Hi Reader, TikTok's benchmark data of top tier brands shows the huge impact from sampling and the resulting creator videos. Brands doing $0 - $12.5K/mo in TikTok Shop GMV deliver about 30 free samples a month. Those generate ~180 pieces of creator content, and those videos drive 51% of the shop's GMV. At $50K/mo, brands sample ~200 units per month. At $100K/mo, ~500 samples and 2,800 creator videos now drive 73% of GMV. At the top tier, brands doing 7-figures a month are pumping out 1,000+...
23 days ago • 6 min read
Hi Reader, That's a quote from Connor MacDonald, CMO of Ridge in the Operators Newsletter. Brands that launch on TikTok are seeing incredible revenue growth both on and off channel. And we're still in the early days! Connor continues, "Spend grew from 0.5% to 1.6% of total budget. Even though the ROAS is inflated with a large % of growth coming from GMV Max, performance has continued to improve." "But this remains one of our biggest opportunities heading into the rest of 2026." [emphasis...
2 months ago • 1 min read
Hi Reader, I was at TikTok Shop’s major summit in LA last week. And I’m even more bullish on this channel. You should be too. TTS is Amazon 8 years ago. Back then, your leadership was saying this about selling on Amazon: “oh I’m not sure we should be on there,” “what about channel conflict? It will anger our dealers,” “we don’t own the customer data, what about re-targeting?”. If you’ve been around long enough, you know how that panned out. Amazon ate the e-commerce world (over 40% share of...
3 months ago • 1 min read
Hi Reader, You will never build a successful TikTok Shop channel without a creator community. Top brands like Comfrt, Medicube, Tarte, Crocs, Mary Ruth's all have creator communities that drive over 90% of their sales. Every brand I audit that is struggling on TikTok Shop has the same problem. They recruited creators, shipped samples, got a few sales, and then sales flatline. The brands that are winning built a community engine that runs whether they're online or not. Here's the full playbook...
3 months ago • 6 min read
Hi Reader,I got on a call last week with a group of people doing 9 figures collectively on TikTok. Five things stood out -> Creator Communities are Your Foundation Sending samples is table stakes. The brands that are winning have actual communities where they’re in direct conversation with their creators. WhatsApp, Discord, iMessage it doesn't matter as long as you're connecting with your community in a genuine way. That means real human conversations, not AI -> which everyone tries to do to...
3 months ago • 2 min read
Hi Reader, You sent samples. You have creators. You might even have a few videos trickling in. But the sales aren’t there. And you can see it stalling. I talked to 16 ecommerce leaders this month. 9 of them had the same problem. An affiliate program that has creators, has samples going out, and is generating less than $1k GMV. You must build a system that constantly generates new videos on TikTok if you want to grow GMV. Video quantity and frequency are the number one drivers of GMV. Here are...
4 months ago • 3 min read
Hi Reader, I did a deep dive into the top-performing brands on TikTok Shop over the weekend to see what they have in common. Medicube ($200M+ GMV), Tarte ($105M+ revenue), Comfrt ($9M in a single month), and 3 more. Different categories. Different price points. Different audiences. Here's What Stood Out One brand drives 99.3% of its revenue through creators. Not their own content. Creators. Another brand found that 96% of their TikTok Shop buyers had never heard of the brand before. Pure new...
4 months ago • 1 min read
Hi Reader, I pulled 30 days of data on one of TikTok Shop's biggest apparel brands. Comfrt is doing roughly $313,000 per day on TikTok Shop. Not per month. Per day. Here's what their operation looks like and what you can learn from it. The numbers at a glance: Over the last 30 days: 136 active SKUs. 9,393 creators posting. 50,435 videos. 10,013 livestreams. Let me break this down piece by piece. Creator Strategy: Wide Net, Concentrated Returns 9,393 creators posted content for Comfrt in the...
4 months ago • 2 min read
Hi Reader, I had a dozen calls this month with ecomm operators and every single one who had launched on TikTok saw an uplift in Amazon sales. A director of ecommerce at a $50M CPG brand told me: "If something's on TikTok, we end up getting like 60% of that as halo sales on Amazon. It is a direct feed to Amazon." A founder said: "Every time we turn TikTok off, we see sales decrease on Amazon. It's happened so many times that the data doesn't lie at this point." And a third was shared: "I have...
5 months ago • 2 min read