TikTok Shop Beauty Growth Went From 96% To 39%
Plus a survey ranking influencer endorsement last, and Bob's Discount Furniture letting creators write its show.
Hi friends!
Short intro this week as there’s lots to get into.
TikTok Shop’s beauty growth has collapsed from 96% to 39% 📉, and a new survey puts influencer endorsement last among the reasons people buy. Not a great week for the creator line in your budget. Better news further down.
Let’s dig in.
October 20th
🛍️ TikTok Shop beauty growth went from 96% to 39% in three quarters
Beauty and personal care on TikTok Shop did $992.9 million last quarter, according to Charm.io. That is the third quarter in a row just under a billion dollars. The year on year growth rate over the same period was 96% in Q1, 82% in Q2 and 39% in Q3. Ajay Salpekar, who runs the category at TikTok Shop, also said that brands going live themselves are now “a much bigger proportion of our business.”
So the money is holding up but the growth has mostly gone. Most of the coverage led on Salpekar’s forecast of a bigger holiday. The second thing he said is more useful: brands running their own livestreams now make up much more of the business, and that is volume which used to go through creators. If your affiliate budget assumes this category keeps doubling, it does not, and you are competing for share of a flat number instead.
🛒 A survey puts influencer endorsement last among reasons people buy
Bazaarvoice surveyed more than 1,600 TikTok users in the US and UK in September. Asked what factors into a purchase, influencer endorsement came last at 31%, behind discounts at 75% and star ratings and reviews at 74%. The same survey found 89% had bought something after a creator recommended it. Bazaarvoice sells reviews software, so the finding suits the vendor.
Those two numbers do not contradict each other. People find products through creators, then look for reasons to trust the purchase, and that is where reviews and discounts come in. The practical point is about measurement. If you judge a creator campaign on conversion alone, you are holding it responsible for a step that happens after the creator’s part is finished.
📺️ Bob’s Discount Furniture let creators write season two of its show
Bob’s Discount Furniture released a six episode series called Till Decor Do Us Part in July 2025. The company says it generated $9 million in attributed sales, 152 million video views and 223 million impressions. No attribution method has been published, so that figure is the brand’s own. Season two started on September 17 and runs weekly until October 22.
For season two the company picked six creator couples, gave them guidelines and an explanation of the format, then let them write, shoot and produce the episodes themselves. That is a real shift in who controls brand content. Worth watching whether the numbers hold up when season two is reported.
🎤 Seller Spotlight
Mellow Sleep is going into 550 Target stores
Mellow Sleep launched in 2025 selling on TikTok. The company says it did $130 million in revenue in its first year and expects to pass $300 million in its second. Those are the brand’s own figures and have not been audited. The Target deal is confirmed: five products, from a $39.99 pillow to a $129.99 comforter, into 550 stores from October 18, with nationwide distribution planned by year end.
Target’s home category lost $1.09 billion in FY2025, down 6.5%, and that was the third year running it fell by more than a billion.
Mellow Sleep is exclusive to Target for now. Co founder Jay Yue says the buyer was already using the products before the pitch.
Usually a social brand goes into retail to prove it is a real business. Target looks to be doing the opposite, using a TikTok brand to pull a declining category back up. If you are the brand in that conversation, it is a much better position to negotiate from.
🧠 Brand Move of the Week
Target is paying for a whole show on NBCU’s shoppable slate
NBCUniversal has run shoppable TV for about seven years and now has it on roughly 12 shows, including Traitors and Love Island USA. Target underwrites an original called Shop What Happens Live. How it works depends on the screen: a QR code during an ad, a product panel that appears during a scene and is scrolled with the remote, or on LG sets the show shrinks into a corner and keeps playing next to a sidebar. Products are identified by computer vision against a catalogue, then checked by a person.
NBCU claims a 171% lift in brand favourability and three times the engagement of a standard ad. Neither number comes with a baseline or a described method, so treat them as sales claims rather than measured results.
The detail worth noting is the commercial structure. Target is funding the programme itself rather than buying placements inside it. That money comes from the same pot as creator work and gives you far less attribution, so it is worth understanding what NBCU is promising Target before anyone proposes you do the same.
🔭 Trend Watch
Which videos do AI engines actually cite?
Sundogs looked at 400 videos that AI engines cited when recommending products, sourced from Jellyfish, and compared them with 3,500 videos from the same creators that were not cited. The sample covers US consumer goods and automotive only. Of the cited videos, about 60% came from creators, 30% from editorial sites and 10% from brands. YouTube was the most common source.
The more useful finding is what did not matter. View count did not predict citation, and some cited videos had under a thousand views. Nor did recency, with plenty of cited videos a year or two old. Nor did production quality, since AI voiceovers and stock footage appear regularly. Nor did the creator’s credibility.
What did correlate was the content itself. 77% of cited videos were formal reviews or physical demonstrations. 76% set out a problem before introducing the product. 71% compared one brand with another. Most were eight minutes or longer, and Shorts were cited at a much lower rate.
If a meaningful share of product research moves into AI answers, this is a problem for how most rosters get built. Briefs are written around reach, recency and production quality, and none of those appear to matter here. The format that does appear to matter is a long, detailed video comparing your product with a competitor’s, which is the kind of thing most brands will not sign off.
Worth saying that Sundogs is building a product to identify creators who are already being cited, so it has an interest in this being important, and the sample is narrow. The direction is consistent enough to be worth testing.
📰 Other news you should look at for this week
TikTok Shop has added UPS Happy Returns. Customers can return items with no box and no label at around 10,000 Return Bar locations. It is the first time Happy Returns has been built into a platform rather than a single retailer’s site. 📎 Read more
Influencer disclosure litigation is still growing. Five class actions filed in 2025 sought over $1 billion combined from Celsius, Shein, Revolve, Alo Yoga and Beach Bunny, and Gymshark was sued in June. Morgan Lewis notes that built in platform disclosures “are not a safe harbor.” 📎 Read more
Global livestream viewing hit a record 31.7 billion hours in Q3. TikTok LIVE took 33.5% of that, up 19% on the quarter, against YouTube’s 43%. The gap between the two is now under ten percentage points. 📎 Read more
Ok, see you next week. In the meantime, Sell! Sell! Sell! 🫡