This told me everything I needed to know about Sherwin Williams corporate.

In 2020, a Sherwin Williams store employee, Tony Piloseno (@tonerserpaints), got famous on TikTok just by showing behind-the-scenes content of mixing paint.

He'd show the gorgeous colors, talked about how the mixing process worked, different finishes.

This dude was a total paint nerd.

He bought all paints himself and made these videos during off-hours.

Sherwin Williams fired him. 🙃

This could've had 2 outcomes—

1. Discourage other employees from making “stupid TikToks.”
2. Create an opportunity for another brand to snag him.

Which one do you think happened?

BOTH.

At first, content creators inside the company got the message: Don’t rock the boat.

But Tony had the last laugh when he was hired by a regional competitor, Florida Paints.

​In an interview after his hire, he said:

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This is by far the biggest content fumble I’ve ever seen.

​This is what happens when brands try to control creativity instead of working with it.​

While the creator/influencer space has become incredibly saturated and more developed, this still happens all too often.

Corporate swoops in, squashes the creativity, and continues operating for "business as usual".

Because it's:

• not in the strategic marketing plan they've set.
• opening them up to liability.
• creating an example for others to not do their work on the clock.

I found out about this on, you guessed it, social media. I followed the entire process, from his original content, to him getting fired, then him getting picked up by a regional competitor.

And as a social media manager at the time, desperately trying to get influencers to work with us, I knew one thing for sure:

Whoever ran social at Sherwin Williams was not having a good day.

Curious where Tony is now?

HE'S GOT HIS OWN GOSH-DARN PAINT BRAND!!!

Tony is doing just fine, five years later.

Because when someone has vision, moxie, and entrepreneurial spirit—you keep them.

You don’t fire that. You promote it. You nurture it.

Tony could’ve been leading marketing inside Sherwin Williams by now.

Instead, he's a luxury paint brand owner.

His clients are interior designers and high-end homeowners. I'd say he's doing alright.

Sherwin Williams and Florida Paints might have the market share…but Tony's got brand loyalty, so he can charge more per can.

Here's a tip for working with creators:

Ask how they would organically work with your product or campaign.

Then get out of the way.

(No offense, but it’ll probably perform better than whatever you had scripted.)

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