On TikTok Shop, an ecosystem of fast-growth, Black-owned beauty brands is taking shape.
It’s a group that includes emerging brands — for instance, Kayla Rowe’s Her Fantasy Box, which was founded in 2022 and is the number-one feminine care brand on TikTok Shop — as well as longer-established lines, from Tisha Thompson’s LYS Beauty to Ron Robinson’s BeautyStat and beyond.
And the list continues to grow, not only as more brands warm up to TikTok Shop, which has been operating in the U.S. for more than two years, but as funding and retail commitments to Black-owned brands have waned over the same period, a phenomenon exacerbated this year by U.S. President Donald Trump’s anti-DEI campaign.
Data from Crunchbase shows that funding for Black-founded start-ups in the U.S. fell from $4.9 billion in 2021 to $700 million in 2024. Meanwhile in the last year, a number of Black-owned beauty brands have shuttered, among them Sknmuse, which sold at Nordstrom, and Ami Colé, which sold at Sephora and whose founder, Diarrha N’Diaye-Mbaye, has since been appointed as head of beauty at Kim Kardashian’s Skims.
Deon Libra, a wellness and body care brand that sells at Ulta Beauty, will meanwhile embark on a “pause” through at least December 2025, according to an Instagram story uploaded in early November by cofounder Devin McGhee Kirkland, citing low funds. The same week, 2023 Sephora Accelerate cohort member Sienna Brown announced she was winding down her lip gloss brand of five years, Glosshood.
“The whole ecosystem tends to be harder for BIPOC founders, and much of that stems from inequities in capital,” said Michelle Lee, chief brand officer at marketing and commerce firm, Front Row. “[That disparity] influences everything — from marketing to whether a brand can survive at retail.”
Why TikTok
While operating on TikTok Shop comes with its own set of challenges — there is no universal strategy for success in creator commerce, either — it can, according to some founders, offer a potentially lower-cost means of visibility that can in turn translate to sustainable success.
“When you’re a small brand, paying for brand awareness is the fastest way to sink your money into a bucket you don’t know you’ll ever see again,” said Karen Young, founder of body care and fragrance brand Oui the People, which sells on TikTok Shop and at Sephora. “The benefit of TikTok Shop for us is that we are at once raising brand awareness and driving revenue — that’s very unique to be able to find in one platform.”
Oui the People’s Featherweight Hydrating Body Gloss Oil and Souk Honey Eau de Parfum.
Courtesy
Since investing in TikTok Shop in March, Oui the People has exceeded $90,000 in sales on the platform, with most of that total driven by the brand’s $82 Souk Honey perfume that debuted in 2024. TikTok Shop is the brand’s second-largest channel, tracking behind its direct-to-consumer website and ahead of Sephora, though the latter only carries Oui the People’s body care offerings and not its fragrances, which are newer and have quickly risen to comprise between 50 to 60 percent of total sales, said Young.
Thompson, who similarly sells her cosmetics line LYS at Sephora, brought the brand to TikTok Shop in 2023, where its $22 No Limits Cream Bronzer Stick became a viral hit.
Two years later, the brand continues to grow its sales on the platform at a rapid clip, exceeding $5.2 million in the 12 months ending October 2025, up 35 percent versus the year prior according to Charm.io. The brand’s $27 hybrid skin tint/foundation stick, too, has become a top seller.
“One of the important parts of our story is that we’re still not as viral as we can be — we’re still on our way up,” said Thompson, adding that Sephora remains LYS’ biggest channel, followed by TikTok Shop and the brand’s DTC website, respectively.
LYS Beauty No Limits Cream Bronzer Stick
“TikTok Shop has fueled an awareness that has made all of our channels successful. You might have a customer who doesn’t want to buy on TikTok Shop, but they see the brand is also at Sephora, which is a trusted name and gives [the product] that credibility. Both channels have changed my life.”
This March, Thompson closed LYS’ first funding round, a series A investment from Encore Consumer Capital. A mutual excitement about TikTok Shop, the founder said, was one key synergy between the parties. “It’s been amazing having partners with a fresh perspective, who appreciate TikTok Shop as a channel — sometimes, in this ecosystem, brands don’t find that.”
Beauty’s at-times reluctance to embrace TikTok Shop as a channel mirrors the industry’s longtime disinclination toward Amazon, an attitude that has shifted in recent years as the e-commerce giant’s beauty business has grown at an incontrovertible clip. NIQ reports Amazon is now the top beauty and personal care retailer in the U.S., and TikTok Shop, meanwhile, has climbed to roughly the number-eight mark in the two years since its debut. TikTok Shop relies on affiliate sales, with beauty brands offering creators a typical 10 to 15 percent cut of revenue generated via their content.
Community-builders
“We previously thought about TikTok Shop as a purely transactional experience, and we’ve managed to find both revenue and community on the platform,” said Young, who has found success posting her own affiliate content via the brand’s page, in which she answers consumer questions and engages with Oui the People’s audience.
Longtime beauty chemist and BeautyStat founder Ron Robinson has similarly opted to educate consumers on his suite of skin care products via TikTok Shop, where BeautyStat sales have exceeded $572,000 since he onboarded roughly one year ago, data from Charm.io shows. The brand’s hero $62 vitamin C product, the Universal C Skin Refiner, is BeautyStat’s top seller.
BeautyStat Universal C Skin Refiner
“The engagement, the storytelling, the one-on-one relationship I can build with users on the platform is key,” said Robinson, for whom Ulta, Amazon and BeautyStat’s DTC website remain the biggest channels, though TikTok Shop is “a fastest-growing element of our business.”
Meet the Breakouts
There are also those brands whose retail footprints started with TikTok Shop.
Her Fantasy Box, for instance, was launched in 2022 after a miscarriage prompted Miami-based Rowe to create a line of clean feminine care products. In 2023, the brand brought its offerings, including a $16 Slippery Box vaginal moisture-boosting supplement and a $15 Fresh & Clean boric acid suppository supply, to TikTok Shop.
“It wasn’t until we started focusing on affiliates that we started seeing momentum,” said Rowe, adding that the brand today sends free products to thousands of creators on a daily basis to create content about Her Fantasy Box.
The strategy is certainly working: Her Fantasy Box sales in the last year have surpassed $19.9 million, growing more than 34 percent from the year prior, according to data from the brand and Charm.io. Its six-piece Balance Bundle, which includes supplements, a suppository, cleansing gels and a body oil for about $64, is its top seller on the platform.
Her Fantasy Box the Balance Bundle
Courtesy
Rowe echoed that TikTok Shop has had a halo effect across Her Fantasy Box’s channels, among which DTC ranks as the largest — and includes a subscription plan option, which generates more than $550,000 monthly — though TikTok Shop and Amazon follow not too far behind.
“We get that Gen Z crowd,” said Rowe, adding that the brand’s customer base ranges from 18 to 45 years old, with those aged 25 to 35 being the core group.
The brand, which has roughly 50 full-time employees and is in talks to soon enter an unnamed U.S. brick-and-mortar retailer, is the top brand on TikTok Shop in feminine care — which is also the platform’s fastest-growing category across beauty.
“We’ve generated roughly $120 million in three years, we are 100 percent bootstrapped, and we see a lot of room for growth — this is just the beginning,” said Wilder Polycarpe, cofounder and chief marketing officer of Her Fantasy Box.
Stormi Steele’s Canvas Beauty, a leading brand in live selling on TikTok Shop, has similarly been a category-defining brand on the platform.
Founded by former hairstylist Stormi Steele in 2018 as a hair care brand, Canvas previously sold at CVS Pharmacy, Sally Beauty, Walmart and Target. By 2023, though, the brand was ailing and Steele pivoted to body care, debuting her hero $32 scented Body Glaze creams and taking a livestream-focused approach to selling on TikTok Shop.
Canvas Beauty’s hero Body Glaze, which comes in more than 30 scented varieties.
courtesy of Canvas Beauty
“I was rebuilding when I got on TikTok. It was me, a stripped-down CEO recording from my warehouse every day, showing people the product we were shipping out, and trying to enjoy the process,” Steele previously told WWD. “We ended up going viral the first week, and then we just continued to go viral.”
Between November 2023 and October 2024, Canvas did more than $22 million in sales on TikTok Shop, a figure which rose 7.3 percent in the last 12 months to more than $23.6 million, per Charm.io.
Among the retailers Canvas sold at in its first life are those — namely Target and Walmart — which have rolled back diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives over the last year. Specialty beauty retailers like Ulta Beauty and Sephora, by comparison, have upheld programs meant to support founders of color, including their respective accelerator programs, which inaugurate annual classes of beauty founders of color and ready them for growth via monetary grants and mentorship.
Standout successes of these programs include Topicals and Eadem, both 2021 Sephora Accelerate cohort members. Generally speaking, Ulta Muse alums haven’t reached the same level of penetration, but up-and-comers include color cosmetics line Pound Cake and clean fragrance line Octavia Morgan.
TikTok Shop does not have an equivalent accelerator geared toward beauty founders of color, though it did partner with Black Girl Ventures this February to launch Soar Together, a six-week accelerator supporting 20 Black business owners via content creation and TikTok Shop operations trainings. This came one year after TikTok donated $1 million to support BGV’s programming and growth in 2024.
