Top Retail Marketers at PacSun, Tarte and Crocs Share TikTok Shop Success Tips – Chief Marketer

By April Berthene
Three major retailers — apparel retail chain PacSun, makeup brand Tarte Cosmetics and shoe brand Crocs — have used social media platform TikTok to attract new audiences, acquire customers and drive millions in sales.
The platform is known to entertain young consumers with short videos, and retailers have jumped in the mix to market to these consumers. Top executives from the three retailers shared their success tips at the National Retail Federation conference NRF ’26 in January in New York City.
For the brands that are just building awareness on TikTok, they are missing out on sales opportunities, according to Tarte, Crocs and PacSun, which all rave about the conversion and sales the social media platform drives for their businesses.
Tarte began selling on TikTok Shop soon after it launched in 2023, but at first it was like throwing paint against the wall and seeing what would stick, said Jenna Manula Linares, Vice President of Digital Marketing. Now Tarte treats TikTok like a “bona fide retailer.”
“Yes, it’s a marketing channel for us, but it is a channel that is driving a huge amount of sales for us,” Manula Linares said.
She advises retailers not to treat their TikTok Shop like their direct-to-consumer site, as shoppers aren’t looking for that on the TikTok platform. Shoppers are being influenced to buy one specific product in the moment, Manula Linares said. Instead, retailers should load onto the platform a small number of SKUs that they have a lot of inventory of in case it goes viral.
Apparel brand PacSun had a viral TikTok moment over Black Friday 2023. An influencer with less than 5,000 followers posted a video while in a PacSun store about the merchant’s Casey low rise jeans. The post went viral overnight and PacSun sold 11,000 pairs in one night, said Chief Merchandising Officer Richard Cox. To date, PacSun has sold more than 100,000 pairs of that one jean style.
Similarly, one of Tarte’s products — it’s undereye concealer — has been viral for about nine months, Manula Linares said. It started in Q1 2025, when one morning Tarte noticed about a dozen influencers had posted TikTok videos of themselves drawing with Sharpie marker under their eyes and then using Tarte’s concealer to cover it up. The next day, a few hundred influencers posted similar videos; the day after that, a few thousand.
“Now we have tens of thousands of creators who are still drawing Sharpie on their face with all different colors and covering it up. I saw a mustache going on. I saw everything,” Manula Linares said.
On TikTok alone, Tarte has sold 600,000 units of that undereye concealer and the brand has sold out multiple times of the product.
All the virality creates a sales halo beyond the TikTok platform. With Tarte’s undereye concealer, sales have increased on its direct-to-consumer website and the product has sold out in Ulta and Sephora.
“My favorite part is that on TikTok shop, we are only selling in the U.S. However, content on TikTok transcends borders,” Manula Linares. “On our D2C site, we’ve actually seen for the last six months that one of the most requested and purchased products from our international customers is our CC Under Eye.”
Overall, Tarte is measuring the success of its TikTok efforts based on sales on the platform and its direct-to-consumer revenue sell through, as well as social media sentiment, increase in conversions of specific products and search volume.
PacSun also had a major sales halo from that one influencer’s post about its Casey jean. Even though it continually sells out of that particular jean, all of its denim sales have increased, and the brand has sold more than one million pairs of jeans on TikTok alone, Cox said.
“We embrace the sellout because we know that it’s going to create a halo effect regardless,” Cox said.
Another way of measuring the impact of a TikTok video is seeing the effect in stores, Cox said.
“A soft way of measuring would also be in stores, how we’ve seen customers walk in and request ‘the viral TikTok jean.’ That is literally the phrase they use,” Cox said.
These sales all stem from the long leashes these brands have given to their influencers.
“You have to let influencers make content,” said Feliz Papich, Senior Vice President of Digital Technology, Experience and Insights at Crocs. “You have to be unafraid of that content.”
Cox echos this sentiment and states that brands can’t tell influencers what to say because that won’t work on TikTok. Instead, he advises brands to tell influencers what they think about their brand and then ask them what they think about it and collaborate from there.
“Go in with an open mind in terms of releasing the keys to your customer for content creation,” he said.
While sales can be a target measure of success on TikTok, so can gathering customer feedback, Papich said. In October, Crocs conducted 30 days of nonstop TikTok livestreaming and learned that consumers prefer entertainment on the platform more than anything else, Papich said.
“That taught us so much about how content doesn’t have to be perfect,” she said about its month-long streaming events.
Crocs does not post polished content but posts different types of “fun” content — like American Girl Dolls (wearing Crocs) floating around to a Lil Jon and Reading Rainbow theme song mashup — to see who responds to it and why.
“We actually see [TikTok] as more valuable to us about what we’re learning from our consumer than just like the conversion funnel, which is also fantastic,” Papich said.
While the brands say TikTok is a great platform to acquire customers, the marketers discussed their current goals and challenges of retaining those customers and balancing profitability.
Tarte was initially attracted to TikTok because of its “extraordinary” algorithm, Manula Linares said. A product can reach millions of consumers in a few hours who had never heard of Tarte the previous day.
“We’ve been on the platform for two and a half years, and month over month, most of our customers are new to our brand, which is really exciting,” Manula Linares said. “We really look at the channel as a discovery engine, but one that’s also driving new user acquisition for us.”
Next on Tarte’s TikTok list is determining how to maintain profitability. When Tarte started on the platform in 2023 and into 2024, TikTok offered Tarte incentives and coupons for being there. Those coffers have dried up, she said.
“As their platform has scaled, they started pulling back on what they’ve been funding for us,” Manula Linares said. “But we also know that the TikTok customer is value driven. So now we are at this intersection where we’re trying to find the balance between how much value can we offer our customer while still being conscious of our bottom line and our EBITDA margin.”
Crocs said the profitability for its brand on TikTok is good because some of the influencers it works with are already creating content there. In this way, it is not a large investment in advertising on the platform, Papich said.
For Crocs, its next challenge is retaining the customers it has acquired on the platform.
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