Who should run the shop?

Before a brand can bring affiliates in and keep them posting every month, someone has to own the shop, the outreach and the community those affiliates join.

How much work is a new TikTok Shop?

Shop setup, free product to creators, outreach and inventory make the shop a staffing question, and Ridge, doing every part in house, called it a struggle.

• Ridge did its whole TikTok Shop in house, the free product to creators, the outreach and the shop setup, and says it has been a struggle. It then looked to bring in a consultant who knows the best practices, and to decide afterwards whether to take the work back in house.
• Jones Road is at about 150k a month in month two on the shop, with inventory and operations problems it is still learning through. It thinks it can reach 600k a month on average by the end of the year.
• One operator calls a new channel a merchandising problem. You have to make something new for that channel, with a view on how your product gets shoppers to look. The operator compares it to Walmart offering a $10 million order for a product that costs 20% less, where you would get your product team to work it out.

Heard on Marketing Operators at 38:37, 25:47 and 51:14, and on Open Residency at 56:20.

Who does the daily work of the shop?

Finding affiliates and briefing them are two jobs, split between two people at one big shop brand and held by one head of creator at a small company.

• Ridge runs its shop with a director of social commerce, an outside agency, and its own creative team.
• Ridge's outside agency does the outreach, the seeding (sending free product), the contests and the sorting through creator content. Its own performance creative team briefs the affiliates on the messages and concepts that are working.
• One big shop brand splits the work between two people. One recruits affiliates inside the shop affiliate platform, and one manages the affiliate Discord and makes sure the affiliates have all the information they need to post.
• At a small company one head of creator owns seeding, paid influencer posts, the shop and the community.

Heard on Marketing Operators at 24:52, 24:54, 56:55 and 25:28.

Which team should the shop report to?

Running the shop is a product job as much as a marketing one, and Skullcandy puts it with the team that already runs its online store and Amazon.

• At one company the same executive runs the shop and merchandising, because winning on the shop takes different products. Ridge is seeing a $30 tracker card work, and says it will probably need a lot more small, high utility, impulse priced products to be really big on the shop two years from now.
• At Skullcandy, the team that runs the online store and Amazon also oversees growth marketing, CRM, TikTok Shop and overall digital customer acquisition.

Heard on Marketing Operators at 57:27, and on Common Thread Collective at 11:23.

Is there a set playbook for TikTok Shop yet?

Brands split on tactics like live streams, but Jones Road thinks they agree most on nurturing creators, the job the shop team has to own.

• One brand says nobody has been doing TikTok Shop for 5 years. That person does not exist.
• Jones Road is still trying to piece together what the playbook is, and feels every brand has a slightly different one. Some brands tell it that lives are crushing it and others that lives are dead, and it thinks the biggest thing they agree on is probably nurturing creators.

Heard on Fitt Insider, and on Marketing Operators at 57:15.

Should you start the shop with an agency?

An agency stands in for the hires a new shop cannot make yet, and Jones Road says a 5 to 10 grand retainer gets the several people a program needs.

• Having just launched a shop, Jones Road signed a 6 month agency deal to learn it, because it could not hire for it yet. It says a retainer of 5 to 10 grand for a while gets you the several people a program needs.
• At launch, Jones Road signed an agency and worked closely with TikTok's own shop team. It says vetting the agency and agreeing the strategy were the quick part, and the logistics and the shop approvals are what took longer than it wanted.
• TBAR, a TikTok Shop agency, says it took the number one Christian clothing brand from 250k a month to 1.2 million in three months.

Heard on Marketing Operators at 28:40, 27:40 and 34:24, and on Common Thread Collective at 13:08.

When should you bring the shop work in house?

Who runs the shop changes over time, and HexClad went from an outside partner to its own team without losing its seeding program's momentum.

• HexClad started its shop with freelancers and now runs it in-house.
• HexClad built its seeding program with an outside partner for 2 to 3 years, then brought it in house and kept the momentum. It says the partner was very instrumental in getting the program set up.
• HexClad is hiring a director of influencer and affiliate, and is being honest with Superbloom, the influencer agency it loves, about how the program will evolve. It tells an agency from the start that it plans to bring the work in house and wants to learn as much as it can.

Heard on Marketing Operators at 31:59, 32:14 and 33:27.

Why do some brands skip the agency?

An in house team can take months to pay off, and Skullcandy's sales only started to scale once it put more into creator relationships and affiliate recruitment.

• Bloom was bootstrapped and could not afford the agencies its competitors paid, so it built its influencer program in house and says it does the work for 10% of the price. It says the system now gets a Super Bowl ad's worth of views, if not two or three, every single month.

• Nutrabolt runs its creator programme in-house, with full-time staff who scout and recruit creators like a sales team.
• Skullcandy built its TikTok Shop completely in house and was scrappy about it. Sales were virtually nothing for the first few months, then started to scale as it put more into creator relationships and affiliate recruitment.

Heard on School of Hard Knocks Podcast at 28:59, on BevNET at 22:27, on Common Thread Collective at 38:33, and on Open Residency at 1:52.

Who to hire for tiktok shop

Who do you hire when nobody has shop experience?

With no track record to check, one founder looks instead for an entrepreneur who will treat the shop like their own business.

• O Positiv hires young people who grew up on TikTok and puts them in charge of coaching a community of creators.
• One founder wants whoever runs the shop to be an entrepreneur who treats it like their own business.
• One founder does not hire for experience, because nobody has been doing TikTok Shop for five years.
• Bloom's founder says a resume is almost obsolete for a lot of these roles, because candidates do not have experience with TikTok Shop. The founder almost prefers younger and younger people who grew up with TikTok, and calls them the experts at it.

Heard on Fitt Insider, and on School of Hard Knocks Podcast at 2:58.

Which skills matter most in a shop hire?

A shop hire chooses which creators the brand works with, and Bloom leaves that choice to the women on its staff, because they know who its customers follow.

• Ridge is hiring a new director of performance creative, and one choice is someone from a TikTok Shop supplement brand who has activated thousands of creators. The other is someone with more experience of bigger shoots, who would take fewer swings that are more meaningful.
• Bloom's co-founder leaves the choice of creators to the women on staff, because they know who his customers follow and he does not. The team is 100 people who are real Bloom consumers, and they also say no to 19 out of 20 of the product ideas.

Heard on Marketing Operators at 35:04 and 31:48, and on School of Hard Knocks Podcast at 32:42.

Can you rely on creator software?

The shop team ends up finding creators and passing them to the paid ads team by hand, which at HexClad was a little slow and very intensive.

• Ridge has looked at tools to speed up how affiliate content gets posted, gets into GMV Max (the TikTok ad product) and reaches the ad account. It would rather launch more videos than fewer.
• In the past, working with creators who are not influencers has been a very manual process at HexClad. Its influencer team found the creators and passed them to the paid team, which worked but was a little slow and very intensive on the influencer team.

Heard on Open Residency at 50:29, and on Marketing Operators at 24:26 and 18:00.

How do Ridge and HexClad find creators instead?

A part time broker is one more way to staff the shop, and HexClad's freelancer lets its influencer team move faster and work with more micro creators.

• Ridge probably had two people in house who found YouTube creators themselves. It went after new accounts that were rising, so it could be their first sponsor.
• This year HexClad started working with a freelancer who has a huge roster of creators. She works a set number of hours a week as a broker between the brand and that roster, and HexClad says it is working really well.
• HexClad tells her the ad it wants to make and she picks the right people from her roster, so its influencer team does not start from scratch every time. That lets it move faster and work with more micro creators.

Heard on Open Residency at 50:18, and on Marketing Operators at 18:34 and 19:33.

What else brands do to staff the shop, from founders who post to a community they own

Should the founder post on TikTok?

The founder can be the brand's first creator, and BEHAVE's founder handed all her responsibilities to her business partner and made TikTok videos for 60 days.

• The founder is RYSE's own biggest creator, with almost half a million followers, and he only posts RYSE. He would rather have 500,000 super fans than 5 million followers where 10,000 are super fans.
• RYSE's founder used TikTok as the place to learn short videos, because TikTok showed his videos to more people and showed fast what worked. He did not get on TikTok to sell more, and what he learned grew RYSE's YouTube by about 70,000 subscribers in a year.
• SEEQ's co-founder Ben posted more than 40 videos on his own TikTok page that went nowhere before launch. It took off in the first week after, with videos of people on the street trying the product.
• BEHAVE's founder handed all her responsibilities to her co-founder and made TikTok videos for 60 days, maybe three, four or five a day and sometimes six. In two weeks BEHAVE had a viral video.

Heard on Open Residency at 16:38, on Joshua Schall at 38:03 and 44:27, on Shelf Talks Podcast at 15:34, and on Behind Her Empire with Yasmin Nouri at 59:23.

Should you hire creators onto your own team?

• At a certain size, brands are starting to hire two or three internal creators, not just one. It need not cost a six figure salary, as smaller brands have hired creators for 3k to 5k per month who make at least one video per day.

• One brand's in house creator posted to her own brand owned handle every single day, one to two times and sometimes three. When a post went mega viral, the brand put it straight into the ad account, sometimes with the hook swapped out.

Heard on Marketing Operators at 14:02, 14:17, 15:18 and 45:03.

Do you need your own studio and production team?

People behind the camera belong on the shop team too, and one brand is building sets with one click setup across the street for shoots that day or the next.

• HexClad has kept more or less the same production team for 3 years. Brief a shoot with any creator and they know how to execute it for paid social. It now brings chefs who are not creators into its own studio and gets ads they could not have shot on their own time.
• One brand is building a few sets with one click setup in a studio right across the street, so nobody has to move lights. It wants creator content shot that day or the next day.

Heard on Marketing Operators at 46:44 and 54:21.

Why move affiliates into a community you own?

• One big shop brand's community is a 17,000 person Discord with a Zoom call every week. One host says the brand gets thousands and thousands of pieces of content for its ad account from it.

• One brand briefs 17,000 affiliates on one call, where you might train 10 or 20 people at a time. It briefs them on upcoming launches and on which hooks are performing well, the way a brand would brief an internal team.
• Neuro's chief executive does a Zoom with the creators every quarter, to pass on how the company thinks. Neuro's head of growth and its brand manager are in the creators' Discord as well.

Heard on Marketing Operators at 53:39, 55:10 and 59:18, and on Open Residency at 6:18.

What else should you set up before you recruit?

At Bloom the shop sits beside the influencer program, not in place of it, and building out the shop affiliate program is one of leadership's top priorities.

• Neuro sends its stock to TikTok fulfillment. TikTok does the fulfillment, and buys the product from Neuro's shop.
• Bloom says TikTok Shop is a very different game from TikTok and adds to it rather than replacing it. Its influencer program with no affiliate links and no coupon codes still runs alongside, and building out the shop affiliate program is one of leadership's top priorities right now.
• e.l.f. was in TikTok Shop's beta and calls the shop tremendous, though it gave no figures.

Heard on The BarberShop with Shantanu at 34:38, on Open Residency at 12:01, and on Suzy at 22:40.

Next comes getting creators, and getting product to them.

Step 2 of 9 in the TikTok Shop affiliate playbook.

Next, step 3, How do you get creators to say yes?

Back to step 1, Which products sell on TikTok Shop, at what price?