Dubai chocolate went viral in 2024, and a wave of new brands rushed to sell the bar. We got in early and sold the experience of making it.
- The product: a DIY kit for making the bar at home, pitched as a family activity or a date night rather than a novelty snack.
- The distribution: TikTok Shop affiliates. Creators made the videos and earned on every sale.
Four of us co-founded it, and Trevor Chau helped us build it.
An oxygen bar in Beverly Hills
On June 26th 2022 I went to a VidCon afterparty in Beverly Hills. At an oxygen bar I met Maya Sabbaghian, Director of Syndication at Flighthouse Media. Flighthouse had a huge audience on social media. When I asked about their e-commerce, it turned out they didn't have any.
I'd been running e-commerce stores for big Instagram pages with my friends Matt Dance and Tobias Andersson for about a year. Six months after that party, LTX was brought on as an external contractor, and over the next two years we made Flighthouse around $400,000 from e-commerce ads across their Instagram network.
From contractors to co-founders
Then we wanted something more stable, inside a bigger company. Flighthouse brought us in-house to create original brands built for long-tail revenue. I left the British countryside for Los Angeles, and three months of chaos.
MrCoco was our first brand built from scratch instead of white label. Almost every part of it was new to us: packaging, supply chains, content, fulfilment, affiliate marketing, health codes and legal.
