TIKTOK, fried egg sweets, and a tropical bear called a kinkajou has made a sweet-seller from the North East an overnight, viral success after skyrocketing his small autistic-run business into internet stardom.
When Covid-19 furloughed him, Simon Nova from Gateshead decided to channel his spare time into starting his own online business.
Originally an artisan baker for eight years, the North East resident was looking for a way to incorporate his passion for taste and creativity into a business.
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He said: “My original plan was to have a bakery, but that involves thousands of pounds in ovens and workers.”
Instead, the determined baker decided to try his hand at selling sweets with an online shop. And thus, The Bonnebon Confectionery Company was born.
Determined not to just sell any old sweets, he was dedicated to providing the highest quality. “I went through eleven different brands of fizzy cola bottles before I settled on this particular one because it tastes the best,” he notes.
After setting up the company, the newly established entrepreneur took to social media to market his business, with a presence on Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok.
One day, Mr Nova was scrolling through TikTok when he came across a video of an American woman feeding sweets to a tropical bear called a kinkajou.
The exotic animal, also known as “honey bears”, are native to the rainforests of Central and South America. With a diet of mostly high-sugar fruits, kinkajous are uniquely able to digest candy sweets.
After the start of the obsession with kinkajou, the Gateshead man sent a message to Alex, the lead zookeeper at Kinkatopia in Boca Raton, Florida, asking if he could send some UK sweets to the kinkajous.
“I wasn’t expecting anything from it. I just thought it would be nice to see them eating my sweets,” said Simon. He sent a box of his products to Florida, and one morning a few weeks later, Simon woke up to 1600 notifications.
In the three-minute clip posted to TikTok by the Kinkatopia account, three million people viewed the original video. Suddenly, Simon’s small Newcastle business was getting worldwide attention.
Before becoming a viral sensation, Mr Nova was getting a handful of orders a month, and only offered shipping within the UK. Now, requests are coming in strong force from potential customers in America, and as far as the UAE.
After a visit to the post office and a quick call to his ecommerce provider, EKM, Simon began to lay plans for how he would expand his business from the back room of his house to shipping worldwide.
The Bonnebon Confectionery Co. is now doing ten times the business it did before, and Simon has made running his online business into a full-time job.
Simon is open about something that makes his business different from others in his industry; The Bonnebon Confectionery Co. is a proudly autistic-run business.
As someone with autism, Simon found the typical nine to five jobs to be difficult. “There’s a stigma around autism,” said Simon. “I’m a normal person, I just have a little different wires upstairs.”
Simon is open on his business’s social media channels about how his autism affects his day to day life as a business owner. He says it was difficult in the beginning to be so candid about his life, especially getting over anxieties about how people online might scrutinise him.
However, social media has put Simon in front of an overwhelmingly supportive audience. He receives regular messages from individuals with autism and parents of autistic children who say that following Simon’s success gives them hope for the future.
In the future, Simon hopes that he can continue to scale his business, and eventually create and manufacture his own line of sweets for The Bonnebon Confectionery Co.
For now, he says you can be on the lookout for a collaboration with Kinkatopia. Simon and Alex are coming up with a “Kinkajou Mix,” so that fans of the videos can order the same sweets that the kinkajous are enjoying.
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