New NielsenIQ data confirms what many of us suspected: TikTok Shop is EXTREMELY successful.
It generated nearly $1 billion in US beauty sales over the last 52 weeks, making it the eighth largest health and beauty retailer in the country.
Eighth. Largest. Beauty. Retailer.
That puts it ahead of most regional chains, specialty boutiques, and every beauty brand that ever convinced itself a well-designed website counted as a retail strategy.
And TikTok Shop didn’t earn that ranking the way traditional retailers do - through decades of shelf and gondola real estate negotiations, carefully curated end caps, and in-store marketing activations.
It got there through a smartphone screen and an algorithm. You see something, you want it, you buy it …without ever leaving the app.
That’s the whole model, and boy oh boy, does it work!
We’ve already covered what TikTok Shop means for brands and consumers. But this number changes the tone of that conversation. A lot of established beauty brands have been treating TikTok Shop like a marketing experiment - a place to build awareness, not necessarily sell product.
To the brands still waiting to see the impact of TikTok shop, that ship has sailed. Nearly a billion dollars in annual sales doesn’t leave much room for your wait-and-see argument.
The brands that boldly adopted this emerging retail platform early on now have the advantage. And the ones still deliberating? Their caution has caused them to fall behind.
It’s Not Just About TikTok
The bigger picture here is what TikTok Shop represents within a broader pattern. For decades, the beauty industry was built around physical retail - department store counters, specialty chains, and the pharmacy aisle. Then Amazon showed up and rewrote the rules. Now it’s platforms like TikTok where shopping and entertainment happen in the same place at the same time. What you discover, what you buy, and what you think about a brand are all being shaped by the same algorithm - and that algorithm doesn’t care about your brand’s heritage or your relationship with a department or specialty store buyer.
The brands doing well on TikTok Shop aren’t necessarily the biggest or most established brands. They’re the ones who moved fast, kept prices accessible enough to drive impulse purchases, and let creators actually speak about their products — not hand them a marketing script to “control” the messaging. They’ve harnessed the real competitive advantage of TikTok Shop, and it’s showing in the sales numbers.
The Conversation Brands Keep Avoiding
The most common pushback I hear from established brands is the fear of upsetting their retail partners. If they start selling regularly on TikTok Shop, often at discount price points to drive impulse buys, will Sephora or Ulta push back? Will they lose shelf space? It’s a fair concern. Those are important relationships.
But here’s what’s actually happening: Sephora and Ulta are already actively responding. Both are building out their own online selling strategies and creator partnerships so they can compete in an environment that’s moving faster than traditional retail was ever designed to. That tension legacy brands are afraid of creating? It already exists. So, waiting won’t make it go away; it just means sitting on the sidelines while your competitors make sales.
The smarter approach is to build a TikTok Shop presence that is specifically for the platform — smaller size items at a lower entry price to introduce new customers to your brand, rather than competing directly with what’s on the shelf at Sephora. Done well, TikTok Shop attracts new customers, and some of them eventually become loyal buyers who will walk into a store to explore your brand's offerings in person.
The beauty industry has navigated many major retail shifts by adapting — sometimes successfully, sometimes not. TikTok Shop just handed us very clear data on where the industry’s future stands. Fearing or ignoring this retail channel’s viability is a major tactical error. And your competitors willing to take the leap of faith will be the winners.
MyTwoCents
Nearly a billion dollars. I’ve been watching this industry navigate every major retail shift for four decades, and that number stopped me cold.
TikTok Shop isn’t a trend anymore — it’s infrastructure. And the beauty industry has a long, uncomfortable history of ignoring infrastructure changes until their bottom line is affected, and it’s too late to recover completely.
The brands I worry about aren’t the small indies. They’re scrappy by necessity and tend to figure it out because they live in survival mode. It’s the established players - the ones with legacy retail relationships, lengthy approval chains, and quarterly targets that identify bold moves as dangerous. They are most at risk here. Caution is understandable. But caution comes with a cost, and right now that cost is a loss of market share.
I don’t think TikTok Shop is the end of traditional retail. But it is a clear signal that consumer shopping habits have evolved, and brands that refuse to evolve will suffer the consequences.
What do you think? Let’s have a conversation in the comment section.
Kevin James Bennett is the publisher of In My Kit®. He is an Emmy Award-winning makeup artist, cosmetic developer, educator, and consumer advocate.
Learn more at www.kjbennett.com
I was speaking to a friend who worked in Bloomingdale’s 59th for 25 years. Her stories about how glamorous the department store experience used to be gives me envy I never got to experience it. So now with TikTok shop, it’s clear that the direction of beauty shopping is going to be the equivalent of fast fashion. While I imagine has the potential to dilute quality control for many of these brands. I know that these more established brands are the ones to lose in all this, but I wonder how they’ll adapt to this new landscape.