Shapermint is on track to hit $10M in TikTok Shop sales by targeting women ages 35-65

“Within the first four months of this year, we were able to scale to $1.5 million, which made us one of the fastest-growing intimate brands on TikTok Shop,” Gabrielle Richards, brand director at Shapermint, said. And this year, the brand is on track to hit about $10 million in sales on TikTok Shop alone. 

Finding the right demographic to target

Richards told Modern Retail that building a TikTok Shop strategy around more mature creators and consumers is an extension of the brand’s overall target demographic. “Since our inception, our demographic has been women ages 35-65.”

When Shapermint first tested TikTok Shop about two years ago, the brand partnered with agencies to understand the ins and outs of how TikTok Shop works.

Richards explained that, unlike in beauty or wellness, there aren’t as many affiliates on TikTok Shop that specialize in apparel and, more specifically, intimates like bras and shapewear. “From that, we’ve been able to build an internal team where we dedicate certain team members to community building and doing outreach to creators,” Richards said. 

“And we’ve seen tremendous success since January on our TikTok shop,” she said. Richards said Shapermint’s TikTok creators have produced over 20,000 videos since January and over 5,000 in the last 30 days, which she said has contributed to the success.

What’s resonating among female audiences 

With shapewear, Richards said it often helps women visualize and determine the size to order by seeing other similarly shaped women model it.

“Oftentimes they’re showing the product on video in the comfort of their homes,” she said. Because buying shapewear can be tricky online, Richards said this type of content is better suited for converting customers into trying a product like a cami or a strapless bra. She added that it also helps that the top-selling SKUs, such as Shapermint’s high-waisted shaping shorts, offer styles modest enough for women to comfortably model them on camera.

“We’ve seen the winning hook and angle is the women doing their normal activities and showing that the product doesn’t slip or tug,” Richards said. “Sometimes that can be hard for people to grasp without feeling and touching the product.”

The rise of TikTok Shop has forced many brands to tweak or rethink how to reach this audience in an ever-noisy landscape. What works on other marketing channels doesn’t always necessarily translate to TikTok Shop and its curious consumers. 

Patrick Nommensen, head of strategic initiatives for TikTok’s e-commerce business, said at Shoptalk Fall last week that since TikTok Shop launched in the U.S. three years ago, “hundreds of thousands of small and medium-sized businesses are reaching new customers and new revenue heights.”

Unlike traditional search-based e-commerce, Nommensen said that many TikTok Shop customers start by organically discovering a product a creator is using. “So, fundamentally, a big difference on TikTok Shop is how users even start,” he said. “They don’t necessarily start by searching; they start by discovering.” That’s why it’s critical for brands like Shapermint to continuously test to see what type of content may work.

Richards said the platform’s affiliate sampling process has also helped streamline content creation on TikTok. 

“If you are a creator who requests a sample and doesn’t post content within a certain number of days, you’re dinged for it,” Richards said. This setup encourages the brand’s creator partners to post multiple pieces of content within a specific time frame, which Richards said helps the brand assess what’s resonating with audiences. 

Richards said Shapermint also utilizes a Discord channel, where her team shares weekly creative briefs with the creator community. “That’s where we also analyze our most successful creators, what types of content they posted and what they were saying,” she said. Those examples are then used to help other creators replicate to achieve similar engagement results.

Richards said she has personally been connecting a number of these creators, many of whom are in their mid-40s and 50s. 

She said that, aside from helping the brand communicate its product’s value proposition, these creators can also generate additional income by promoting Shapermint through TikTok. One creator has brought in more than $31,900 to date through the program. “I spoke to one woman who said that sending her daughter to college is now a reality because of this income,” she said. 

Richards said these testimonies from female creators outside the traditional 20s-to-30s demographic have pushed her team to invest further in TikTok Shop this year. “The goal is to reach a $4 million per month in sales run-rate by the end of the year,” she said.

Julia Waldow contributed reporting.