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Eli Rallo is a 23-year-old living in New York City who revisited her favorite childhood family activity during the pandemic, leading to a viral TikTok and subsequent “jar content” broadcast. Now, two years later, Rallo (534,100 followers on TikTok) with a book deal in development at HarperCollins, a podcastand name brand deals, knows a thing or two about gear changes.
Rallo didn’t expect to make social media his full-time job. Eli’s giant glass jars filled with gluten-free animal crackers, sour candies, cheese puffs, and other goodies created a unique mix of nuts and TikTok virality, and his account quickly gained traction.
Observer: What made you do your first TikTok?
Eli Rallo: Similar to many other content creators in New York City. I was messing around with TikTok during the pandemic and randomly went viral. So it was not intentional. I never thought this would happen. So it was a very pandemic Tiktok success story.
How did you go from one type of content to another?
I’m very lucky that it was kind of perfect for me. I posted when I left home for New York City. And I just told everyone at Tik Tok that I’m not going to be posting that much jar content. So if you want to unfollow me, unfollow me now, and more people ended up following me. So that was really crazy. And I didn’t fully know that that was ever going to be a thing. I feel like they accepted the content change, which was really cool.
What types of brand deals do you normally do?
It’s a mixed bag, some fashions, skin care, I do restaurants, Broadway entertainment shows. I do Spotify, Amazon Prime, Google. It really depends. I am very lucky to have positioned myself in a place where many different brands feel inclined to work with me.
Did you expect TikTok and social media to be your full-time job? How has that worked?
I was just doing some kind of trial and error. He knew that he had two excellent titles in case he needed to get back into the corporate world and also have a tremendous amount of family privilege. That was an obvious safety net.
So I decided, you know, I’m going to try this, and then TikTok and Instagram were my full-time moneymakers for a while, and then my podcast got monetized. So now that makes a little bit of money, and my main source of income is the advance on my book contract.
How has the journey of your book been? How did she approach you to write this book?
me I was posting a lot of my writing on a Substack, and then my agents saw it and contacted me. They said that they noticed that I wanted to write a book and that inspired them a lot, and they loved my writing style and would love to talk about something.
What specifically is your book about?
it’s called me I didn’t know I needed this. And it is a full relationship from start to finish. So the first part is about building relationships. The second part deals with the relationships themselves. And the third part is about our relationship with ourselves. It’s very much about the ways that I’ve made mistakes and the ways that I’ve been wrong and what I’ve learned from that in the future and how I hope to apply those things in the future and what I’m learning as I go along so it’s very, it’s a personal essay style, narrative non-fiction, and it’s a bit of stories, a bit of advice.
Since the pandemic, there’s been a trend of “real” and more authentic influencers, what’s your take on that?
I never want to claim to be myself, you know, because I want to make sure I’m humble and also remember that my life is really aspirational and might not be as relatable as some people make it out to be. it’s for them. So I think one thing about it for me is being true to myself every day.
I don’t want to try to be real or try to be authentic or try to be relatable because I think that absolutely mitigates the point if you’re trying to be authentic that you’re not being authentic.
I want to be a writer and I hope that people will really invest in my writing when the time comes.
This interview was originally published on The creatorsa Newsletter on the people powering the maker economy. get it on your inbox before it’s online.
