The neck-less shirt video that somehow ended up on Kelly Clarkson

It started like every other folding video: a normal day, a pile of laundry, a camera propped up because that's just what I do now. I was sitting down, picked up something of my wife's that looked like a sweater, and when I picked it up, there was no neck hole. I sat there for a second, genuinely stumped, and said the only honest thing I could think of: "how do you even fold this thing?" Women's clothes are hard enough to fold as it is. Add in a piece you can't identify and it gets weird fast. I did my best, held it up, and said, "here's your... neck-less shirt."

That video started taking off almost immediately, which is rare enough that I actually noticed it happening in real time. So I did something I don't normally do: I leaned into it. About twenty minutes later I posted a second video, this time actually trying to put the thing on. You can hear my wife off camera go, "is that my vest?" and me, mid-existential-crisis, going "so it's a VEST?!" before finally getting it on right and declaring "we figured it out!" That one did even better: over 45 million views. Two days after that, she actually wore it in a video where I said something like "apparently I don't look good modeling this thing, let's see what it looks like on my wife," and then just hyped her up for the rest of it. That one landed around 9 million.

Between the three, it was somewhere north of 89 million views, and the DMs started coming in fast: meme pages asking to repost it, the usual chaos. Then one DM stood out for the wrong reasons. A woman with almost no followers messaged asking if I wanted to be on the Kelly Clarkson Show. My first instinct was that it was a scam, and a friend of mine with 5 million followers, Big Beau Brown, confirmed there was an active scam going around using that exact pitch. So I did the only reasonable thing: I found her on LinkedIn, sent a separate message there completely outside the DM thread, and used that as my own little background check. Her LinkedIn checked out, she really did work for the show, and the opportunity was real.

I'd had videos go viral before that one, but this was the first one that actually built something. It wasn't just "the guy who got lucky with a video" anymore, it was "the guy who did it well enough that it landed him on national TV." A handful of brand deals came in afterward, which was genuinely exciting, but the bigger shift was strategic: it taught me to actually lean into something when it's working instead of moving on to the next idea too fast. That's a habit I still use.

The one thing I'd do differently: I gave Barstool Sports exclusivity on the original video before the Kelly Clarkson opportunity even came up, and I didn't get paid for it. If it happened again, I'd protect the rights to the video no matter how tempting the exposure looked in the moment. Exposure doesn't pay the bills. Being able to say yes to the right opportunity later does.