received more than 412,000 views. It is a less-than-average number for the Scrub Daddy TikTok account, which has a total of 30m likes on the app.
Thanks to TikTok, Krause said the brand has been able to “reach a sizable new audience it hadn’t previously tapped into through traditional marketing”. The comments under Scrub Daddy’s videos are perhaps more entertaining than the actual content.
“I swear this is just interns having the time of their lives,” said one TikTok user.
“Nahhh we literally get health insurance for this,” a social media manager for Scrub Daddy replied.
Another asked: “Are y’all okay over there?” to which the Scrub Daddy account replied: “No.”
“What did I just witness,” one person asked, prompting a reply from the Scrub Daddy account, which simply said: “Perfection.”
The all-purpose hand scrubber rose to popularity after appearing on the reality show Shark Tank in 2012. Krause said that Scrub Daddy’s online fandom has been huge for business, with sales increasing at a rate of 30 per cent a year.
“I know exactly the [return on investment] on that,” he said, explaining that he can track the number of TikTok users who followed a link from a video to make a purchase on the site. “You can’t get that kind of data anywhere else.”
