Amid debate in Washington about whether TikTok should be banned if its Chinese owner doesn’t sell it, one group is watching with particular interest: the many brands — particularly in the beauty, skin care, fashion and health and wellness industries — who have used the video app to increase their sales.
Youthforia, a makeup brand with more than 185,000 followers on TikTok, is considering moving more of its marketing to other platforms, including YouTube and Instagram. Underlinings, which makes the popular Nailboo brand, planned to use TikTok to launch a product with a major retailer in August and is now wondering if it should change course. And BeautyStat, which sells skin care products on the TikTok Shop, can’t even fathom the idea of ​​the platform disappearing.
TikTok is “just really big, especially in beauty and in some industries, I think it’s gone,” said Yaso Murray, BeautyStat’s chief marketing officer.
Companies and creators have known for years that TikTok could be in danger. But those fears seem more real now that the House has approved a bill that would ban TikTok in the United States unless its owner, ByteDance, sells it. (Since that vote last week, progress on the bill has slowed in the Senate.)
Some lawmakers in Washington believe that TikTok is a platform for espionage by the Chinese government. Parents fear it is rotting their children’s minds. However, many companies — big and small — credit TikTok and its group of influencers for getting their products in front of potential customers, especially young people.
Retailers, whether Sephora, Walmart, Target or Amazon, are also big beneficiaries of TikTok, said Razvan Romanescu, CEO and co-founder of Underlinings and 10PM Curfew, a company that connects content creators with brands.
“If something goes viral on TikTok, they sell out,” Mr Romanescu said. “So I feel like the whole ecosystem is driven by the discovery that TikTok has provided.”
For some brands, TikTok has become an integral part of their marketing strategy and sales development. This is partly because short videos are easily digestible by consumers and partly because marketing on the platform is relatively cheap for smaller brands. TikTok Shop, which launched last year and allows shoppers to buy products directly from the app, has become particularly popular among beauty and fashion brands.
“Before Covid, the beauty category was pretty flat, maybe growing a few percentage points every year,” said Anna Mayo, vice president of beauty and personal care at NIQ, a research firm. But during the pandemic, when consumers had more time on their hands and Zoom calls became more popular, TikTok’s beauty and skin care videos exploded.
“Since then, the beauty industry has been all about growth and it hasn’t slowed down,” Ms Mayo said. “TikTok is a big driver of that growth.”
New products or clothes can be tagged by people who, unlike movie stars or models, feel more connected to viewers. Quick how-to videos can show the best way to pair spring sweaters and jeans, or the order in which to apply toners, serums, moisturizers, and sunscreen in a morning skin care routine. Some people say they go to TikTok before Google for shopping.
“The first video was a makeup tutorial, showing you how to flawlessly cover acne using three products,” said Mikayla Nogueira, a 25-year-old influencer who started making videos on TikTok four years ago. “In just 60 seconds, you’ve learned a new skill.”
That’s when Ms. Nogueira had time on her hands after her university closed classes and Ulta Beauty, where she worked, closed its stores due to the pandemic. Today, she has 15.5 million followers on TikTok and regularly collaborates with beauty and skin care brands.
While larger companies can spend marketing dollars on various sites, TikTok offers a more affordable advertising channel than platforms like Google and Meta, which owns Instagram.
“For a direct-to-consumer business like ours, the platform is very unique,” said Nadya Okamoto, who began posting TikTok videos about her company’s organic menstrual products in August, summer 2021.
First, TikTok’s “For You” stream constantly puts August’s videos in front of new consumers, not those who have chosen to follow the brand on other social media platforms like Instagram. Second, the platform allows Ms. Okamoto to be the primary content creator.
“Other brands spend hundreds of thousands of dollars every month on advertising and we spend next to nothing,” he said.
Asked about a possible ban on TikTok, Fiona Co Chan, CEO and co-founder of Youthforia, said: “I don’t know that anything would fill the hole in the same way.”
TikTok allows Frida to talk about her baby and birthing products in a way that other advertising and social platforms might consider taboo, said Chelsea Hirschhorn, the company’s founder. The brand was a relative latecomer as an active user of the app — ramping up its posts starting about a year ago — but it has about 123,000 followers and several videos have gone viral.
Still, Ms. Hirschhorn said, there are legitimate concerns about TikTok leaving or changing in some way, and Frida is not overly dependent on the app. He’s figured out how to advertise both in traditional forums (it’s now sold in 4,000 Walmart stores in the United States) and in more creative ways (sponsoring Jason Kelce’s pregnant wife, Kylie, at the Super Bowl when his Philadelphia Eagles played in the game last year) .
“I believe it is critical that brands have a bulletproof, robust marketing plan across a variety of media channels, both traditional and emerging, in order to meet any potential challenge,” said Ms. Hirschhorn.
While some companies are working on contingency plans for new products, others are watching and hoping lawmakers don’t ban the platform.
At BeautyStat, Ms Murray said she was “trying not to get too worried by everything that’s going on because I think a lot of brands are going to suddenly have a big hole in their sales.” He added: “It would be very damaging.”
