How a Gen Z founder used TikTok to jumpstart her climate career

• Estella Struck launched Viviene New York, a marketing agency for sustainable brands, in 2021.
• After booking $8,900 in revenue in 2022, she scaled to $9,300 in revenue in March alone.
• She shares the steps she took to launch the business, and the tactics that helped it grow. 

This is an as-told-to essay based on an interview with Estella Struck, a 22-year-old senior at New York University and the founder of a social media marketing agency called Viviene New York, which focuses on sustainability.

Her interest in sustainability arose in 2020, when Struck began reselling clothes online through a company she created called Ethica NYC. The business drew hundreds of thousands of  followers on social media. Given that success, Struck wanted to make sustainability marketing more accessible to other brands. She took the skills she learned from creating her business to start Viviene New York. 

Viviene New York booked $8,900 in revenue in 2022, documents reviewed by Insider show. It’s continued to grow and in March, the business brought in $9,300 in revenue. Struck shares how networking and tapping into Gen Z’s buying power helped her build the company.

TikTok jumpstarted my climate career

I didn’t feel the gravity of the climate crisis until 2020, when I started following and learning from sustainability educators and creators on TikTok.

Hearing people my age passionately advocate for climate action flipped a switch in my brain. I suddenly had a lot of free time thanks to quarantine. So I thought to myself, “Why don’t I try to do something about it?”

I launched Ethica NYC, an online thrift store selling donated items, in 2020. The store blew up really quickly on TikTok when we had an early video go viral. It reached around 5 million views and the business gained 200,000 followers within our first two weeks.

I always wanted to have a career that impacts people, and I saw this as my way to do that. Ultimately, I decided to take the things I learned through marketing and building a community with Ethica and offer that to other companies. That’s why I created Viviene New York in 2021.

I built my team and client base gradually

For the first year of running Viviene New York, I focused solely on the business plan, website, and brand ethos. Landing clients came later.

I believe that your network is your net worth, so I spent a lot of time at networking events meeting people in sustainability, marketing, and social media. With each relationship I made, I used Ethica as my portfolio to prove I knew what I was doing.

The connections I made turned into part-time employees, creators Viviene now represents, and brand clients. 

In 2022, we signed three influencers who have online followings to create content for eco-friendly brands. Now, we have 10 influencers on board and we’ve worked with more than 40 brands.

We offer social media audits, where we assess what’s working, what should change, and what should be implemented in a brand’s social media content; user-generated content, where Viviene creators film content for brand platforms; and strategy planning, where we suggest content types and campaign ideas, along with recommending the creators from our platform who will work best with their audience. 

Expanding beyond the sustainability community fueled growth

When you look at sustainable businesses on social media, a lot of their content and messaging seems exactly the same. I’ve grown Viviene by attempting to change that up, introduce new social media techniques, and reach consumers outside of the environmental-activist community. Sometimes brands are hesitant to change, so I have to explain to them the importance of making sustainable messaging mainstream. 

One way of doing that is connecting with Gen Z. It works: After two months of Viviene running one brand’s TikTok account, followers increased by 28.5%. Another brand started with 10,000 views, on average, and after working with Viviene, the number of views the brand’s videos got jumped by more than five times. That results in community-building and purchasing, which are both important for brands hoping to grow today.

Now is the perfect time for brands to catch the Gen Z market. Not only are we the generation of influence, we also have huge buying power — $360 billion in disposable income — and we’re at the point in our lives where we’re finding brands we love and could become loyal to. For many of us, sustainable and ethical brands are ones where we’ll spend our money.

All brands need to start tapping into Gen Z if they want to grow, and Viviene has grown rapidly as companies have begun realizing it.