FORTUNE OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2021 123ing products. Roth has struck up a
relationship with Sandoval, who by
now has more than 159,000 followers
and has appeared on Good Morn-
ing America and Dr. Oz. The CEO is
considering ways to work with her to
promote the video after the organic
traffic wanes and trying to think about
how he might capture lightning again.
“If you have someone who’s doing
something on their own, being who
they are and genuinely showing the
way it is, the breakout successes can be
huge,” he says.
Countless other examples prove
the point. A series of feta cheese
recipes, stemming back to a video by
a Finnish chef, led to #fetapasta. At
last count, the hashtag has more than
1 billion views and has boosted feta
cheese sales around the world. The
recent #BamaRush phenomenon, in
which University of Alabama women
detailed their outfits during soror-
ity rush, bolstered sales for several
fashion brands. New visitor traffic and
weekly revenue for one oft-mentioned
clothing line, Kendra Scott, jumped
17% and 20%, respectively, according
to Advertising Age. At the Pants Store,
online orders were up 400%.
Last spring, TikToker Carly Joy
inspired a mad rush to her pre-
ferred shave cream. In a charming,
profanity-laden how-to, she demon-
strates the regimen she uses to groom
her lady parts and praises a product
from the brand Eos as the best route
to a “smooth-ass hooha.” The video
drove a 2,500% increase in orders and
45,000% increase in traffic, accord-
ing to the beauty industry publication
Glossy. It inspired Eos to sign Joy
as a partner and to create a limited-
edition “Bless your F#@%ING Cooch”
shave cream. “I know that there are
some brands who still view TikTok as
experimental,” Eos’s CMO Soyoung
Kang told Glossy. “We are way past
that. TikTok is table stakes.”
TikTok is working to help market-
ers track and harness such com-
munity endorsements, lest they be
sideswiped by them. A portion of its
platform has been handed over to
the #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt hashtag,
where users perform demos and gen-
erally fawn over products. It has more
than 5 billion views. More recently,
the company announced a strategic
partnership with global advertising
conglomerate Publicis to help brands
learn best practices for ad creation.
The company also recently an-
nounced an arrangement with Shopify
aimed at removing the friction from
TikTok commerce. Starting in the
U.S. and U.K., the initiative gives
merchants the ability to run video ads
through Shopify’s TikTok presence,
to tag products in organic posts, and
to create mini storefronts. One of the
earliest partners is Kylie Cosmetics.
“For merchants that don’t have mil-
lions of followers, TikTok is unique
in that they can post something that’s
exciting and make it shoppable—and
anyone can see it,” says Shopify’s
director of product Amir Kabbara.
“We’re trying to close the loop between
a TikTok user seeing something and
being able to buy it.”S
OMEONE ONCE told
me the easiest way to
determine a person’s age
is with an iPhone. Hand
one to a boomer on a
whale watch, for example, and he’ll
use it to scan the horizon and silently
record the tableau before focusing onthe action off the bow. A Gen Xer will
behave similarly, except add audio
commentary. “You might not be able
to tell, but that humpback is bigger
than our entire boat!” The millennial
will just snatch the phone from your
hand, quickly position himself in front
of the camera, and make the whole
scene about him.
It wasn’t until Gen Z came along
that it dawned on me: This reductive
observation is less a reflection of age
than of fluency. Each generation’s
manner of expression is developed by
the technologies of its youth. TikTok
is made possible not just by high-
quality cameras and microphones, but
also unfettered access to a bottom-
less library of music and video clips,
intuitive video editing software, A.I.,
and cloud computing. The people
born into this suite of capabilities—
who also happen to have a surfeit of
vitality, creativity, and spare time—
have naturally become the masters
of a platform built to cater to their
technical aptitude and fickle attention
spans. They are the TikTok genera-
tion, and they’re leading the rest of us
with them into what is fast becoming
a full-blown TikTok Economy.
A month of field research by this
reporter—a.k.a., spending way too
much time on TikTok—suggests that
one crucial aspect of the platform’s
appeal is the way it’s uniquely suited
to bringing users together to bond in
a joyful or celebratory way. That lent
TikTok extra resonance during theTikTok says that the
number of companies
running ads on its platform
jumped 500% in 2020.
THE TIKTOK ECONOMY