Tabs is a sex chocolate brand that:
- Made 10 million dollars in revenue.
- Generates 45% net profit margins.
- Has more than 8 Billion views on their videos.
All this in just 1 and a half years of its launch.
The two Gen Z entrepreneurs named Oliver Brocato and Jake Lewin, dropped out of college at the age of 21, and started their business selling sex chocolates.
In the 1st year of their business itself, they managed to make revenue of 90 crores. and that too without paying single money on paid ads.
What is their secret sauce, let’s check it out.
What is Tabs Chocolate?
By combining two of the world’s favourite things, Sex, and Chocolate, they engineered a product from day 1 that was bound to raise curiosity.
Along with choosing the right product, a lot of effort was put into getting their chocolate formulations right. The founders also paid great attention to the designs and each and every word on the packaging.
What will blow your mind is their unique Marketing Strategy that consists of turning the TIK TOK creators into franchisees, which skyrocketed their sales by creating viral videos.
These new-age entrepreneurs understood the importance of community building as a critical component to success. They achieved this, by leveraging the TIK TOK to create a strong connection with their target audience and foster a loyal customer base.
1000’s of people have jumpstarted their TIK TOK strategy using their template. Before diving deep into the nitty gritty of their marketing strategy, let me throw some light into the background of these two entrepreneurs.
Past Business Experiences of The Founders

Image source: Jake Lewin Twitter
Oliver Brocato, one of the founders of TABS had an entrepreneurial streak since the age of 14 when he started his first business of manufacturing and selling spinners.
He had sold 50 thousand dollars worth of spinners just at the age of 14. Then the market got saturated, and he decided to start dropshipping.
He did not get much success in dropshipping, so he decided to start his own digital marketing services at 17 years of age.
He was handling the marketing of his friend’s mom’s jacket-selling business. He had managed to revamp her website and increase her sales, but later she hired a professional agency and replaced him.
At the age of 18, when he started college, he joined his 2 friends who were doing the leggings business. One of them later became his co-founder in the TABS chocolate business. Together they had managed to sell million dollars of leggings in just one year.
After working with many people and starting a handful of businesses, Oliver finally decided to start his own business. He partnered with his friend Jake Lewin, with whom he had worked in the leggings business earlier.
How Were Tabs Started?
The founders got the idea of selling sex chocolate when they saw a random video of sex chocolate, it had 8 million views, and a few million likes.
That particular sex chocolate was not selling online, and the packaging was also subpar. They realized that there is a massive opportunity, and sex chocolate can go viral because it is controversial.
This is when they came up with TABS’ sex chocolate idea. They wanted to get everything about their business right, from the beginning itself.
That is why before finalizing the formulation for their chocolate, they did a lot of research and used the most popular and effective sex enhancement supplement for their chocolates. They went through a lot of prototypes and after a lot of trial and error, they found their perfect product.
Also, every word written on the packaging, the design, and the black and golden colour was very intentional. Everything was designed to give luxury vibes.
When you remove the chocolate they have these fun Emojis. All this was deliberate on the part of the founders to take away the stigma attached to sex and design a product that gives the feeling of enjoyment and pleasure.
Instead of putting lots of chocolates in the box, they kept it at 3, to give the feeling of luxury.
To get their product ready, they work with 8 different manufacturers, right from supplements manufacturer to packaging. It took them 11 months of hustle from getting the idea to launching the product.
Tabs Chocolate Tik Tok Marketing Strategy?

They knew that because of the nature of their product itself, there is a high chance of their product going viral, which is why they did not spend on paid advertisements.
From the start their game plan for marketing was TikTok. Initially, they started working with as many micro-influencers as they can, and started sending them free chocolates, and paid some bonus.
When those influencers would post about the TABS their sales went up, and then they would be down until another creator would post it, it was kind of a roller coaster ride and they realized that this model would not work.
So they approached one content creator and paid him 2k dollars to create 30 videos, 1 TikTok a day. That creator made a different page on Tik Tok on TABS. This strategy worked wonders, those videos started to get viral and they generated 80k dollars in sales.
This was when they realized that this was the model that they will run. So they made a team of 20 to 30 influencers, and each of those influencers made their separate page on Tik Tok. This means that if you type TABS on Tik Tok, you will get 25 different pages each managed and run by an independent creator. They were instructed to post 1 to 3 videos per day.
They also put a special link in their bios, which helps them to track and see kind of the impact they’re having on sales. If any particular creator is driving huge sales, then they give him an opportunity to earn 20% of revenue on the number of sales they generate. This is how they turn TikTok influencers into their franchises.
How Does Their Video Go Viral?
Whenever any of their team members’ videos would go viral on Tik Tok, the founders would send them to all the other creators and ask them to make a video like that. The founders believed that if something can go viral once, it can go viral again, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every single time.
He had also given them basic instructions like:
- The video should not look like ads.
- There should be no CTA.
- It should be around 30 seconds long.
The creators have full control over their videos, he would not micro-manage them. This strategy led them to get many viral videos on Tik Tok.
How Does Their Video Make Sales?
They do not make sales from the viral video itself. In viral videos, they would get a lot of comments. The creator is then instructed to respond to those comments by making videos that address those comments. TikTok gives the option to reply to a comment with a video.
Now when this 2nd video (which is a reply to comments) is posted, it gets shared by Tik Tok, to all the viewers of the original viral video. This in the language of marketing is called Retargeting. Through these viral videos, TABS derives a lot of sales.
For e.g., they had one video that got 30 million views, which generated 30k dollars in sales, and the follow-up videos generated 130K sales.
How Do They Pay The Tik Tok Influencers

Image Souce: Swaylytics
(Depending upon the sales they make)
- Some influencers get some per cent of the sales they make.
- Some get a fixed amount of fees.
- Some are hybrid, i.e., some cash, and the per cent profit in the sales they drive.
How They Repurpose Their Tik Tik Videos
They have a Discord community. Wherein the members were instructed to make their own TABS page on different social media platforms like Instagram reels, Youtube shorts, Facebook reels, etc.
All these members have access to the TABS Tik Tok videos library. Their job was to take any viral Tik Tok video, remove the watermark and post it on Instagram reels, Youtube shorts, Facebook reels, and Pinterest pins.
These members would be paid on the basis of the sales they drive. For this reason, his discord community is growing rapidly with more than 20k members.
E.g., Once a 14-year-old kid a Discord member, posted a video that other members too were posting, but his video got viral and generated 50k sales, and he made more money than his parents. Whereas other members who too shared the same video did not generate as many views as he had.
This made the founders realize that social media is a black box and nobody knows what works, but if you push out enough content and your product is good, you win.
How They Conquered Twitter The Game
They have hired virtual assistants who have made their Twitter Meme pages on TABS Chocolate. These assistants put out Tweet which is something like,
Found out about a viral video on TikTok…
And they would validate their tweet with the viral TikTok video on TABS. The majority of the time it goes viral on Twitter.
When any particular tweet goes viral, that same person put a second tweet, which is the continuation of the 1st one, it is something like…
OMG!!! The viral video that I discovered, here is the website of that brand…
And they would put the website link. The intention behind these tweets is to make people feel that they found them and not as if they are promoting the chocolate.
How Do They Upsell Their Chocolates
- When a buyer lands on their product page, they encourage them to buy 2 or 3 boxes instead of one, by giving discounts.
- In the cart, they give something called Melting Insurance, in which they give additional perks like ice insulation, fast shipping, skip the queue, and priority handling for a few dollars extra. What is surprising is that usually, 80% of people take this.
- Finally, on the Check out page, they give the option of upgrading to a subscription and saving 20% and most of the time people opt for that too.
- On the Post-purchase page too, they give the option of buying another box to get an additional 50% off.
This is how they smartly upsell their chocolates.
Expert Tip From The Founder:
The founder Oliver Brocato, suggests that don’t stack all offers at once, because this way many things get sacrificed. Instead, he suggests offering different incentives on different pages. This way people will end up purchasing a lot more products
TABS Tech Tools:
These tools are used by TABS to automate their business processes.
- Affiliate Marketing (referral) – https://platform.shoffi.app/r/rl_XOzf…
- Email Automation – https://www.klaviyo.com/
- Online store – https://www.shopify.com/
- Text SMS Marketing (referral) – http://oliver.onetext.com/link?token=…
- Organization task tracking – https://trello.com/
- one click upsell – https://apps.shopify.com/zipify-onecl…
Future Plans,
Their future plan is to introduce new flavours and start selling on marketplaces like Amazon, Etsy, Walmart, etc.
They also intend to start a wholesale system.
Also, they are planning to introduce more SKUs, by increasing the number of chocolates they sell in one box from their existing number of 3 chocolates.
On The End Note,
Such genius entrepreneurs are a big source of inspiration for aspiring entrepreneurs. We all could benefit a lot from their marketing strategy and upselling tactics.
If you have your business or planning to start one, you too can shoot up your sales, just by copy-pasting their formula.
We would love to know your thoughts about this interesting case study through comments.