Mrs. Dutchie is the queen of TikTok Live

The Kentucky creator is customizing cups every weekday night

Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, from Kate Lindsay and Nick Catucci.🧩

TikTok’s hottest club is Mrs. Dutchie’s Lives.—Kate

---

Martens and a recent customized cup.

When I hop on Zoom with Shannon Martens, she’s hard at work mixing epoxy. 

“The part they see on camera is the easy part,” she says with a laugh. She's referring to the up to 15,000 people who tune into her TikTok Lives on weekday nights to watch her make custom tumblers. The Kentucky-based creator—who goes by Mrs. Dutchie, because her husband is Dutch—began customizing tumblers with rhinestones in the fall of last year as a way to cope with her grief over her father’s death. From there she discovered epoxy, and 460,000 followers discovered her. Recently, Martens sold out of over 600 custom cups in less than four minutes.

Here’s how it works: If you manage to snag one of the 35 to 40 different styles of cups Martens offers, you’ll also be invited to make an appointment for her to customize your purchase live on TikTok, with you giving input over Zoom. Martens offers six appointments every weeknight from 8pm to 11pm, with an additional four afternoon slots on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

“They will say something like, ‘I want Boysenberry, Twilight Purple, Enchanted, and Love Potion,’” Martens says. “So I will drop those, and then it allows them to actually be a part of the creation. 'Cause they're like, ‘Ooh, what if we put some Tequila in there? Can we add a little Silver?’ Those kinds of things. So they really get to be a part of it.”

From there, the cups spin for eight to ten hours to set the epoxy. Then Martens applies another layer, and the cups spin again. Then, the creations have to cure for 72 hours on a shelf before they can be shipped to their new owners. Martens says she makes anywhere from 12 to 23 cups a day.

Martens’ lives have developed a bit of a cult following, thanks, in part, to a viral video from @zzzachariah that detailed a dramatic moment from a March livestream: Commenters mislead Martens into thinking the customer asked for dark glitter, when she had actually asked for light. 

What makes Martens so special isn’t just her art, but the dedicated community she’s built around its creation. Her followers return night after night because of the opportunity to commune with Martens and one another in the comments.

“You might pop in and we will be laughing so hard that our stomachs hurt,” she says. “You might be coming in and we'll be tearful, you know? We keep it real.” 

The idea of online fame is new to Martens, and there are growing pains that have come with it, especially for a small business. In this interview for paid subscribers, Martens and I talk about this adjustment, the uniqueness of her Live community, and of course, cups.