Eight months ago, Kaeden Rowland started a new job as a print specialist at her local Staples store in upstate New York.
These days, however, at least online, the 22-year-old has a new title: the Staples Baddie, a moniker bestowed upon her by hundreds of thousands of followers who watch along as she makes posters, stickers and stamps.
In a TikTok she posted last month, Ms. Rowland demonstrates making a custom photo mug featuring a picture of a green cat with alien-esque features — known online as “glorp cat” — loudly tapping her fingernails on the vessel to tingle-inducing A.S.M.R. effect.
The combination of Ms. Rowland’s earnest yet deadpan description of what might otherwise be banal sundries is part of the draw. In her videos, Staples is a potential wonderland of creativity and whimsy rather than just a place to grab toner and ballpoint pens.
Ms. Rowland, who also goes by Oblivion on social media, began posting videos from her workplace this winter, she said in a phone interview while driving back upstate after a trip to New York City focused on brand deals and events spurred by her recent viral fame. (She was scheduled to clock in for a Staples shift the next day, she said.)
Ms. Rowland said she had “very big passion for stationary and art supplies,” and added that she is autistic. “I was like, How can I make people really feel, not just see, the passion I have for these stationary office products?”
She means it, too. Just ask for her opinions on laminators or label makers or vellum drafting paper.
Initially, Ms. Rowland was worried about how her employer might react to her videos, but those concerns were soon assuaged.
“Printing queen,” the official Staples account commented on her first video. When she saw the comment, she recalled thinking: “Oh, great, I’m not going to get fired.”
From there, she has continued posting videos while on the job, gaining over 450,000 new followers along the way.
Bob Sherwin, Staples’s chief marketing officer, wrote in an email that it had “been incredible to watch Kaeden’s content resonate so widely.”
Her videos are also driving people into the stores, he added, writing that the company had seen “measurable increases in store traffic and meaningful lifts in categories featured in viral posts, including custom mugs and specialty print products.”
The company’s apparent embrace of Ms. Rowland offers a glimpse into the ways big brands are thinking about social media and virality in 2026, as content creators use their workplaces as backdrops for their videos.
In 2020, Tony Piloseno, then a college student in Ohio, became popular on TikTok by posting videos of himself mixing cans of paint on the job at a Sherwin-Williams store. Like some of Ms. Rowland’s more A.S.M.R.-style videos, Mr. Piloseno’s content was “oddly satisfying,” he said; some followers would play a game and try to guess what hue each blend of pigments would yield.
After racking up over a million followers, he was fired when the company realized he had been making the videos during work hours.
Now, six years later, Mr. Piloseno, who is 27 and lives in Orlando, Fla., owns his own paint brand. He said he felt his former employer had “missed out” on an opportunity to connect the legacy brand with a younger generation of potential customers.
“These people who are in the marketing boardrooms don’t have boots on the ground, or are not actually in the retail stores working directly with their customers,” Mr. Piloseno said. Somebody with “firsthand insight,” he added, is better suited to create “this great organic content that someone like the Staples Baddie is making right now.”
Julie Turkel, a brand licensing and marketing specialist who did brand licensing work with Staples in the early 2000s, said she was surprised by the company’s reaction to Ms. Rowland.
“Businesses really need to kind of pay attention to how social media has really changed their ability to have control over these things,” she said.
The challenge for Staples now, she added, will be finding a way to capitalize on Ms. Rowland’s fame without stripping her content of the very thing that made it popular in the first place.
For now, Ms. Rowland continues to make her videos, recommending the best paper for business cards: a heavyweight, shiny card stock she said she had been known to glaze — slang for overly hyping up — on her TikTok.
“I love that paper so much,” she said.
Madison Malone Kircher is a Times reporter covering internet culture.
The post Office Supply Store Employee? Please, She’s the Staples Baddie. appeared first on New York Times.
