Laid Off, a Couple Opened an Online Candy Store With $3,000: One Freeze-Dried Skittles Video Took Off, $5.5M in Sales in Under Three Years, Still No Outside Investment

Process

To be clear up front: Trendy Treats now has its own facility, and at its busiest it had 20 to 30 people packing orders by hand, far beyond a "one-to-three-person team." It's included because of where it started: a newly laid-off couple, $3,000 and a kitchen table, and it has still never taken outside investment.

Stage 1: Two Laid-Off People, and 200,000 Kids Watching Pranks

In spring 2020, the pandemic closed malls across the US. Mel, who worked in retail management and visual merchandising in the luxury handbag space, was furloughed; Zeus lost his job too. The two had just started dating.

They weren't starting from nothing. They had been making short videos together, mostly Zeus pranking Mel. Zeus recalls they had "around 200,000, 300,000 kids that just loved watching me prank her."

Neither of them could sit still. With that audience, what should they sell? Candy, because it's "a good consumable product we could sell over and over again."

On April 29, 2020 (Zeus stresses the exact date), they put up $3,000 and opened an online candy store from a kitchen table on Shopify. It was first called "For You Feed," after TikTok's recommendation page. Their first products were slime candy you could play with and eat, and a rolling sour candy.

The packaging was bare-bones: a sticker on a bag, with no nutrition label at all. Zeus later said that, coming from outside the food industry, one of the toughest problems was figuring out "how do I even tell someone how many calories this has."

Stage 2: One Freeze-Dried Skittles Video

The real turning point came from a single video.

Zeus experimented with all kinds of TikTok content, trying to figure out how to sell freeze-dried candy. One day they filmed something he had never seen before: pouring Skittles into a freeze dryer with satisfying ASMR sounds, pulling them out and biting in.

"That video took off. We had had viral videos before but nothing around freeze-dried candy." They followed that formula over and over, at a time when almost no one was posting freeze-dried candy on social media.

Soon everyone selling freeze-dried candy was posting the exact same video: pour it in, put it in the machine, take it out. How could they be different? They started making time-lapses of the freeze-drying process, "and we were the only people time-lapsing," so they went viral all over again.

In late 2020, they renamed the store. They considered calling it a freeze-dried candy store, but chose Trendy Treats because they "didn't want to be tied into one specific type of candy."

Stage 3: From 100 Orders a Day to Zero

It wasn't a straight line up.

When malls reopened that year, Mel's boss called to ask if she wanted to come back. Mel was in her last semester of college and about to move from Texas to Utah to live with Zeus. She said no. In August 2020, the two decided to go full time on Trendy Treats: "we are going to give it our all."

Then in October, orders fell from about 100 a day to zero a day.

"There was multiple times where the conversation was like, hey, we need to go get a job," Mel said; a business is a roller coaster, and suddenly there can be no sales for months. With the holidays coming, they sat down again: what are we doing wrong? What do we need to improve? "Let's give it one more shot."

That fall became a make-or-break moment. From then on, Zeus said, they would "eat, sleep, breathe Trendy Treats." At their most intense, they went into work at 6 a.m. and left at 2 a.m., "and we loved it."

Stage 4: How a Couple Divides the Work

Building a company and a marriage at the same time, Zeus said, is "probably the hardest thing that I've ever signed up for, and it's definitely been worth it."

Their method is "putting our ego down" and letting whoever is better at something take charge. Zeus knows social media and websites and takes risks; Mel came from a corporate structure, knows how to train employees and build processes, and has a visual merchandising background. So any visual change Mel wants is "automatically approved in my head," while on media and promotion, even if Mel disagrees, Zeus makes the final call.

Zeus describes one moment that moved him. After an all-nighter, they went straight to church in their work clothes. He looked at Mel: she used to dress only in black-and-white monochrome, always polished, and would never eat candy on camera. Now she wore a tie-dye hat and a T-shirt with a big Jilly logo, her hair a mess. "She's like a representation of what this company is."

Stage 5: $5.5 Million, and a Warehouse That Keeps Filling Up

According to The Freeze Dried Business podcast in August 2024, Trendy Treats grossed over $5.5 million in 2023, passing $5 million in less than three years.

Scale brought new problems. With no automation early on, at its busiest 20 to 30 people were packing by hand. Zeus remembers one night when everyone stayed until 1 a.m. to get a big order out; he looked to his left and right: "all of these people are packaging an order for this company."

Another headache: the warehouse was never big enough. With over 100 pallets of stock, each over 1,000 pounds, they kept moving. The reason was simple: "We're self-funded, we don't have any outside investment. We grow as we go, as we have the money. We can't just go out and get a ginormous oversized warehouse that we'll grow into."

Every dollar they made went back in: "We didn't go out and get a new car, we didn't go out and buy a house. Every single dollar that comes into the company gets reinvested into the company."

Their ambitions are big too. "I will never use the hashtag small business," Zeus said. "I want to be a corporation that hires and employs hundreds and thousands of people." Their next goal is $10 million, and the long-term vision is $100 million.

Stage 6: Forbes, the Giants Arrive, and Original Candy

Trendy Treats made the Forbes 30 Under 30 Food & Drink list (Class of 2024). Zeus remembers picking up his phone at 5 a.m. to an email that said "congratulations." He went for a walk, went to the gym, had coffee, and came back to find Mel still asleep, so he sat there watching her, waiting for her to wake up. Mel had thought it was impossible: "these are like software companies, like super big."

Once freeze-dried candy took off, the giants arrived: Mars launched its own freeze-dried Skittles, and Hershey entered too. Zeus's response: "I love situations that make me have to change my whole game plan, because it's where I feel I thrive."

Their answer was to make something no one else had. In 2024 they launched GLOBOS, their first original freeze-dried candy, developed for over a year, with the tagline "Every pop's a party." "Everyone can go out and sell Skittles," Zeus said, "but not everyone will be able to sell GLOBOS. Don't try to copy us, because by the time you get to this we're already working on the next one." In 2025 they launched Gummy Ghost, their first non-freeze-dried product, a sour blue raspberry gummy shaped like Jilly; today their lead product is Aura Gems crystal candy.

Content is still the engine. They now have a dedicated media team, and 90% of the channel's videos are shot in one small studio room in the factory. YouTube subscribers grew from about 1.6 million in March 2024 to about 7.56 million in October 2026. The official site says they have served over 1 million customers, are in about 500 stores nationwide, and are "still bootstrapped."

Thinking

1. Audience first, then product. Mel and Zeus didn't make candy and then look for traffic; they had 200,000 to 300,000 followers first and then figured out what to sell. That meant they didn't have to buy traffic from day one.

2. Choose a category people buy again and again. Their reason for choosing candy was simple: it's a consumable, and people come back for more. For a content-driven business, repeat purchases matter more than one-off hits.

3. A good product is content in itself. Freeze-drying candy, the puffing, the crunch, the sound of biting in, is satisfying to watch and hear. When the product has a built-in visual hook, the content spreads easily.

4. When copied, stay a step ahead. When their freeze-dried videos were copied, they switched to time-lapses; when Mars made freeze-dried Skittles, they made original candy. The moat isn't any single product but the ability to keep launching the next one.

5. In a slump, re-examine instead of quitting. When orders hit zero, they didn't simply give up; they asked what they were doing wrong, what to improve, and tried once more. Many businesses stop at their first slump.

6. Self-funding means growing within limits. Not raising money kept them in control, but it also meant they couldn't afford a big warehouse with room to grow and had to move again and again. That's the real cost of bootstrapped growth.

Action

1. Build your audience first. Before the product, post consistently on one platform and build a group of people who genuinely follow you. That audience is the starting point for anything you sell later.

2. Pick a product people buy repeatedly. Think about what your audience buys often: snacks, everyday goods, consumables. Repeat-purchase products make each customer worth more.

3. Make the product itself filmable. Look for the side of your product that's fun to watch or hear: how it's made, unboxing, taste tests, before-and-after. Film it.

4. When copied, change the format. If your hit content gets copied widely, try a new angle: time-lapses, behind the scenes, challenges. Keep it fresh.

5. Divide roles clearly with your partner. If you start a business with a partner or friend, agree up front who has the final say in which area, and settle disagreements by those roles.

6. Reinvest early profits. When the first money comes in, don't rush to upgrade your life; put it into inventory, equipment and content so the business can run.