TikTok users find a windfall in live shopping push

What you're seeing right now is the moment beauty consumer brand Canvas Beauty made TikTok history, hitting $1,000,000 in sales during a single live session. The TikTok Global team celebrating with her as she passes the $1,000,000 mark. Last week, the shoppable live stream on TikTok Shop not only achieved $1,000,000 in sales, but generated 60,000 orders and gained over 25,000,000 views. Gabby Fonrus explain this phenomenon to us. So TikTok is the first company to actually make live shopping work. It's been huge in China for years. In 2023, that market was worth about $647 billion in China. Wow. And the US 50 billion, so drop in the bucket, not that much. But Tiktok has done something that all these other companies haven't been able to do Amazon Live has tried shopping, eBay curate, the QVC parent company, everyone has tried live shopping as well as these like smaller startups, but it hasn't been able to take off. And the reason why it's working so well on Tiktok, according to some of the sources that I've spoken to, is because it's fusing social media entertainment and shopping. You are on Tiktok 'cause you want to look at great videos. You're there for entertainment. And then as you're scrolling, one of your favorite influencers, oh, what's this interesting ice maker or what's this interesting beauty brand that I haven't heard of? And then in two clicks, it's in your cart and come into your house. Less friction. They're like an Instagram live event basically. It's not like when I'm scrolling down and I see a sort of static ad for a pair of men's shorts or a pair of shoes or a Movado watch or something like that. This is a, this is a program like HSN or QVC, right? It's exactly like HSN and QVC except that you can interact too, which is also what's making it so exciting. And it's really landing with the Gen. Z consumer, that younger shopper. You have the ability to comment and oftentimes the creator is going to be responding to your questions in the middle of the stream. Let's say you're shopping for new apparel or a new shirt and you've got somebody that's showing off this new blouse. And then I can comment and say, can you show that from another angle? How would that work on a size medium or a size 6? So it's a completely different than just an ad. It's an engaging community building kind of experience. We have a little surprise. Yeah. Stormy Steele herself, the Canvas Beauty brand. See who we just mentioned is going to join a Stormy. Are you there? Yes, I'm here. How are you? Congratulations. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. What was your previous high watermark for sales? It was honestly on a single TikTok live, I think we set the first record and it was about $350,000 contributed to the live. Wow. So how did it work like Gabby's describing where people literally were you getting and able to check those messages as they were coming in and kind of show people what they wanted to see in real time? We were, and just recently we broke our previous record. So just recently we did $1,000,000 in sales in a single live in a single thing. How long was this TikTok Live event open? We were on for about 5 hours. Five hours. Wow. Yay. Oh well, we should just marathon our lunch going for five hours, see if we could do it. I mean, that takes a little bit of stamina. So what you sell are explain what you sell. Basically, they're beauty products of, of and fragrances of various sorts, right? Yeah. So our hero product is called Body Blaze. When we got on TikTok Shop, it was a industry disruptor. And it totally took TikTok Shop by storm, no pun intended. And it just went viral last year in August, and we have been on a high ever since. And the product isn't going anywhere. It's amazing. Gabby, what do you think as the as people see the success, should we expect Amazon and Instagram and all the rest of them to kind of jump in and try to follow suit? Well, that's why Stormy's product was so successful is because Tick Tock has that virality of it. It's something where you're watching a video and communities get behind it. And that's how it's able to grow and scale so fast. So what we're hearing from a lot of these CPG companies is that they would rather, especially newer brands, upstart such as Stormy's company, they're going to Tick Tock because you can scale like that. If you're trying to do that on Amazon, it's going to take you far longer. You've got to play the, you know, make an offering to the SEO gods. You've got to pay for the boosted search. You're competing against your own manufacturers and five other people that might have counterfeits of your product. So it's far more competitive. And so young upstarts story was able to do this just by herself by opening an account. Yeah, that's huge. And that's where shop shoppers want those new hot brands. And they're on TikTok. Who handles sort of your back office affairs? Stormy, in other words, payments and so forth. How does that get done? And I assume that that TikTok collects some toll of of of revenues, right? So basically when you have a TikTok shop, all of your transactions are actually done through the TikTok shop and their platform. So all of that is coming through their platform. They have something, you know, very similar to, you know, any other e-commerce brands, like a like a Shopify, etcetera, but all of that is housed by TikTok. Once you open your TikTok shop, Stormy, do you worry they're going to ban TikTok? Of course, it's always like at the top of mind. And I would hate if they did such a thing because TikTok is one of those platforms to me. It's for it's for the American dream. Like our story is truly a story of the American dream. You know, you get on social media, you have this vision, you have this dream, you have this platform that actually helps you reach consumers and it's all based off of your personality. Just what you share is truly authentic and it's truly lo fi and raw and you can't really that anywhere else. And I would truly hate to see TikTok go. I think it would crush a lot of people's American dream and I, I don't think that's right.