After about three years of designing creative campaigns for brands, Evan Horowitz, the co-founder and CEO of Los Angeles-based branding agency Movers+Shakers, says it wasn’t clear he and his business-partner-slash-husband Geoffrey Goldberg could continue.
“It wasn’t paying the bills and we needed to figure out if we could make it pay the bills,” Horowitz told Inc.’s What I Know podcast.
A contract with e.l.f. Cosmetics gave the startup a chance, though. The company wanted a TikTok viral campaign–with the goal of hitting a billion views. E.l.f was looking for a brand reinvention, and Movers+Shakers proposed a hashtag challenge (#eyeslipsface) using original music. The client seemed skeptical; most TikTok videos used trendy clips of existing popular music.
