As TikTok continues to play an important role in retail, brands are adapting the platform to their own needs.
Cakes Body, which sells stick-free nipple covers, uses TikTok primarily as a sales channel and has made millions of dollars through TikTok Shop. Duolingo, a language learning app, doesn’t sell its products through the platform but uses TikTok to increase brand awareness, make jokes about its owl mascot, and connect with anime and K-pop fans. And Zenni Optical, an eyewear maker that sells glasses for as little as $7, uses TikTok to showcase its products and jump on trends like “Brat Summer.”
The three brands are already seeing their strategies pay off. Cakes Body, for example, became the top-selling shop on TikTok Shop last month, Modern Retail said. The company is now on track to generate $15 million in sales on TikTok Shop alone this year.
Here’s a closer look at how the companies made TikTok their own, as well as their advice for other brands looking to do the same.
Cakes Body: Partners and Crossposting
Cakes Body founders, sisters Casey and Taylor Capuano, launched the company during the Covid-19 pandemic. They initially invested $5,000 in the company and began posting organically on TikTok to gain reach. According to marketing director Krysta Lewis, the brand sold out three times within the first six months. Then, in Cakes Body’s first year of business, the company made $1 million in sales without doing any paid advertising at all.
Cakes Body has also seen a surge in sales on its TikTok Shop since joining the platform in January. But it hasn’t always been smooth sailing, Lewis said during an eTail East panel moderated by Modern Retail in Boston on Wednesday. Cakes Body initially hired contractors to approach about 300 creators each week about working with the brand. Then Cakes Body saw a surge in sales on its TikTok Shop in March and April.
Being patient and posting regularly (about two to three videos a day) was key, Lewis said. “It took a while… but it was worth it in the end,” she explained. “I know some brands that have jumped on the platform. They give it a month and if it doesn’t work in the first month, they give up. You just have to ride the momentum and do the right outreach.”
Cakes Body has more than 110,000 followers on TikTok and 3 million people have liked its videos in total. Today, the company works with “thousands” of partners, Lewis said, and has gotten to the point where influencers contact Cakes Body, not the other way around. Cakes Body requires its partners to have at least 1,000 followers and asks each of them to post within 10 days of receiving a free sample. If they don’t, they’re locked out of the TikTok Shop platform, Lewis said. “It’s a really nice safety measure to make sure people are actually posting,” she said.
While Cakes Body invests a lot of resources in TikTok, it’s also had success posting videos from TikTok to other platforms — one reason the company isn’t leaving TikTok just yet ahead of a potential ban. “When you see momentum building (on TikTok), pay attention to the videos that are doing well and getting conversions for you, because one of the best hacks… I’ve ever seen in my life is what we’re seeing right now with repurposing content from the TikTok Shop on Meta,” Lewis advised. “There’s a direct correlation of performance.”
Duolingo: memes and keyword mining
Like Cakes Body, Duolingo also joined TikTok during the pandemic. Many of its early videos were based on memes about its owl mascot admonishing people for not doing their Spanish or Italian lessons on the app every day. “When we started joking with our community and saying, ‘We get this too – Duo is an owl that kidnaps and scares people,’ we saw immediate growth,” said Melissa Yeung, Duolingo’s global social media strategist, during the eTail East panel on Wednesday.
The fact that Duolingo is “in on the joke” has actually led to people leaving TikTok and downloading the app, Yeung said. The company conducts a survey of new users and found that 20% of new users year-over-year came from social networks. About half of those, or 10%, came after discovering the brand on TikTok.
Duolingo has 12.7 million followers on TikTok and nearly 300 million people have liked its TikTok videos. All of its posts feature the owl mascot, and recent posts cover trending topics like the Olympics, Formula 1 and “Rat Boys.” Duolingo’s most successful content on TikTok isn’t always the content you expect, Yeung said. Duolingo is a language app, but “showing someone learning something never drives our growth,” Yeung said. “We’ve always had the mindset that entertainment comes first and then growth will follow.”
Niche fandom marketing has also proven helpful for Duolingo. The company built a keyword scraping tool that goes through comments and determines which hashtags people are using the most. This is how Duolingo was able to learn about a game called “Genshin Impact.” A Duolingo employee then went to an anime expo dressed as a character from the game and made a TikTok about it, which received 150 million views. “We found an audience and a fandom that already overlapped with our audience, and we were able to tap into it easily,” Yeung said.
Zenni Optical: Trends, Tips & Tricks
Zenni Optical, an eyeglass and contact lens company, joined TikTok in 2021, shortly after seeing an influx of new customers in the early days of the pandemic. Today, Zenni Optical has 334,000 followers on TikTok and 1.5 million people have liked its videos.
Zenni pulls TikToks from many sources: internal content creators, influencers, user-generated content, and external creative houses. Many of his videos touch on pop culture moments like “Barbiecore” and “Brat Summer” and showcase different glasses to fit each aesthetic. This week, Zenni jumped on a TikTok trend, saying “very mindful, very low key” with a video captioned, “See me wearing Zennis while playing golf? Very low key.”
Some of Zenni’s other TikToks offer tips for eye exams or how to find the best frames for your face. Others show the creators trying out different glasses and asking viewers for their opinions. Zenni also makes TikToks with his celebrity partners, like Keke Palmer. A TikTok from February in which Palmer tries out different glasses and thus different personas (“entrepreneur Keke,” “mom Keke,” “actor Keke,” “pop star Keke”) has nearly half a million views.
TikTok has been so successful at getting people talking about Zenni that the company has increased its TikTok spend by 100% year over year, Veronica Alcar, Zenni’s vice president of brand, told Modern Retail during eTail. “TikTok allows us to capitalize on trends in ways we’ve never really been able to before,” she said.
