Having your brand pulled into a viral TikTok video about someone sitting in a pile of poop on a New York subway would, understandably, be a nightmare scenario for many social media managers. Nuuly, however, turned its inclusion in a TikTok user’s dramatic tale about accidentally plopping down onto human feces while wearing jeans from the subscription clothing rental service into a viral video of its own. 

TikTok user Tess Hill recounted what she called “quite possibly the worst experience to ever be experienced on the New York subway” in a now-viral video as part of the latest trend circulating the platform. It entails users detailing their most embarrassing or traumatic stories in a slideshow format, typically with a grainy image of Pepe the King Prawn repeated across each slide and a choir version of Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” from the film “Deadpool & Wolverine” playing in the background. 

The black cargo jeans Hill rented from Nuuly are something of a main character in her 30-slide story, which involves her frantically running off of the subway and through the streets of New York to find a new pair of pants (which she eventually procures from a Lululemon store) and having to hold a bag containing her “shit jeans” throughout her journey back to her apartment. 

“You may wonder why I didn’t just throw them away,” Hill wrote in her video—which, as of this writing, has amassed over 10.4 million views and 1.5 million likes, and has been shared more than 266,000 times. “Well, remember they were rentals from Nuuly. If I didn’t return them, I’d be charged $200.” Later in the video, she reveals she returned the pair of jeans to Nuuly the next day. After washing them, of course. 

But some commenters were disturbed by the possibility of said “shit jeans” being put back into circulation, with one user receiving over 151,000 likes on a comment reading, “Returning to these [sic] to Nuuly was diabolical” and another reading, “me looking down in horror at my black Nuuly rental cargo jeans” receiving another 150,000. 

When Nuuly’s marketing team members came across Hill’s video over the weekend and noticed it quickly gaining traction, they gathered that Monday to promptly put together a response, said Kirsten Henri, the brand’s creative director. The brand’s customer support and social media teams researched Hill’s story and discovered the subway incident occurred in 2023, meaning “there wasn’t actually something [they] could step in and do” to remedy the situation, she said. 

Instead, they sent Hill a DM on TikTok telling her “we could absolutely have helped in this situation, had we known about it,” and got to work on a TikTok video of their own, Henri said. 

“First and foremost, even if you take Nuuly out of it, the story is objectively hilarious,” she said. “It’s really well-written. And I think everyone has had, hopefully not the exact same experience, but a disastrous day like that, where it couldn’t have gotten worse … So, we wanted to make sure that we acknowledged [Hill’s video].” 

Henri and her team decided to respond to Hill’s TikTok with a self-referential video documenting what the viral moment looked like from Nuuly’s perspective—using the same trending TikTok format. The video is told from the POV of the brand’s social media manager, with lines including, “I open TikTok and see the most devastating video about someone sitting in literal sh*t. I stare blankly at my phone,” and, “I open the comment section and begin to respond. Yes, you can rent jeans. Yes, that pair of jeans has been removed from the inventory. You will not be charged for sh*t jeans.” 

Nuuly’s video about what the brand dubbed “shitgate” has amassed over 4.3 million views and more than 504,000 likes since Monday, along with hundreds of comments from both sympathetic social media managers and TikTok users who applauded the brand’s response. “An iconic way to respond to an iconic story,” said one user, while another wrote “You crushed this. 10/10. Considering using Nuuly now.” 

“We could have a ‘standards of procedure’ for crisis [management], and I can guarantee you that never once would we have had ‘somebody told an incredibly funny story about sitting in poop on the New York subway’ in that. That's not in any book,” Henri said. “In this type of situation, you have to bring some different skill sets than what you’d typically do for social. You kind of have to think like a crisis comms expert, a cultural expert and also really bring your creative approach, all at the same time.”

Nuuly also provided Hill a discount code (TESSWORSTDAY) to share with her TikTok followers and readers of her Substack newsletter “Please Read Me.” The brand sponsored the most recent edition of Hill’s newsletter where she wrote about the unexpected virality of her TikTok video. And on TikTok, Hill followed her original story with several additional (unsponsored) videos about Nuuly, including one where she told viewers she ultimately rented the same style of jeans again and purchased them through Nuuly and another where she shared photos of several of her “favorite Nuuly looks.” Naturally the first outfit in the slideshow features the infamous black jeans. 

Also read: Newsletter platforms attract TikTok creators

“While I’m shocked by the numbers, I’ve always thought this is the story that would make me known. I knew it the moment I sat in the shit,” Hill wrote in her newsletter. 

Graza and ‘Olive Oil Girl’

In her newsletter, Hill told readers she decided to share her embarrassing story after she came across another popular video to come out of the “Pepe the King Prawn” trend—a TikTok from creator Megan Chacalos detailing her disastrous attempt to moisturize her hair with a homemade olive oil hair mask. Olive oil dripped from her hair, creating an “oil slick” that caused her to slip and knock herself unconscious. Chacalos reenacted the series of unfortunate events that followed in a separate TikTok video that garnered 21 million likes—on top of the nearly 58 million her original video received.

Unlike Nuuly, Graza wasn’t mentioned in Chacalos’ viral video. But just a few days later, she posted another video telling viewers she was given a Graza box set in a gift exchange as a playful nod to her newfound status as “Olive Oil Girl.” 

“So many times in social, you're making the decision about what conversations to be a part of and what moments feel ownable to the brand,” said Gabby Fowler, Graza’s senior social media manager. “But every now and then, something like ‘Olive Oil Girl’ comes around, and it's less of a question of if we're going to be a part of it, and more about how quickly we can be a part of it.”

Graza’s marketing team brainstormed and executed its response to Chacalos’ video within one work day, Fowler said. That morning, the team collectively came up with the idea of delivering olive oil with customized packaging to Chacalos’ New York apartment, and by 4 p.m., Graza’s designer had created an illustration of Chacalos slipping on olive oil, a few team members ran to a local print shop to print out the custom label designs, and Graza’s community manager and creative producer had sprinted through the rain to Chacalos’ apartment (which the team received by DMing and then emailing her that day) to deliver the personalized olive oil bottles.

The team also mirrored the format of Chacalos’ reenactment of her olive oil story in their TikTok video documenting their journey to her apartment, including a scene of the two team members who delivered the olive oil to her doorstep wrapping their heads in saran wrap. 

“Half the journey is what you do, and then the second half is always how you share about that back on social,” Fowler said. “And I think having leadership that understands the importance of these things happening, and how fast we have to react to it” is what allowed the team to “completely change our whole schedule that day and miss a lot of meetings so we could make this happen.”

Also read: Behind Graza founder Andrew Benin’s unorthodox approach

Graza also extended its relationship with Chacalos by sponsoring a TikTok video of her applying an olive oil hair mask—but without the traumatic events that followed in her original video. Together, Graza’s delivery video, another video showing a closeup view of the custom label and Chacalos’ hair mask tutorial video generated over 708,000 views and tens of thousands of likes. 

Fortunately, Chacalos reported in a caption that her hair is now “the shiniest [it] has ever been.”