A 2,000-store rollout is no small feat. Stryx began to hit CVS shelves in early June after months of work behind the scenes. As a digitally native brand, our website is our home base, but there’s nothing better than a customer email highlighting their excitement at finding your product in their local store.
“I grabbed my mom to show her the shelf you’re on and said ‘I know that brand from TikTok!’ then we purchased a concealer for my dad.”
With a major rollout, it can be hard to know which stores have your product, and while inventory management has come a long way, the in-store experience can be hard to track across so many stores. As part of the program, we worked with an in-store merchandising team to have shelves set up. Additionally, using Instagram and TikTok, we made a way for our followers to know we were in stores, and if they were going in already they could help us ensure everything was displayed correctly as well!
Two weeks ago we posted this TikTok:
Within the first 24 hours, we crossed 100K views and garnered hundreds of comments. Within the first hour, we had five customer emails with in-store photos. Over the next 3 weeks, we received nearly 200 customer emails from across the country, which we were able to use to help cross-reference inventory levels and find stores that needed an extra look from the merchandising team.
The power of TikTok comes from the ability for any creator to truly go viral in a way that is not possible on other platforms. The primary engagement model is the “For You” page, which allows the entire world to view your video, because TikTok does not rely on follower counts to judge content. Each video is judged individually. If you post a video that looks, feels, and sounds native to the platform, you can reach millions of people with a single post. We’re finding an entirely new audience on TikTok, and platform creators today reach more followers in a month than they can after years of hard work on other platforms like Snapchat or Instagram. You can see in our TikTok comments there’s true engagement, curiosity, and support, which is very exciting. I started using Vine the day it launched and was very sad when it closed down. TikTok today is what Instagram was in 2013-2015. Don’t let it pass you or your brand by.
