Who is Eli Rallo?

TikTok queen Eli Rallo (@TheJarr) opens up about her unexpected rise to fame, pivoting her Tiktok content, and using her mistakes (and candor) to help others. 

BY MAIJA ARIELE FIEDELHOLTZ 

Friday, March 11 2021

If you spent a lot of time on your couch scrolling TikTok during spring and summer of 2020 because of the global pandemic, you might recall a wide-eyed young woman gesticulating and shaking a massive glass jar filled with snacks from your feed. 

That was Eli Rallo. 

 When we were all still afraid of surfaces, Eli was making TikToks about snack jars with never-before-seen, totally outrageous snack combinations from the kitchen of her childhood home in Fairhaven, New Jersey—where she quarantined after she left UMichigan in the final semester of her senior year.  The morning after accidentally uploading a video to TikTok of herself filling a massive glass snack jar with her favorite gluten-free snacks—twizzlers, cashews (her favorite nut), gluten-free Brownie Brittle—Eli went viral. 

As Eli explains, “we always had [a giant glass jar] in our family home, and then my brother and I were just fooling around on TikTok and I posted the video to public instead of private by mistake. It just blew up.” After her success skyrocketed, TikTok gave her the username @theJarr. If you want to find her on your phone right now, go ahead and type in the @. 

In early January, Rallo signed her first book deal with Park&Fine Literary and Media, a well renowned NYC publishing company. Eli launched a podcast in October 2020  “The Miss Congeniality,” and also has a modern-day Carrie Bradshaw-esque newsletter,  “Salt and the City.”  But if you told Eli two-years ago this is where she would be, she wouldn’t believe it to be true.

Even though Eli went viral on TikTok amidst the global pandemic, in many ways, Eli was and— to an extent—is just a normal twenty-something finding her way post-graduation. Like many college students, Eli was uprooted from her alma-mater University of Michigan in 2020 and graduated on Zoom. TikTok was just a fun creative outlet in a time of great uncertainty when it felt like the whole world went topsy-turvy— at least that’s all it seemed to be initially. 

During her time at UMichigan she was in the school of music, theatre, and dance, and studied theatre management, political science, and creative writing. 

When Rallo’s sorority at Michigan proved to be riddled with mean girls and unaligned with her values of inclusion and equity, she found comfort in her extracurricular activities like acting class and comedy club. And, when she faced disappointments in her theatre career—like when her student play didn’t get chosen for production— or, in her love life—she channeled her frustrations into her writing.  Indeed, when her first college-boyfriend broke up with her, Eli applied to the Michigan Daily, where she ended up being Assistant Editor. She explains in the third episode of her podcast, “Wh*re Ultimatum: Would You Stop Eating Cashews so You can Kiss Him?”: “I have journal entries that I’ve re-read that say I’m never going to love anyone again in my life….that was a fact for me back then...” she says. “I think Michigan presented the opportunity to continue to live my life to the absolute fullest potential even when I was heartbroken and really sad and that meant just filling my life with other things and other relationships and other activities to do to totally distract myself.” 

It seems the common thread amongst Rallo’s interests is sharing stories and helping people—screenwriting, acting, journalism all have this in common. It was Rallo’s creative pursuits that sparked joy during undergrad, and which she notes as having made her time at UMichigan incredibly valuable.

Upon closer examination it seems Eli was always on a path towards making creative content for a living. Reflecting on her passions and experiences as a young person, it seems that getting creative was a common thread, and the proof was in the pudding all along. 

Given her ambition and seize-the-moment attitude, in retrospect it is no surprise that Rallo could not help but push her passion for storytelling to permeate her TikTok content. TikTok was the perfect way for all of these creative pursuits to collide into one. Rallo wanted to give her TikTok content a lifestyle-oriented spin beyond jarr and cheese board making. But, diverging from this content was an inherent risk to her online presence: would her following dissipate? would she become irrelevant? Thankfully, her followers took her in with open-arms. 

Rallo was able to use her initial TikTok fame to spearhead her love for telling stories and uplifting marginalized voices by expanding the content of her posts to topics like popular culture, sexual health, and dating advice. While her snack-making videos seemed to attract a slightly younger audience, her target audience got much bigger when she started to talk about more culturally relevant and personalized topics. Rallo explains the intent behind expanding her content: “If I can spare people the specific brand of pain that I was in, many times in my life, whether it was because of a breakup, or because of some kind of body issue, because of self-confidence or because of friends. If I can spare someone those little troubles, that to me is making someone’s day better.” 

After watching her videos obsessively, it must be that Rallo’s followers were attracted to her passion for giving advice. For instance, she has a category of her TikToks devoted to rules for life-improvement like “rules for a third date” or “rules for the Wednesday before Thanksgiving” or “rules for finding joy for you” (pictured above). Rallo also uses her Tiktok platform as a space to talk candidly about her personal experiences and hopes her followers can learn from them. She is candid, hilarious, and good at distilling real life phenomena to her audience.

***

When Eli graduated, the struggling job market made it hard to kick-start her career. The prospect of settling for any position short of her dream job as the real life Carrie Bradshaw writing for the NY Post sex, dating, and relationships columnist would be, in her view, sub-par. She felt like she was flailing. On a whim, she decided to go back to school to get her master’s, and ultimately landed on Columbia’s Journalism school where she obtained her master’s degree in Journalism in June of 2021. 

Just like during her time at UMichigan when she was frustrated and faced disappointment, she got creative. Rallo kept on making TikToks. Eventually, Rallo gained enough followers to be able to create content as a full time career. Check out Eli’s announcement about leaving her day job: 

As she moves forward in her career, one thing that is of tremendous importance to Eli is being cognizant of the privilege she holds which led her to access this kind of fame in the first place and her ability to do content-creation full time. She feels a responsibility to lift-up other content creators who don’t share the privilege she has as an affluent, straight, white cisgender woman who falls into the Western beauty standard. “I’m going to grab all my creator friends who are smaller than me … who don’t have the same opportunities and say, ‘Come with me.’ … I don’t walk through doors and shut them behind me. I don’t believe in that,” she said. 

***

Eli has been self-employed since September 2021. She went with her gut. She left her day-job at US News covering totally boring insurance updates. Eli’s dreams are coming true IRL. Rallo is evidence that following your passion works. And, maybe the cliché phrases we know and love to hate like, trust your path, and life’s about the journey— are used frequently for a reason, they have some truth to them. So, who is Eli Rallo?  Ten years from now you’ll be able to answer that question to the person standing to your right at Barnes and Noble after her second book comes out, or maybe even the matinee showing of her first play. 

Works Cited

“Eli Rallo .” Park & Fine, https://parkfine.com/client/eli-rallo/. 

Rallo , Eli. “The Miss Congeniality with Eli Rallo .” https://open.spotify.com/show/1ppxFlQrr6qDqNr3ExH0CI?si=d8fb50264033489f&nd=1

Rallo , Eli. Salt and the City , https://elirallo.substack.com

Sherin, Mia. “Interview with Eli Rallo: Tiktok Queen of Astrology, Oatmilk, and the Jarr.” SHEESH MAGAZINE, 31 May 2021, https://sheeshmagazine.com/eli-rallo-the-jarr-tiktok/

Rallo , Eli. Eli Rallo - Content Creator - Self-Employed | Linkedin. https://www.linkedin.com/in/eli-rallo-09341113a. 

Rallo , Eli. “Wh*Re Ultimatum: Would You Stop Eating Cashews So You Could Kiss Him? .” Season 1, episode 3, Oct. 2020. 

“Eli Rallo by The Jarr.” TikTok, https://www.tiktok.com/@thejarr/video/7001160173205064966?is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v1&q=%23thejarr&t=1642628598143. Accessed 3 Feb. 2022. 

Farfan, Isabella. “Talking Jars, Gender Politics, Copper Iuds, and Financial Independence 

with TikTok Star Eli Rallo, Journalism '21 - Columbia Spectator.” Columbia Daily Spectator, 11 Nov. 2021, https://www.columbiaspectator.com/arts-and-entertainment/2021/11/11/talking-jars-gender-politics-copper-iuds-and-financial-independence-with-tiktok-star-eli-rallo-journalism-21/. 

QUOTES from Crushing Interview: 

Eli: “I’m originally from New Jersey, I grew up there, was born and raised in central Jersey, and I went to the University of Michigan. I studied theater there—specifically writing and producing—which was really great. I ended up writing for the Michigan Daily while I was there. I really wanted to pursue writing in some capacity. I ended up graduating in 2020 during the pandemic, so I decided to go to grad-school because I couldn’t find a job in journalism or writing and I wound up getting into Columbia which was crazy, and I went there. And, throughout the pandemic I was like slowly growing on Tiktok,  it was you know those very classic tales of like random virality. And, I started to really like what I was doing and I really liked the opportunity to create something so big, for so many people, it was so fun. And I worked in journalism for a little while but I had a creepy boss—which is sort of beside the point—but I was looking for another job actually, he was making me feel uncomfortable and unsafe at work…” 

Eli: “I was looking for another job and my Tiktok started growing a lot and I realized I could capitalize on it—obviously that was a big thing. A lot of greenspace went into the decision, and of course privilege and luck. So, that was really crazy and I ended up leaving my job. And, now I do tiktok and instagram for my main source of income. I’m working on a book proposal that’s almost done, and yeah, that’s pretty much the whole thing I guess up until this point.” 

Me: “How do you reconcile coming upon this career, given your privilege, and given your luck, and how fast this all happened? How do you parse through that in your head?” 

Eli: “yeah, you know I think it feels really right, and I’ve struggled a lot with feeling right through a lot of my professional career and also college. I didn’t really feel right when I was working in theatre or working in that setting, and I didn’t really feel right when I was at journalism school. I just like wasn’t a good journalist and I wasn’t a good producer. And like, beyond that, I just didn’t feel…like something in my gut told me it was wrong. Beyond that, something that helps me to stay calm or reconcile everything going on is just remembering this is the first time I’ve felt right in so long, and I have to revel in that. And like yes, it happened fast, but it happened fast for a reason. I really believe in the universe. I’m a big universe girl, so I think you have to trust the universe. And like I really trust the universe in this way.”