Beauty retailer Milani Cosmetics outperformed its sales goal by more than 250% for a product in its first two weeks of selling on the TikTok Shop.

That was the first time Milani Cosmetics used TikTok Shop to launch a product that it would then make available through traditional retail stores and channels. The product, Highly Rated Lash Extensions XL Volumizing Tubing Mascara, also gathered 1.5 million impressions on the social media platform.

Milani Cosmetics began selling on the TikTok Shop about two years ago, chief marketing officer Jeremy Lowenstein told Digital Commerce 360.

“Like most brands, we all started to pilot and figure out how to play within the channel,” Lowenstein said. “First, we just turned it on and said: Let’s see what happens.”

The retailer began working with influencers and affiliates on TikTok, he said. It later also brought in an agency to make its outreach to affiliates on TikTok “a more concerted effort.” Milani Cosmetics also had to consider which products it made available on TikTok Shop. It started with its full portfolio of sampling, to a narrow selection for core items, and ultimately landed on the test for the aforementioned mascara.

Milani Cosmetics is a 25-year-old brand. It started selling in physical drug stores before making its way into retailers such as CVS, Walgreens, Walmart, Target and Ulta, Lowenstein told Digital Commerce 360. It later joined Amazon, which he said is one of Milani Cosmetics’ top five retailers. However, Amazon is “nowhere near half” the brand’s sales.

Milani Cosmetics is a private retailer. Lowenstein said its sales are “north of $250 million as a brand.” Additionally, Milani Cosmetics has achieved 18 consecutive quarters of growth, Lowenstein shared.

Milani Cosmetics is No. 1568 in the Top 2000 Database. The market research tool ranks North America’s largest online retailers by their annual ecommerce sales.

Where TikTok Shop plays into Milani Cosmetics’ strategy

Lowenstein compared how Milani Cosmetics uses Amazon and TikTok Shop differently as online marketplaces.

“TikTok Shop is obviously driven by social content,” Lowenstein said. “Amazon is more of a search engine. How you market them is a little bit different. With Amazon, it’s your portfolio of products. What you can find in a store, you can find on Amazon.”

He specified that Amazon includes a focus on product detail pages (PDPs). That includes optimizing for keywords, the content that goes into carousels and videos on the product pages.

“With TikTok Shop, you’re dealing with a different type of content,” Lowenstein said. “We have our own brand content, but then we’re focused on partnering with affiliates, which is different than creators who are more live-sell model — or sell model period — through their content and that could be both live or pre-recorded. Looking at how you demonstrate product, all of which can be used on Amazon. It just shows up in a different way.”

How Milani uses the TikTok Shop largely comes down to finding “a balance of right affiliates, right product and the right timing of when that product goes on and what’s the offer,” he added.

It has been about discounting and driving conversion because that’s part of the platform’s differentiation strategy, he said. Like with Amazon and other third-party sales channels, TikTok Shop does not release data allowing retailers to track who buys from them. Milani Cosmetics still handles its own fulfillment, but it has to “pass back shipping information to TikTok,” he said.

To retarget those customers, Milani Cosmetics has to use look-alike audiences.

Milani Cosmetics’ D2C sales

The retailer predominantly sells through its wholesale channels, Lowenstein said. The business it drives from its own channels is “small,” Lowenstein said.

But it still uses its direct-to-consumer (D2C) website to its advantage.

“We offer things on our D2C like exclusive makeup brushes or we’ll pre-launch there,” Lowenstein said. “We have our loyalty program. So we try to incentivize people to shop on D2C, but ultimately our brick-and-mortar business is far superior scale.”

In addition to exclusive products, Milani Cosmetics offers product bundles on its site to help reach its free-shipping threshold. That process includes educating consumers on how to use products or upgrade their makeup, Lowenstein said. The bundles give consumers looks, tools and techniques, he added. That guides the consumer on how to shop Milani Cosmetics’ catalog, ultimately improving average order value (AOV) and conversion, according to Lowenstein.

Although its D2C site is far from its primary selling channel, Milani Cosmetics drives traffic to it both through organic and paid search with Google. It also uses paid social for Meta’s social media networks and TikTok. Lowenstein said the retailer began testing Pinterest as another channel for the first time. In the past year and a half, it has also tested connected TV (also called CTV) with YouTube and streaming TV (STV) with Amazon Prime.

Milani Cosmetics also uses Shopify, through which it has planned to integrate with large language models (LLMs) including OpenAI’s ChatGPT. As of when Lowenstein spoke with Digital Commerce 360, the retailer had registered to incorporate that integration into its business and was waiting on approval, he said.

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