Scaling 8+ Figure brands on TikTok Shop - Clients: Loop Earplugs, Divi, BeautyBio, Mylee, Little Words Project + more
Ready to SCALE on TikTok Shop?
Joined January 2009
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BANGERR video just dropped 🔥
Alex Hormozi breakdown on how to crack TikTok Shop.
Look up "Ashley Wright TikTok" on YouTube to watch!
One of our clients in the pet space is hiring a freelance creative strategist to own their UGC end-to-end: ideation, sourcing US creators, and working with the video editor to get it live.
Interested? Drop a comment or DM me.
Ashley Wright retweeted
TODAY’S SHOW // 9.14.26
> @chrisorzy (Orzy Media)
> @ImChaseMohseni (CreativeOS)
> @ashley_wright (Social Tale)
> @Cody_Wittick (Kynship)
BCCGATE | Ridge x Tony Hawk Sweepstakes | WSJ on “Guerrilla Marketing”
xitter.cf/i/broadcasts/1qKDzWwDQ…
Question for X: when is the best time to bring in an AI engineer?
I love dabbling and building out pieces for the agency, but the moment anything breaks, I'm the support layer and it all falls back on my lap.
July was the best month in SocialTale’s history. August was the first time I felt burnt out.
Low energy. Slow decisions. Sat on team calls unable to give the people around me what they needed. The motivation that had always been there just wasn't.
I had never really thought about burnout before. Founders tend to assume they are built differently. I did too.
Turns out the problem with a train that never stops is nobody tells you when to get off. And when you finally do, the landing is rough.
I got lucky. End of August, a week away with the family and the tail end of summer. No pipeline, decks, or calls.
Came back into September with a clearer head than I have had in months, and a full read on what the rest of the year needs.
The lesson is simple. Working hard is the job. Sacrificing your health for it is a decision, and it is the wrong one.
If you are sitting in that fog right now: step off, take a breath, and remember why you started this in the first place.
Join my TikTok Shop community 👇 Playbooks, weekly live calls, and a community of the smartest ecom operators.
skool.com/shop-operators
I tend to find most AI prompts fall short because they don't have context.
Shoutout to the @coworkerapp team
Check what they're building to disrupt that.
🤝 Paid partnership
When I started pitching TikTok to brands, most laughed it off as a dancing app.
Phase 1 was organic. We got clients crazy views, but retention was tough. "What is the ROI behind this?" came up on every single client call.
Phase 2 was ads. Decent CPMs, but the returns couldn't compete with Meta at the time. I was running Meta ad accounts on the side just to keep agency cash flow steady while we dialled in our TikTok setup.
Then TikTok Shop launched.
The entire game shifted overnight.
Because we'd already spent years understanding creator behaviour, editing styles, and what actually drives attention on the app, we could move instantly. Competitors were suddenly scrambling to learn the basics.
First-mover advantage isn't comfortable. You take the friction early so you're ready when the commercial layer arrives.
Time is ticking ⏱️
You need to start prepping for Q4 today.
What you do in the next 2 months determines how hard you can scale during bfcm.
Here are the 4 things you need to do now:
1. Forecast your stock
Forecast how much you expect to sell and place your orders asap.
Plan beyond bfcm weekend. You still need enough stock for the rest of q4 and the start of q1 (aka q5 - for some even better than q4)
2. Increase ad spend
CPMs are gonna rise as bfcm gets closer.
Start increasing spend now to fill your top of funnel before they spike.
Don’t just increase budgets, focus on launching more ads that drive real top of funnel (net new visitors).
3. Test your offers
You still have a few sale periods to test different offers.
Always calculate your margins before testing, otherwise you might find a winning offer that loses you money.
By bfcm, you should already know which offer performs best, you don’t want to experiment during that period.
4. Make sure your backend can handle the spike
5x more sales can mean close to 5x more orders to fulfill and ship, plus a huge increase in support volume.
Can your customer service team handle up to 5x the reply volume?
Can your 3pl ship your expected order volume within a week, while all their other clients are scaling at the same time?
Can your returns process handle the extra volume without breaking?
Do you have backup payment processors and ad accounts ready in case either gets restricted.
By the time q4 starts, the hard work should already be done, that’s the only way to have a record breaking season
We recruit creators for a living. 30,000+ of them so far.
Finding people was never the hard part. The real bottleneck was reading them.
This week I handed the vetting to an AI employee from @viktor_com that sits directly in our Slack.
214 creator profiles in. He scored every single one against what actually correlates with GMV for us, not surface metrics like follower count. Came back with four worth a real conversation, with outreach already drafted for each.
He didn't send anything on his own. He asked me to approve the four first.
I cut one, pulled one back from his maybe pile, and approved the batch.
That was my entire involvement for the afternoon.
The part I keep thinking about: the shortlist was noticeably sharper than what I would have built, mostly because he actually evaluated all 214 and I would have quit around profile 60.
🤝 Paid partnership
I shared this with a brand today.
Every TikTok Shop model I map out with a brand has a J curve in it.
I have not found one that doesn't.
You go cash negative before you go cash positive. That is the deal.
And when I say cash negative, I mean something specific:
Samples. Not a handful. Enough volume to keep creators supplied.
Creator retainers. To get 10 to 30+ creators posting 10+ videos a month, you are realistically looking at $10k to $30k.
That is where I see the most opportunity right now, and it is also where most brands underspend.
Then ad spend on top of that.
I am always transparent about this, because the alternative is a brand budgeting for month 1 and quitting in month 3.
Some brands get there faster.
A product hits, something takes off, the curve shortens. I have seen it. But that is the upside, not the plan.
9 times out of 10 it looks like this version
The one thing that genuinely changes the shape is timing.
Going into Q4 with budget ready is the best version of this.
You can go slow on TikTok Shop.
Plenty of brands do. It just takes a lot longer to see anything you would call a result, and you spend that whole time wondering whether it works.
It works. It is just front loaded.
After $100M+ in client GMV, the one thing I'd tell every CFO:
Stop measuring TikTok Shop by its margin.
For every $10 a brand makes on TikTok Shop, another $3 to $5 shows up on Amazon and DTC. The platform is a demand engine disguised as a marketplace.
The brands breaking even on TikTok Shop and panicking are sitting on the cheapest customer acquisition channel they've ever had.
Premium brands on TikTok Shop almost always have the same reaction.
They look at the in-platform numbers and think it's not working.
But their DTC revenue is quietly climbing.
Customers discover through TikTok, need more education on a higher price point product, and end up buying on the website.
The halo effect on premium products is massive. The in-platform GMV is almost a marketing cost at that point.
Good luck explaining that in a board meeting though.
Don't get the hate on this.
If I was in my 20s now it wouldn't be far off.
Some days I look at my calendar and think wow.
Difference is it doesn't feel like work, and I'd guess Max feels the same.
Doesn't mean it looks like this in 10 years.
Kudos.
Every week I talk to a brand that got burned by an agency on TikTok Shop.
They launched. Spent money on samples. Got a handful of low quality videos. Made barely anything back. Agency just comes up with excuses.
So now they think the channel is the problem. It was the operator.
Issue is there are MANY agencies who are just figuring it out whilst you pay them.
It's sad, but we're in a place where TikTok Shop is the shiny object that everyone wants to have a piece of.
TikTok Shop is never going to be a linear line, but transparency is KEY.
TikTok Shop is your cheapest demand engine. Most brands just had someone running it who didn't understand that.
Especially true with TikTok Shop.
It’s a pay to play arena. Spend more and you tend to get more back, whether that’s GMV, data or creator videos.
