“I wake up, and I’m an artist, which doesn’t even feel real to say,” he told Business Insider.
That instinct for spotting undervalued objects is what transformed Flodstrom from scraping together $500 at a time into a working artist with a viral product and six figures in sales.
From side hustles to social media
Flodstrom grew up in Peru, Illinois — a small town that he describes as “the middle of nowhere” — and came to Los Angeles to pursue music. But art and design came first. For the first several years, he made pieces while getting by with just enough income from teaching swim lessons and other side hustles, but “nothing was really popping,” as he told Business Insider.
The shift came when he started treating social media like a craft. Flodstrom reverse-engineered what made videos perform well on Instagram: a fast three-second hook and engagement signals, like retention, comments, shares and saves.
He began posting short, fast-paced videos of himself making things. The breakthrough came from a brick mirror he made for his own room, which drew about 3 million Instagram views. Then came an avocado chair, and then the pill-bottle side table, which garnered tens of millions of views.
The $50 idea that generated $150K
The pill-bottle side table started with a piece of curved acrylic from Facebook Marketplace. Flodstrom wrapped it in orange vinyl, shaped a lid from foam and plaster and printed a prescription-style label at Staples. Total cost: about $50. Hundreds of DMs came in immediately, but U.S. manufacturers quoted him $400 per unit, plus shipping, to scale it.
Then NO LOGO, a company that helps artists get their designs to the market, offered to produce a sample at no cost. He made a video with the company about his process. “If they had told me to pay for the sample, this never would have happened,” Flodstrom noted. “I would not have had the faith in it.”
He linked his Shopify store to NO LOGO’s system and listed the customizable table at $225. It generated $150,000 in gross sales in its first two weeks and $253,000 over a 90-day period, according to Business Insider’s review.
The unglamorous side of viral success
Flodstrom’s story is a case study in what happens after a product goes viral, and it isn’t all clean margins. At the time of the Business Insider interview, hundreds of orders were stuck in customs, with roughly $80,000 in Shopify funds unavailable to him while he continued paying for production. “It’s just super stressful,” he said.
