Kaeden is a 22-year-old print specialist at a Staples in upstate New York. She started making TikToks about her job because she genuinely loved it.
She kept watching customers walk past services they didn’t know existed. Custom mugs. Eight-foot banners. Direct mail. Stamps. Things Staples had offered for years that got little attention. So she started talking about them. In her own voice, with her uniform on and her name tag visible. She didn’t have a script, a strategy, or permission. She was just genuinely pumped about office supplies.
Her most viral video has 6.5 million views. Staples’s official TikTok account has 47,000 followers while Kaeden has 472,000. The internet has since dubbed her the Staples Baddie.
That’s what genuine passion does. It doesn’t ask, it just goes.
A few years back, a young Englishman named Francis Bourgeois started making a similarly quirky set of videos of himself getting genuinely emotional on train platforms. He, too, went viral, people really dug his uber train-nerd vibe.
Next thing you know, he started getting endorsement deals from big brands like Gucci and North Face.
Because you can’t fake that kind of joy, and people know it when they see it.
This is a pattern, not a coincidence. An early 19th century economist named Johann Van Thunen noticed how shepherds moved their flocks toward the grass, and when the grass ran out, moved on again. Culture works the same way. Glamour rises, dazzles, exhausts itself, and people move toward something more nourishing. Then glamour seduces again.
So why now? Why this particular move away from glamour toward something so plainly, unapologetically real?
The answer is hiding in the word itself. “Glamour” isn’t just a feeling. It comes from the old Scots word “gramarye,” meaning sorcery. And as any fan of Tolkien knows, you don’t get the sorcerer’s magic for free. There is always a cost. You summon powers from dark places. The spell works, for a while. But people eventually feel it wearing off. The celebrity who has never touched the product. The campaign engineered to look spontaneous.
That’s the bargain brands have been making for decades. And for now, it’s going out of style.
Kaeden didn’t cast any spells. She just showed up in a red shirt and meant what she said.
As the Pagans say, there is magic everywhere. You just need someone willing to notice it.
