TikTok is known for everything from popular dances to short comedy sketches. But during the pandemic, another sort of content went viral.
With people stuck at home during lockdown, home renovation projects took on a whole new urgency. And TikTok was there to deliver.
There’s a community of creators on TikTok taking on full room renovations, showing us how to fill a wall with plants, designing custom wall paneling, and helping make wallpaper trendy again.
One creator, Kyla Herbes, runs the account @houseofhipsters and saw her internet presence blow up as a result of the interior design videos she posted during the pandemic. While her early videos from 2019 would only get around 1,000 views and no more than 50 likes, she now has nearly 350,000 followers and her videos can top 100,000 views.
Herbes’s first brush with TikTok fame came in May 2020, when she embarked on a project called the “One Room Challenge.” The viral video, now at over half a million views, shows the sped-up renovation of a room in her house, with the popular song “Renegade” playing in the background. In fact, she often uses trending sounds or songs in her design videos in order to get more views.
After that first viral video, Herbes worked to grow her following, posting one video a day for a month straight. “People were doing 30 days of outfits, so I started doing 30 days of home vignettes,” Herbes said. “It was really difficult because I was like, ‘Well, which corner am I going to style now?'”
She started out small, showing a piece of empty counter space in her kitchen, for instance, which she would decorate with a few basics like plants, candles, and bowls. However, as the videos progressed, Herbes realized that viewers were more interested in “tips and tricks” and learning how to improve their own homes. She changed her strategy to start reconfiguring small parts of her house, like a video teaching viewers how to style a bar cart into a coffee station.
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FAST COMPANY/DEENA ELGENAIDI/