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“Wellness” has been part of the consumer zeitgeist for well over a decade — and thanks to TikTok Shop, young wellness brands have a new place to acquire new customers.
Given that Gen Z uses TikTok like Google, it makes sense that the demo is turning to the app for health and wellness information, seeking recommendations for everything from the best at-home workout to the best creatine gummies. According to Social Media Pro, weight management products, like gut cleanses, supplements and home workout equipment, are among TikTok Shop’s most lucrative categories.
“This is so different from the classic influencer model,” said Nishant Samantray, co-founder and co-CEO at the 5-year-old supplements brand Arrae. Rather than paying an influencer $10,000 for a post, you’re only paying them when they sell your product, Samantray said, noting that most brands on TikTok Shop employ the affiliate model that, though not new, has taken on new life on the platform.
“Our top creator made $100,000 in a month [selling Arrae on TikTok Shop],” Samantray said.
At the outset of TikTok’s popularity, its algorithm gave just about anybody a shot at influencer stardom. Similarly, on TikTok Shop, anyone can be a successful entrepreneur from their home if the right video goes viral.
Wellness entrepreneurs have vastly benefited from the platform, but even if it gets banned, they feel confident their momentum won’t die down.
Co-founders Gabriella Walker and Sommer Carroll, who launched the clear protein powder brand Gramms in June, said there was never any question whether TikTok Shop was the right way to bring their brand into the world. A serving of Gramms delivers 20 grams of protein. Notably, according to market research company Spate, from March 2024 to Feb 2025, searches for “high protein” saw 40.3% year-over-year growth — 41.7% on Google and 40.1% on TikTok.
“We knew we didn’t want to raise [money], and we knew we wanted to keep it very lean,” Walker said. “TikTok Shop is an interesting place for [brands] to grow organically versus the traditional marketing path, which is to spend as much as possible and try to do as many paid ads on Instagram and Meta.”
The video-forward nature of TikTok appealed to the co-founders because they would be able to show how Gramms differs from traditional protein powders, which are often chalky — not to mention the fact that, historically, they’ve been marketed toward men. It’s reminiscent of why beauty has been so resonant on the app — the fact that users can demonstrate how products work and are applied in real time, visually.
“Clear protein is a [newer] product, and the video format is the most compelling medium to tell the story of what we’re doing and why it’s different — it lends itself naturally,” Carroll said. Gramms has seen some of its highest success on social media through its own content, such as a post sharing its founding story, which has 5.6 million views.
The brand declined to specify its TikTok sales, but a banner on its TikTok Shop denotes that it has sold over 18.2k products. Currently, the brand is only available on TikTok Shop and its own website, though an expansion to Amazon is coming soon, Walker said.
According to recent data from Capital One, 79.3% of TikTok Shop sales in the U.S. are on health and beauty products, and Americans spend an estimated $32 million per day shopping on TikTok.
Samantray said he couldn’t pass up the opportunity. He’d heard about brands like Guru Nanda, which in January told Glossy that it had made close to $1 million in a single day in 2024. Though Arrae has been around since 2020 and launched on TikTok Shop last year, it did not see notable TikTok sales until this year, after some of its products went viral, he said.
Though he is well aware of the fickle nature of the platform — no one knows what will happen with the ban, and the products in favor constantly change — Samantray said, if things continue as they have been, Arrae will reach $50 million in TikTok Shop revenue by the end of 2025.
Samantray said he began selling Arrae in TikTok Shop because the social-content-driven marketplace reminded him of other successful social commerce apps in India and China. “I just knew it was gonna work,” he said.
Arrae’s entire product assortment is available on TikTok Shop. But it has seen the most success with its metabolism-boosting product, dubbed MB-1 — it markets it as an alternative to Ozempic, using the term “faux-zempic.” In countless videos, users share their experiences of benefits including reduced cravings. Arrae has put money behind promoting some of these posts. Claims are carefully monitored on TikTok Shop, Samantray said, and anything false is automatically taken down by the platform. His team can also deactivate commissions if they find that a video makes exaggerated claims and will then ask the creator to take it down, he said.
For March 2024 to Feb 2025, Spate reported a 123.5% year-over-year increase in searches for the term GLP-1 — 100% on Google and 131.9% on TikTok. Samantray said Arrae does not manipulate which products sell the most — that is up to the affiliate sellers. Arrae has made itself attractive to affiliate sellers by “[having] a very attractive commission rate, so that when they sell the product, they make real money from it,” Samantray said.
Nello, which launched in 2021, is best known for its ready-to-mix Supercalm beverage, which blends ingredients like magnesium glycinate, ashwagandha, L-theanine and vitamin D3. Connor Noe, Nello’s co-founder, was inspired to create the brand’s hero product following his own struggles with reliance on caffeine and the side effects he suffered as a result. Supercalm is marketed as “[supporting] healthy cortisol levels.”
This is a timely benefit to offer consumers. According to Alyssa Williams, food and beverage category insights manager at Spate, from March 2024 to Feb 2025, searches for “cortisol” have seen a 339.7% year-over-year growth rate — 87.4% on Google and 422.6% on TikTok. She attributed the spike to “increased discussions about stress management.” Search queries such as “How to reduce cortisol” and “How to lower cortisol levels” indicate rising concern about chronic stress and its physiological impact, she said.
“One of the biggest trends we saw on TikTok was that people would talk about the symptoms of high cortisol, … and that content started to pop off. We call it ‘valuetainment,'” Noe said, noting that the “combination of educational value and entertainment attracts people on TikTok to become interested in the product and [want to] purchase.”
Not only were the symptoms [of high cortisol] being talked about last year, when Nello first started to see success on TikTok, but so too were its ingredients. “Ashwagandha was very, very popular. Magnesium glycinate was becoming popular, as well. L-Theanine was gaining more traction. A lot of the core, star ingredients in the product were already being talked about a lot,” Noe said. There were days last year that Nello was TikTok Shop’s bestselling product, not just in the health category but across all of its categories, Noe said. Atop Nello’s TikTok Shop, a banner states the brand has sold over 643,000 products.
Echoing Samantray’s point about the affiliate model, Noe said, “It wasn’t necessarily a big influencer that you’d recognize or know [that led to the brand’s success on TikTok Shop]. It was just everyday people making content about the product, which honestly made it [even cooler], in a way, because it’s relatable.”
Nello remains in the top 10 most-viewed wellness brands on TikTok. Glossy recently reported on Diffusion PR’s 2025 research on health and wellness consumers on TikTok Shop, which found that 23% of consumers actively distrust influencers who are paid to promote products [on TikTok] — this, of course, only helps brands that win by way of “real people” promoting their brands.
For Noe’s part, he said, “While TikTok Shop is one of our main discovery platforms, it is not a majority of our sales.” TikTok Shop is social commerce — a category that is not only not going away but is, in fact, growing, he said. “If TikTok were banned in the U.S., other platforms would quickly rise to fill the vacuum,” he said.
“I’m still really bullish on TikTok,” Samantray said. “I don’t think it’s going away. … I’m just trying my best to make the product [stay popular] for as long as [we] can, because after a certain time, it’s not going to be showing up all the time — people move on to different products. [So for now] I want to keep gifting influencers. I want to keep giving people commissions. I want to keep doing what it takes to make the platform work, and it’s a lot of work; we have a team working on it all the time. But, you have to ride the wave.”
Collab of the week: TreSemmé x Red Clay Provisions
On the heels of announcing a year-long partnership with Paige DeSorbo, TreSemmé has introduced Hot Gloss Sweet Peach Honey, a hair gloss made in collaboration with the hot sauce brand Red Clay Provisions.
“While we didn’t expect to partner with a global hair brand like TreSemmé, when the opportunity presented itself, it was honestly a fun and natural fit,” said Geoff Rhyne, Red Clay Provisions’ chef and CEO. “Our honeys are great for glazing, which gives a nice gloss to foods we pair it with. And both brands’ products seek to elevate; whether that be with your food or hair, it’s all about giving yourself that extra shine.” Shop it here.
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