Sephora shoppers getting a head start on their holiday shopping may have come across a new holiday value set from POV Beauty, which launched at the retailer in September. The 12-piece set promises a $327 value for $265 — the only catch is the set isn’t actually available on Sephora’s website. The product page instead directs shoppers to Sephora’s newly launched TikTok Shop.
On Saturday, Sephora kicked off its TikTok Shop launch with a livestreamed shopping session hosted by Mikayla Nogueira, the mega influencer and co-founder of POV Beauty. According to Sephora’s TikTok Shop storefront page, the retailer has sold close to 2,300 products on the platform as of publication, with its selection limited to POV Beauty and Sephora Collection products.
Sephora is still in the beginnings of its TikTok Shop journey, with plans for future products to arrive on a monthly drop-model basis. But that doesn’t mean the partnership with the social media giant will stay small. TikTok Shop’s combination of eyeball-sucking entertainment and frictionless shopping have made it a legitimate competitor to beauty giants like the LVMH-owned Sephora.
If you can’t beat them, Sephora is now testing what it looks like to join them.
“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,” said Blaine Nielsen, president of retailers at e-commerce agency Rithum.
According to data from NielsenIQ, TikTok Shop is now the No. 4 health and beauty retailer in the U.S., with health and beauty product sales since TikTok Shop’s 2023 U.S. launch surpassing $4.4 billion as of May. In July, Sephora’s major competitor, Ulta Beauty, joined the platform with a perfume launch with Ice Spice. Emerging beauty brands that have some degree of retail exclusivity with Sephora, like Violette_Fr and Rhode, are also on TikTok Shop.
Part of the social platform’s success has been its unique ability to surface new brands and trends to a captive audience, with TikTok Shop letting customers add to cart without leaving the page.
“On TikTok, a creator can make you want something you weren’t looking for,” said Ashley Banks, chief client officer and partner at e-commerce agency Iced Media. “What Sephora is testing is what happens when that retailer that really helps build brands, because Sephora cultivates and nurtures so many brands, can really participate at that moment in discovery.”
TikTok has shown that it can get customers to pull the trigger on a lip color or a fragrance discovery set. But the long-term success of the platform, and its new partners like Sephora, will depend on how well it can lure customers back to make their next beauty purchase.
“Is this really just a one-time exploratory purchase, or can you turn this into a recurring customer of yours? The beauty companies live and die by those types of things,” said Nielsen. “And where does that second order come from? Is it promotional or discount-driven, or does it have a different flavor to it?”
While Sephora attempts to retain customers with loyalty points and carefully managed sales periods, TikTok Shop takes a strategy of dispensing coupons and discounting opportunities with seeming abandon.
A transaction from Sephora’s TikTok Shop triggered offers of coupons worth 50% and 70% off on select purchases. After making a purchase from Sephora’s TikTok Shop, Glossy was fed content promoting a 50% discount on Snif’s Only Sunshine perfume, its collaboration with Mikayla Nogueira.
Those elements can help disrupt a frenetic environment and stop consumers mid-scroll, but they don’t necessarily communicate the sort of premium beauty experience Sephora is more often after. And TikTok’s heavy couponing may require more of a conscious opt-out from brands that don’t wish to take a discounting strategy.
“It’s playing whack-a-mole sometimes. … We’ve worked closely with TikTok to ensure that those pop-up coupons don’t appear on our clients who aren’t giving that type of couponing is key,” said Banks. “But it’s also about the creator messages and who you partner with and the stories you tell.”
Indeed, creators like Nogueira, who has more than 17 million followers on TikTok, have been instrumental to beauty’s success on the platform. A four-hour TikTok livestream with Nogueira in March helped fragrance brand Snif achieve its biggest sales day ever. Micro creators may not have the audience to sustain hours of livestreaming, but they can push products to smaller, hyper-engaged groups of followers.
But while there may be easy sales to be made on TikTok Shop, Sephora still needs to give consumers a reason to shop in its physical stores. And when discovering trends and shopping the products to achieve them all on one platform is easier than ever, that will likely mean leaning on tools that can’t be translated through TikTok — at least for now.
“There is absolutely a challenge laid at the foot of the Sephoras and Ultas of this world of: Why buy there?” said Banks. “It is very much those loyalty programs and those relationships or the knowledge base that the sales associates have to help you discover — because increasingly, Gen Z, especially, are looking for that in-store experience, that curation, that human connection. And if stores can really provide that, that’s what’s going to be key.”
Should Sephora and Ulta find success on TikTok Shop, that may encourage other brick-and-mortar retailers to follow suit. But by the time brands and retailers understand TikTok Shop, it may already be time to join the next big thing in shopping.
“These channels, [when retailers] add a new one, they don’t get to subtract anything,” said Nielsen. “Consumers are finicky and change and are always trying new things. And wherever that shopping is happening, you have to follow that and be there.”
