Cakes Body: How Twin Sisters Turned a US$10,000 Bet Into a US$95 Million Bra Alternative

Cakes Body is not really selling nipple covers; it is selling the option to skip the bra for the day. In three years, that option has grown into a US$95 million business.

Cakes Body launched into more than 1,000 Ulta Beauty stores in August 2025, its first move into physical retail (Source: Cakes Body)

The company was founded in 2022 by twin sisters Taylor Capuano and Casey Sarai, two marketing managers who wanted a product that did not exist: a silicone nipple cover that stayed on without adhesive and actually fit larger sizes. Three years on, the brand reported US$95 million in net sales for the fiscal year ended June 2025, and it got there having accepted a single outside check. This breakdown follows our WWW.HER model: who buys, what the product is, why the playbook works, and the founder story behind it.

WHO: Who Is Buying Cakes Body?

The core customer is a woman who finds bras uncomfortable and existing nipple covers worse: sticky, small, and designed as if every body were the same. That frustration cuts across ages, but the brand's center of gravity is millennial women, many of them mothers, who came to the product through TikTok rather than a lingerie aisle.

Two design choices define the audience. First, size inclusivity is functional, not cosmetic: the covers come in larger cuts and multiple shades (Honey, Caramel, Cocoa), addressing women that legacy intimates brands treated as edge cases. Second, the adhesive-free format speaks to customers with sensitive skin, including women who have gone through breastfeeding or surgery and cannot tolerate glue-on products.

The brand names its superfans Hype Girls: thousands of everyday customers who post try-ons, comment, and recruit friends. When Cakes Body ran its first out-of-home campaign in summer 2025, it put those customers, not professional models, on billboards. The audience is not a demographic so much as a self-organizing community that recognizes itself in the marketing.

WHAT: What Makes the Product Different?

The hero product is deliberately unglamorous: a reusable silicone cover, larger than competitors', made of higher-grade silicone that tapers at the edges and grips skin without adhesive. The sisters spent their prototype phase solving exactly the pain points they experienced as users, then each put US$5,000 of personal savings into the business, enough for the first 500 units and an online store.

The catalog has stayed disciplined. The core SKUs, grippy Circles and grippy Triangles, still carry the business; extensions move adjacently into backless and strapless solutions rather than sprawling into general apparel. That focus shows up in the sales data: grippy Cakes became the number one SKU in its TikTok Shop category in 2024, with more than four million units sold to date, and the brand passed US$100 million in cumulative sales within three years.

Distribution followed social proof rather than preceding it. The brand sold direct and through TikTok Shop for three years before entering physical retail at all; its first shelf placement came in August 2025, into more than 1,000 Ulta Beauty stores nationwide.

WHY: Why Does the Cakes Body Playbook Work?

The product demos itself in nine seconds. A nipple cover that grips without glue is visually persuasive in a way most consumer products are not. Five months after launch, a single TikTok hit one million views and sold out the company's entire stock. The sisters did not treat that as luck; they rebuilt the moment into a system of founder-face videos, customer duets, and TikTok Shop conversion, precisely the loop that made the product a category leader there.

On Shark Tank in 2023, the sisters closed a deal with Skims co-founder Emma Grede for 10 percent of the company, a deal that valued Cakes Body at US$3 million. Grede's money remains the only outside capital the company has taken; growth since has been funded from margin. That bootstrapping discipline echoes what we saw in our breakdown of Kitsch, which reached half a billion dollars in cumulative sales with zero funding: in cash-generative categories, the moat is operating restraint, not fundraising.

Community as the brand asset. The Hype Girls program, the real-customer billboards, and over US$1 million donated to women's health causes are one coherent choice: spend the marketing budget making existing customers visible instead of renting celebrity attention. It is slower than performance spend, and much harder for a competitor to copy.

Cakes Body co-founders and twin sisters Taylor Capuano and Casey Sarai, whose self-shot TikTok content built a US$95 million business (Source: CNBC)

HERSTORY: Two Marketing Managers Who Needed a Way Out

In 2022, Taylor Capuano was a marketing manager at Life Is Good with a newborn, wanting flexibility her job could not give. Her twin sister Casey Sarai was a marketing manager at Pernod Ricard, worn down by pandemic-era layoffs. By their own account the sisters "desperately needed a path" forward, and decided the risk of starting something was smaller than the cost of staying put.

The origin is strikingly unromantic: no venture round, no accelerator, two US$5,000 transfers from savings accounts. By the end of the first full year the business had topped US$1 million in revenue, yet both women kept their day jobs until repeated sellouts convinced them the demand was real. Today Sarai is CEO and Capuano chief creative officer.

The founders turned that founding motive into policy. In May 2025, Cakes Body announced a childcare stipend of up to US$3,000 a month for employees with preschool-aged children, and when the sisters designed the program, they could not find a precedent to copy. The decision came straight out of Capuano's own ledger: in her last corporate job, most of her salary went to childcare. A year on, the 30-person company had not lost a single employee and had hired people away from Fortune 500 firms; the announcement video drew 2.4 million views on TikTok, and the sisters went a step further, publishing the policy template and launching the Cakes Childcare Movement to bring employers and childcare advocacy groups to the same table, pushing for federal reform of employer childcare tax credits. In a country where childcare for two children costs more than rent, a brand whose core customers are mothers has turned employee benefits into its hardest-working PR.

What Should Emerging Brands Take From Cakes Body?

First, an unmet need beats a crowded aspiration. The sisters did not try to out-brand Victoria's Secret; they fixed a product everyone tolerated and no one loved. For Chinese manufacturers who have watched nipple covers become a commodity export category, the lesson is uncomfortable and useful: the margin was never in the silicone, it was in fit, shade range, and the community that vouches for them.

Second, sequence channels by proof, not by ambition. DTC and TikTok Shop first, retail only after US$100 million of cumulative sales was on the board. Brands that reverse the order buy shelf space with money they have not earned yet.

Third, keep the company self-funding and treat outside capital as support. One strategic check from an operator who understood the category, then expansion funded from margin. The open question for Cakes Body is what happens as it internationalizes and legacy intimates giants respond; community travels less easily than product. But that is a problem most bootstrapped brands would love to have.

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Double V is a cross-border operating partner and intelligence house for emerging consumer brands, based in Hong Kong and Shenzhen. We help brands connect China and the world through three businesses: Brand Operation (marketing and distribution for brands on retainer), Brand Incubation (sister company Glam Infinite and our own-built brands), and Industry Intelligence (cross-border research and reports). Talk to our team.