A childhood bedroom in Ireland has become the set of one of the internet’s best soap operas.
Thea Von Engelbrechten, 23, lives and works from her room full of toys as the creator of Sylvanian Drama, a comedic TikTok and Instagram account that combines the innocent aesthetic of Calico Critters figurines (known as Sylvanian Families outside the US and Canada) with extremely online language and dramatic fictional storylines involving everything from drugs and robberies to murder.
As many soap operas do, it began innocently enough: Von Engelbrechten watched Desperate Housewives during Covid lockdowns, and was inspired to create her first video, a story about cheating that ends in homicide that got more than 130,000 likes on TikTok.
“I was at home in my family home and we weren’t allowed to leave, so the Sylvanian Drama account was kind of a boredom thing that I started,” she told Marketing Brew.
The account has since evolved into a full-time job for Von Engelbrechten. Sylvanian Drama now boasts a following of nearly 3.5 million across channels, and the account has attracted notable brand interest. In the last three years, collaborators have included well-known brands like Hilton, Netflix, Asos, Burberry, Cash App, Sephora, Taco Bell, Away, Urban Outfitters, Supergoop, Royal Caribbean, and Marc Jacobs.
“It’s definitely a dream come true for me because this was always what I wanted to do,” Von Engelbrechten said. “I always wanted to work in advertising.”
Critter mania
There’s no specific cadence to how often Von Engelbrechten posts, and she said she often wishes she posted more. The critters don’t come with her while she travels—she said she’d have to “hire a moving truck to do that” considering the number of toys she’s purchased for the account, much of it sourced secondhand from eBay and Etsy—so she only makes videos when she’s home and inspiration strikes.
“It’s very ADHD mode,” she said. “I just post whenever I get an idea and then see how it goes.”
Whenever the posts come, so do the fans. When the Sylvanian Drama account briefly vanished from TikTok earlier this year, fans demanded the account return, and one revealed a tattoo inspired by the account on her forearm in solidarity. (Von Engelbrechten said she couldn’t comment on the account’s disappearance, but it has been reinstated.)
Whether it’s infidelity, job woes, or figurine-on-figurine violence, the content of Sylvanian Drama’s branded videos is often as wild and full of drama as the unbranded ones. That is perhaps why they’re often filled with comments from people who seem surprised to have watched them all the way through. One recent video with Hilton involving a bachelorette weekend and wedding interrupted by a cheating scandal racked up more than 16 million views and over 343,000 likes and had comments ranging from “The ad quality I’m looking for” to “Wait…this is an ad? 😭.”
In a recent partnership with real-estate platform Opendoor, Von Engelbrechten said she was given the broad directive to make the story about divorce, but had “full creative control” over the storyline with only a “few tweaks” from the brand. The resulting video shows a pregnant critter leaving her deadbeat husband and selling the house she got in the divorce to Opendoor as she enters her “single era.”
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Creative freedom in storylines and an overall creative alignment are both important factors when Von Engelbrechten decides which brands to work with, she said.
“I totally understand from a brand’s point of view that there are some topics that you can’t discuss that aren’t brand-friendly,” she said, but added that “you can still create something that people love” and be “a bit crazy” while being brand-safe.
Usually, it’s not an issue, she said: “If brands are coming to me, they kind of know what they’re in for, anyways.”
Von Engelbrechten attributes some of the success of her paid videos to the fact that the brand references are generally understated. “I honestly think the less that you mention the brand, the better because people are going to gravitate more towards that and actually be invested in the video,” she said. “That’s just my own personal thing that I’ve learned from doing ads: ‘Less is more.’”
Viewers also seem to like the miniature versions of products. “That itself is a novelty,” she said.
Von Engelbrechten acknowledged that there’s a certain irony to her running a hit social media account.
“I don’t post that much in real life, so it’s kind of funny that I’m doing this,” she said. “I’m quite a private person, so I don’t think I ever would have done something like this had it been with my face in it.”
Knowing the fleeting nature of social media, Von Engelbrechten said she’s thinking about what comes after Sylvanian Drama in her own career, whether that’s comedy writing or working in advertising. In the meantime, she’s working to build Sylvanian Drama’s own brand image, hoping to bring back merch soon, and continuing to field advertiser interest.
Perhaps notably, there’s one inbound request Von Engelbrechten has yet to receive: one from Epoch, the company that makes the Sylvanian Families/Calico Critters figurines.
“I’d definitely be interested if they ever wanted to [collab],” she said. “But it’s not something that has happened.”