TikTok Shop is doubling down on new product drops this holiday season, with items it hopes you won’t find elsewhere.
TikTok wants to offer US shoppers products from lesser-known, smaller DTC brands that may not have the resources to operate on rival platforms like Amazon, among others.
“What we’re doing is product discovery—unique products that you can discover by yourself naturally in your feed,” Nico le Bourgeois, head of US operations for TikTok Shop, told Retail Brew on the sidelines of an event the company hosted in New York on Oct. 23. “That means a lot of small brands, direct-to-consumer brands that don’t necessarily have access to those large platforms.”
New product launches exclusively for Black Friday will be on TikTok Shop shelves in November. Merchants like candy brand I Love Chamoy, will be dropping sugar-free Mexican watermelon candy gummies, Mavwicks Fragrances is set to launch a fabric softener, and period care brand August has plans to introduce cozy winter merch—all exclusive to TikTok Shop for Black Friday.
Le Bourgeois said TikTok is “reimagining” how people shop this Black Friday/Cyber Monday with the exclusive products sold through TikTok’s community of creators, as small businesses create custom products for the platform.
More brands: In addition, big names in the personal care and beauty space, including Dyson, Kiehls, Fenty Beauty, and Make Up Forever will also start selling TikTok Shop for the very first time in early November. These brands will ramp up their TikTok stores ahead of the Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend, le Bourgeois added.
TikTok opened TikTok Shop in September 2023. Since then, the number of people shopping on the platform every month has “almost tripled,” le Bourgeois said. Fashion and beauty are two of the biggest categories for shoppers on TikTok, he added. Since July, the monthly gross sales on TikTok Shop have exceeded $1 billion, eMarketer reported, citing data from The Information.
According to Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData Retail, TikTok Shop seems determined to make “more of an impact” this Black Friday with a long period of deals and offers.
“This, and the big-name brands they have on offer, should attract the attention of consumers. There also seems to be as much focus on helping sellers as pulling in shoppers, which underlines the fact TikTok Shop is keen to demonstrate the value of its platform to merchants,” Saunders said in an email.
On competing with the likes of Amazon, for essentially the same audience, TikTok’s le Bourgeois said, “Everybody overlaps with Amazon, given how big they are.”
“You may shop your everyday essentials on Amazon,” he said, “but our hope is that if you want to be surprised, if you want to discover new products, you come on TikTok.”
Ultimately, le Bourgeois pitched TikTok Shop to the audience as your neighborhood farmers market: “What TikTok Shop does is seamlessly transition people from content inspiration to product discovery to checkout—all of this within the same app. It’s like shopping at a mall or farmers market.”