Going viral on TikTok Shop
“I know I'm not the only one where it has completely transformed my life.”
Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.
This is partially inspired by the pickle sweatshirt that is still haunting my FYP. —Kate
I’ll hold up my hands and say I was skeptical of TikTok Shop. It’s not that I didn’t think it would work, but that it would work too well—that my FYP would turn into Amazon on an acid trip. TikTok already encourages overconsumption, and I figured the types of products that would find success on its shopping platform would be more of the same trendy, mass produced items that will end up in landfills by next year. I certainly didn’t think it would mean that it would allow artists to quit their day jobs.
Tanner Bowen has been sewing and making clothes for the past four years, but it wasn’t until the spring that he started taking his internet presence seriously. He began posting more intentionally on TikTok and launched a newsletter called
, where he shares tutorials and essays about being a maker. He also turned some of this content into print zines, one of which he decided to throw up on TikTok Shop after noticing other creators using the feature.
This particular zine, “How To Develop A Sewing Brain,” is a vocab lesson for people who want to get into sewing. New TikTok shops are capped at 100 sales a day, and when Bowen and I spoke over Zoom, his had been on the market for 29 days. The number of copies sold? 2,900.
“It consumed my life for the past month,” he tells me. “Which is amazing and transformative and has allowed me to kind of do this thing.”
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Bowen is still getting used to calling himself a content creator, something he’s now diving into head-first after giving notice at his regular job. To have found this level of success with one product, especially one as specialized as a sewing zine, was remarkable to me, and testament to TikTok’s ability to connect creators with their people.
In this interview for paid subscribers, Bowen and I talk about what creators need to be successful sellers online, as well as the perks—and frustrations—of running a viral TikTok Shop.
What made you decide to give TikTok Shop a go?
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