Peta thought everyone got the joke.
She filmed a quick TikTok offering to sell the gym shorts she’d just peeled off after a training session, expecting a laugh.
The laugh never came. The cash offers did.
The powerlifter, who has 460,000 followers on Instagram as @power_midget, says the requests started fast and never really stopped.
A joke nobody treated as one
The shorts came off because of a fairly routine hazard of lifting heavy. Peta is blunt about it.
“A lot of girls wet themselves doing heavy weights, particularly squats and deadlifts,” she says.
So she changed, filmed the clip, and posted it. “I once made a jokey TikTok saying, ‘Who wants to buy these shorts?’ because I’d had to change out of them after training,” she says.
“I had so many DMs offering to buy them. I thought people would realise I was joking. I didn’t expect anyone to actually want them.”
They wanted them.
The market for worn gym socks
The shorts turned out to be the start of it. Followers now ask for whatever she’s trained in, and the list runs more specific than you’d guess.
Plenty of fans just watch her lift. A smaller group wants the kit. “People ask for gym stuff a lot,” she says.
“They want to buy my gym wear. Gym socks are another thing. Loads of people want my gym socks.”
‘I’m not filming porn in my local gym’
The demand for gym content runs into a practical wall. Peta trains at a public gym, which limits what she can shoot there.
“People really like gym content,” she says.
“But it’s hard because I don’t have a gym to film in apart from my local gym, and I’m not filming porn in my local gym.”
The local connection cuts both ways.
The gym owner knows exactly what she does, and so do plenty of members. “We laugh about it,” she says.
Other lifters clock her mid-workout.
“I’ve had messages from other members being like, ‘Oh, you train at my gym’.”
A cardio group she drops into does the same.
“I get messages from people in there all the time like, ‘Oh, I saw you in my gym today’.”
Domination pays best
The strength that built her following also shapes what sells.
“Domination-style content is probably some of my best-selling stuff,” she says.
This week she’s taking it off-site. “I’ve actually booked a BDSM dungeon this week to film with another Domme creator.
We’re going to go there and film together because that latex domination content always does really, really well.”
The DMs, the socks, all of it. She leaves most of it alone.
“It doesn’t bother me, each to their own,” she says.
Why It Matters
Peta’s inbox is a small window into one of the creator economy’s stranger growth areas: physical merchandise as proof of proximity.
A subscription buys content. A pair of worn gym socks buys the feeling of something real, something that was actually there.
For creators built on a personal brand, the work and the body behind it start to blur, and the worn-item trade sits right on that line.
Fitness makes it sharper, because the product is the training and the training keeps producing things to sell.
Worn clothing has quietly been a fixture of online adult commerce for years, long before fitness creators folded it into the offer.
What’s changed is the funnel. A free TikTok joke now feeds a paid pipeline, and the audience that arrives for squat PBs is the same audience getting upsold on latex.
Peta films in the dungeon this week. Worth watching whether more fitness creators follow the money into the niche stuff, and whether the platforms handing them the free reach stay comfortable with where it goes.
