Darien mom becomes TikTok star

DARIEN — Shannon Doherty knows life can be hectic trying to balance running a business and raising four small children. Add a pandemic to complicate things, and the 36-yearold Darien mom needed to come up with some hacks to get through the day.

That’s when she decided to share her ideas on TikTok.

“To be honest, I wasn’t sure what it was at first,” said Doherty, who owns Darien’s Coco+Lala clothing store.

“I thought it was just something that kids used to share videos of them dancing,” she said.

Since joining in March, Doherty now has 160,000 followers, 6 million likes and an estimated 40 million views. Earlier this month, one of Doherty’s mom hacks, a healthy sanitation station, was featured on “Good Morning America.” Doherty said she was approached by the show’s editor after she saw Doherty’s TikTok. The video has now gained more than 400,000 likes.

One mom hack Doherty shared on TikTok was “Random things in our laundry room that just make sense.” Those items included a purse for loose change, a sign that can be flipped to say “clean or dirty,” a small Keurig coffee maker, and a lonely sock bin. That TikTok got nearly

15,000 likes. Another similar video about laundry room hacks gained nearly 40,000 likes.

Doherty said she tries to combine humor with useful tips for how to juggle being a working mom.

“I try to think of creative ideas that no one else is

pointing out. And we have four kids, so I’m running around and most of my ideas have gone through trial and error — they actually work,” Doherty said.