Rent the Reach, Own the Relationship

Sephora steps onto TikTok Shop

Last month, Sephora launched on TikTok Shop. A livestream hosted by creator Mikayla Nogueira, a curated drop of POV Beauty and Sephora Collection, and around 2,300 products sold by the time the trade press caught up.

On paper, it's a no-brainer. According to NielsenIQ data cited by Glossy, TikTok Shop is now the fourth-largest health and beauty retailer in the US, with more than $4.4 billion in category sales between its 2023 launch and May this year. Ulta got there first in July. The audience is enormous, and it's already shopping.

But one line in Glossy's coverage stuck with me. Blaine Nielsen, president of retailers at e-commerce agency Rithum, put it plainly:

"Do these retailers want to go to TikTok Shop? They would prefer that the world comes to their own domain, and they can control that experience. But the world doesn't really work that way."

Which is what makes this move so interesting. Here's a retailer built on premium positioning and one of the most powerful loyalty programmes in beauty, stepping onto a platform better known for flash coupons and impulse buys—some shoppers were offered 50–70% off selected items on day one.

So the question isn't really whether brands should be on these platforms, but rather how much power should we hand over when we are present.

The path to purchase is a loop, not a funnel

Marketers have leaned on the "rule of seven" for decades: a customer needs to see you at least seven times before they buy. This "rule" assumed a funnel—awareness, consideration, conversion, in that order, in a reasonably short window.

That model no longer exists.

Today, discovery is a journey with no fixed route. You see a serum because a creator mentions it in a get-ready-with-me reel on Instagram. A week later, a friend swears by the same serum over dinner. Then you completely forget about it—until, three months on, an ad appears in your feed and reminds you that you wanted it. You buy it in two taps.

Google's "messy middle" research described this phenomenon back in 2020: people loop between exploring and evaluating, again and again, before they commit. It's only become more pronounced since.

It's fashionable to blame Gen Z for this. I don't think that's right. The shift is driven less by any one generation and more by how integrated our channels, platforms and systems have become. The pixel remembers what you looked at. The algorithm remembers what you lingered on. Your accounts talk to each other. The platforms hold the thread of your interest long after you've dropped it—so everyone shops this way now, whether they're 19 or 59.

For brands, that changes the job. You're no longer guiding someone down a funnel. You're trying to be memorable at every point of a loop so that you're top of mind when the consumer is finally ready to buy.

Why the big players are showing up

If we agree that the loop is the new reality, then the logic for joining TikTok Shop becomes easy to follow.

• Discovery lives there. As Ashley Banks of Iced Media told Glossy, "On TikTok, a creator can make you want something you weren't looking for." That's the most valuable moment in the loop—and it happens on TikTok's turf, not yours.
• The scale is too big to ignore. The fourth-largest health and beauty retailer in the US, in just three short years. That's no longer a test channel—it's proven.
• It's partly defensive. Once Ulta moved, standing still meant ceding a generation of first purchases to a competitor.
• Checkout is where the content is. On TikTok Shop, the gap between "I want that" and "I bought that" is a single tap. No link in bio, no leaving the app, no second thoughts.

None of this is irrational. But it does come at a price—and it isn't the one on the commission invoice.

The cost of "renting" your audience

There's a growing critique in marketing circles that social platforms and paid media give you a rented audience, whereas your newsletter, your community and your customer list are owned. Sephora on TikTok Shop is the "rented" model at its most seductive—but here's what the rent actually costs.

The platform owns the relationship. The customer data, the algorithm, the fees and the rules all sit with the landlord. They can change any of these parameters overnight—and they often do.

Discounting sets expectations. When the default experience is a coupon, you train customers to wait for one. A heritage retailer can absorb that (although whether they SHOULD or not is another question entirely...). A premium DTC brand that has spent years building price integrity often can't—and shouldn't.

Attribution flatters the platform. Let's return to the earlier serum example. The creator sparked the desire, the friend validated it, and the ad simply turned up at the end. Guess which one gets the credit in your dashboard? Brands then shift budget towards whatever collected the last click, and starve the moments that actually created the demand. The platforms, in effect, are marking their own homework.

Platform risk is no longer theoretical. In March, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube negligent in a landmark social media addiction case. Meta's AI glasses are facing a privacy lawsuit and a wave of public backlash over covert filming. TikTok's own future has been politically uncertain for years.

This isn't a moral argument against using these platforms—we run social and paid campaigns for clients every day. It's a commercial one. Consumer trust in the platforms is eroding at exactly the moment brands are leaning on them hardest. If your entire customer relationship lives on someone else's land, their reputation problem quickly becomes yours.

Read the range, not the headline

It's easy to see Sephora on a discount-driven platform and assume that the beauty industry is in a race to the bottom. But if you look at the bigger picture, the reality is a bit more nuanced.

They've launched with an extremely narrow catalogue of products, composed entirely of the Sephora Collection, its own label, and POV Beauty, a creator-founded brand launched by Mikayla Nogueira. None of the premium partner brands that sit at the heart of their stores are present.

Whatever the thinking behind the move, the shape of it tells us something. Sephora is renting reach without renting out its brand. The discounting happens on products it controls, and the partner brands whose price integrity it depends on are kept well away from it.

That suggests the goal is less about margin on each sale and more about new customer acquisition in an increasingly challenging ecosystem: meeting potential purchasers at the moment of discovery. The real test is what happens next. As Glossy notes, the unsolved problem in beauty is turning a one-off, exploratory purchase into a repeat customer. If a TikTok buyer never becomes a Beauty Insider member, Sephora has simply paid TikTok to make a sale.

What this means for smaller brands

Sephora has the teams, budgets and supplier leverage to run a new storefront. Most brands don't. Every platform needs content, community management, stock allocation, customer service and someone watching the numbers. Spread that across seven channels and you end up doing all of them badly.

The good news: because the loop is long and connected, you don't need to be at every stop. You need to be memorable at the first touch and own the last one.

Here's how we'd suggest deciding where to put your energy:

1. Pick three roles, not seven channels. One channel for discovery, one for conversion, one you own. For many beauty brands that's TikTok or Instagram for discovery, your website for conversion, and email for the relationship. Focus on doing three well.
2. Go where people already talk about you. Before opening a new storefront, look at where unprompted mentions, tags and reviews already happen. Follow the demand, don't try to invent it. If you're a new brand and starting from scratch, look at similar brands and use their structure as your benchmark.
3. Borrow resource, don't build it. Creators and affiliates can be your content engine on a platform you can't staff. That's precisely the model Sephora used for its launch.
4. Set a trial period, clear KPIs and a stop point. "Ninety days, and if it isn't bringing in customers who buy again, we pull back." Most brands join a platform but fail to take a step back to review and evaluate.
5. Make every channel feed the one you own. If a platform can't send a customer back to your email list—through an insert in the parcel, a QR code, an aftercare guide, a reason to register—treat it as advertising, not a storefront.

Channel-specific offers, not channel-specific products

There's a growing view that brands should build dedicated ranges for each platform. I think that's a road to disaster. More SKUs means more stock, more forecasting risk and, inevitably, more waste—at a time when the industry is meant to be tackling overproduction, not accelerating it.

Sephora didn't need a whole new range for TikTok. It chose what to put there. Smaller brands can do the same: make a channel feel special through bundles, gift-with-purchase, early access, exclusive content or a live launch moment. Same product, different story.

Where the industry is heading

The storefront is splitting. That part isn't up for debate. What's still open is how brands respond.

I'd expect to see three shifts over the next few years:

• The brand website becomes the home, not the till. Fewer sales may start there, but it's where the relationship lives—content, community, service, the full story.
• First-party data becomes the moat. Email, SMS, loyalty and community are the only audiences no algorithm update can take away. The brands that turn platform buyers into owned customers will win the long game.
• Fewer channels, done better. The brands that last won't be the ones on every platform. They'll be the ones that chose deliberately, showed up consistently and didn't dilute their product or their price to chase every new storefront.

There's a sustainability case here too. A market that rewards endless drops, platform exclusives and deep discounts is a market that encourages overproduction and overconsumption. Choosing depth over breadth isn't just good strategy. It's more responsible.

Rent the reach, own the relationship

Blaine Nielsen is right: the world doesn't come to your domain any more. But that was never really the goal. The goal is that the customer who finds you out there comes back to you.

So by all means, show up where discovery happens. Partner with the creators that your customers trust. Test new storefronts. Just decide in advance what you're willing to give away—and build every channel so that it leads to somewhere you own.

Rent the reach. Own the relationship.

If you're weighing up where your brand should show up next, get in touch—we'd love to talk it through.

Sources

• Glossy: With Sephora joining TikTok Shop, is the social shopping platform becoming too big to ignore?
• Google: Decoding decisions — the messy middle of purchase behaviour (2020)
• NPR: Jury finds Meta and Google negligent in social media harms trial
• Euronews: Meta faces privacy lawsuit over AI smart glasses
• CBS News: Woman covertly filmed by Meta AI smart glasses