Celia Gercovich never expected she would make her living posting videos to 1.5 million social media followers – but she did not expect to be made redundant, either.
The Victorian woman also never expected her balloon decoration business to go viral during the state’s record-breaking lockdowns, but it did.
And she never expected that her fifth business – an eyewear brand – would make her $7000 in one day. But it did.
“I never imagined doing TikTok fulltime and making a fulltime wage as fast as I did,” Ms Gercovich said.
“TikTok completely changed by life. And when it’s been a stable income for over a year, if someone had told me that, I never would’ve believed them or that I could do that on TikTok.”
The bumper launch sale in December 2021 came just two years after her job at a major telecommunications company was made redundant, and the Ballarat local “went guns blazing” into producing social media content and spruiking her “side hustles”.
“I knew corporate life wasn’t for me forever, anyway. So this (redundancy) was the push that I needed,” she said.
But months after being put out of a job, the 31-year-old (along with the rest of Victoria) was plunged into one of the world’s longest and most strict Covid-19 lockdowns. Her lash appointments and orders for balloon garlands soon dried up, so she started posting videos to YouTube and TikTok.
“I think Covid made me realise that I wanted to diversify my income streams, and that was by being on a number of different social media platforms,” she said.
Today she posts regularly to almost 1.6 million followers across her YouTube, TikTok and Instagram accounts. She also hosts a website for her sunglasses business – which she started at the end of 2020 – as well as copies of her ‘How to Use TikTok’ ebook. And she hosts online courses for balloon display making.
In December 2022 Ms Gercovich decided to sell Bespoke Balloons Ballarat (and handed over its Instagram account) after more than five years building balloon installations.
“All of my businesses have started by seeing a gap in the market and thinking I could fill that and doing it,” she said.
“I was following all the influencers of Melbourne who were posting these extravagant balloon installations at their events and I thought, ‘there’s no one in Ballarat doing this’. So I did.”
While her business was ballooning – in every sense – so was her brand and TikTok following: every video was clocking tens and hundreds of thousands of views, one for a gender reveal balloon hit 20 million views overnight.
But things “were really taking off” for Ms Gercovich at the end of 2020 and start of 2021; which is when she decided to launch an eyewear brand.
“Because I’ve always worn blue light glasses and people would ask about them. And I thought well there’s people asking, so I started a brand,” she said.
And, as if she needed more proof she was on the right track, her most successful launch sold $7000 worth of glasses in one day; a real result she described as “insane” after years posting and curating her online brand.
“I’ve been able to replace my full-time corporate wage by doing my social media stuff, diversifying my income stream and running media from different places,” she said, adding that most of her income comes from “brand deals” or selling eyewear.
Though it may seem as simple as setting up a business, Ms Gercovich insists it’s “not easy”, and she can recount a few businesses she has tried (and failed) to get off the ground in the last few years, alone.
One was period product subscription service called My Monthly. Ms Gercovich says it was “going great” until she realised she miscalculated the postage costs and the actual charge per box (that was three-times higher than initially thought) would gobble up any possible profits.
“But I’ve never seen those (businesses) as a failure,” she said. “I’ve learned so much from every single business and that’s helped me achieve what I had in the glasses and balloon business.”
She also learned by having such a diverse income portfolio, is the importance of having a Linktree “hub” to connect it all together.
“I had so many different ways to send traffic. Everyone’s looking for everything,” she said.
Ms Gercovich said she was amazed by how many entrepreneurs were branching out in similar ways as she was, especially businesses around Ballarat. But she will not take credit for starting a local trends.
The biggest piece of wisdom she can hand down, though, is to do it.
“If it’s something you want to do, just start it. You will learn so much along the way. The first videos will suck and that’s fine, mine did too. But you should give it a go and just keep practising.”
And as for how long she will keep this up, as long as she is enjoying herself.
“I think when I stop enjoying it, I’ll look down other avenues. But even then I’ll probably just think of another business idea and do it again.”