Building Great Products: How Aiori went viral on TikTok with 1.6M Views

Aiori went viral, early. Aiori’s clip-on earrings went viral on TikTok with 1.6M views and 120K likes on Feb 15, 2022.

But there’s a stigma about clip-on earrings being either for costumes or for kids.

How did they counter this? They built the supply chain to make an extensive, elegant, and differentiated collection of earrings.

“As a clip-on earring, there are trade-offs every single time you're changing the material composition per piece.”

“I think what makes us stand out is we have a huge range of styles and also earring closures. We understand that every ear is different. Like you have someone with thin ear lobes, they have a harder time finding earrings that will stay on their ear. We carry like, six different closure types, to make sure that say we can educate the customer, if they have thinner ear lobes, then this style is better for you.” - @andrea wong

Here's The Breakdown To Build Great Early:

1. Great Product = Great Design x Great Components: They went deeper in the supply chain to partner with multiple manufacturers to find the right combination of components. This meant taking longer to find not just 1 manufacturer, but 4+, and iterating on designs with them. In the tiktok that first went viral, there’s an “a-ha” moment when you see aiori jewelry that... is jewelry. Not costume, not for kids.
2. To do this, they manage a roster of manufacturers, tracked what materials and styles they specialized in, and built their own network to track which vendors match each ideal design for aiori’s collections. This means treating the manufacturer not just as a vendor, but as a long term partner.
3. There’s a focus on procurement (purchase orders, buying) and onboarding vendors when it comes to running a brand but there’s a lot of untapped value from deeper vendor relationships.

Building something distinct means choosing more complexity and intentional product design. Doing this in spreadsheets is challenging - the best thing is to leverage software that makes managing the bill of materials and multiple vendors easier. We're building this at Centro - let us reach out to you here.