About

Tony Piloseno, also known as @tonesterpaint, is an American TikToker known for videos of paint mixing. In 2020, Piloseno was fired from his part-time job at a Sherwin-Williams retail store for "gross misconduct." According to Piloseno, the company received calls about viewers attempting to mimick his techniques, which includes using unconventional items in paint mixing.

History

On December 14th, 2019, Tony Piloseno, using the name @tonesterpaints, posted his first paint mixing video on TikTok.^[1] The post received more than 22,000 views and 1,000 reactions in less than one year (shown below).

Over the next year, Piloseno's videos continued to receive positive reactions from people on TikTok. On January 6th, 2020, Piloseno published a video with the caption, "How black paint is made." The post received more than 3 million views, 132,000 reactions and 175 comments in less than one year (shown below, left).

Videos by Piloseno regularly reach more than one million views. On April 5th, he published a video that received more than 3.6 million views, 195,000 reactions and 390 comments in less than one year (shown below, right).

Firing

On November 11th, 2020, Piloseno published a video about how he was fired from his job at a paint mixer. In the video, Piloseno shares his experience, explaining that he put together a marketing deck about how TikTok could benefit Sherwin-Williams. Sherwin-Williams VP of marketing rejected the pitch without hearing it, according to Piloseno. The company later fired him for gross misconduct, after customers called stores asking if they too could mix paint with unconventional items, like those seen in Piloseno's videos. The video received more than 26 million views, 6.1 million reactions and 18,000 comments in less than one month (shown below).

Piloseno later told BuzzFeed ^[2] that he was accused of stealing. "They first accused me of stealing -- I told them I purchased all my paint," Piloseno said. "They made me answer a bunch of questions like when I was doing this, where, if there was anyone in the store while I was doing [filming]. There was never anyone with me while I doing it."

In a statement to BuzzFeed, Sherwin-Williams Vice President of Global Corporate Communications Julie Young said:

While we don’t discuss the details of employee matters publicly, what I can tell you is that we were made aware of the TikTok videos produced by Anthony Piloseno through a customer complaint. We take all complaints seriously and thoroughly investigated the customer’s concerns. Following the investigation, Mr. Piloseno was let go in July 2020 due to multiple Company policy violations.

Search Interest

External References