Sweetish candy shop got an unexpected boost from a viral TikTok post

Tyler Graybeal is the owner of Sweetish, a Scandinavian candy store in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Graybeal started his company in 2019 after friends suggested that the United States should have more stores where customers can select their candies out of bulk bins, like in Sweden.

In January, Graybeal noticed thousands of orders coming through his website, seemingly overnight. After some initial confusion about where the surge was stemming from, Graybeal and his team realized that a TikTok post featuring their store had gone viral, racking up thousands of views.

Keeping up with demand was difficult at first.

“The traffic coming from the viralness at the beginning was definitely daunting, and we were really not sure what to expect,” Graybeal said. “It dramatically changed the business to where we went from approximately 30 to 50 orders in our queue on average every day, to skyrocketing to a couple thousand at one point, to 10,000 orders within a few days.”