It all began with a simple 10-second pitch.
Robert Kapas was sitting in a local mall in Atlanta wearing his homemade fish hat, when a man named Leo (leo.the.introvert on social media) stopped to ask about it. Kapas doesn’t actively try to sell the hats he makes. Instead, he simply walks around, hoping the hats will sell themselves — and, in this case, that’s exactly what happened.
After hearing the story behind the hat, Leo asked Kapas if he could film a video of it for TikTok. The 79-year-old tells PEOPLE that, despite being “low-tech,” he agreed. The next day, Leo called Kapas and said the video had been viewed by 2 million people.
“By the end of the next day, it had been seen by 28 million people. I thought, ‘Oh my God, I have to set up a TikTok account,’ ” Kapas says. “So, with his help, I started my own TikTok account, ‘Fish. Hat. Bob.’…