Two things just happened in beauty ecommerce that you should not file under interesting and scroll past. Ulta and Sally Beauty, actual retailers, opened storefronts on TikTok Shop. And a brand most people have never heard of is outselling Hailey Bieber.
Per eMarketer, TikTok Shop is now the fourth largest health and beauty retailer in the United States, and beauty sales there climbed 107.7 percent year over year. Medicube has moved 6.2 million units since it launched. Rhode, with roughly four times the following, has moved 213,000. Read that twice.
Showing up stopped being the strategy
For two years the advice was simple: get on TikTok Shop before your competitors do. That window is closing. When Ulta and Sally Beauty open marketplaces, a move an eMarketer analyst called almost unheard of for a US multibrand retailer, the platform stops being a frontier and turns into a crowded mall. Presence is table stakes now. It is not a plan.
I have made this case about TikTok Shop before. The brands leaving money on the table are rarely the ones who are absent. They are the ones who are present with no strategy, reposting their glossy campaign ads into a feed that punishes anything that looks like an ad.
Followers are not the scoreboard
The Medicube and Rhode gap is the whole lesson in one line. A celebrity brand with an enormous following sold a sliver of what an emerging brand sold, because units on TikTok Shop do not come from who follows you. They come from whether real creators, with real trust, make something that makes a person buy in the moment. Most of the platform's ten best sellers are emerging brands for that exact reason.
This is the same thing I tell clients who are convinced their next hire is a bigger name. Follower count is a vanity number. Trust is the asset, and it is why a trusted creator outperforms a famous one. The brands winning here built a bench of creators whose audiences believe them, then handed those creators freedom instead of a script.
What actually moves units in the crowded phase
If you want the version that holds up now that the big names have arrived, it is short.
- Creator led, not ad led. Give real creators the product and the creative control. Native content beats polished every time on this platform.
- Live is its own muscle. The brands scaling are running long, staffed live sessions, not the occasional one off.
- Kill the friction. Tag the product in the moment of the video, use native checkout, never send anyone to hunt on a homepage.
The bigger picture
eMarketer projects TikTok Shop will do 23.41 billion dollars in 2026, growing faster than Target, Kroger, or Best Buy. The growth is real and the retailers piling in prove it. But growth brings noise, and noise raises the bar. The brands that win the next phase will not be the ones with the most followers or the fattest ad budget. They will be the ones whose creators are actually believed. That part has not changed, and it is the work I do with brands.
