When Lillian Tung noticed her team buying products through TikTok, she saw a behavior shift worth testing. What followed was a year of trial, missteps, and hands‑on experimentation that quietly transformed TikTok Shop into one of the fastest‑growing revenue channels for Fur, the body‑care brand she co‑founded. But it wasn’t until she took control herself, that the experiment worked. Her experience offers a rare, unvarnished look at what it actually takes to make social commerce work and how. 

In this article you’ll learn:

BY ANNABEL BURBA, EDITORIAL ASSISTANT

As the co-founder and chief marketing officer of an omnichannel consumer packaged goods brand, Lillian Tung is always attuned to the different ways people shop.

She and her best friend, Laura Schubert, launched hair and body care company Fur as a direct-to-consumer business in 2016, then expanded by landing wholesale deals with local New York City salons and estheticians. Today, the brand sells its products—which fight ingrown hair, dry skin, and razor burn and are safe to use in intimate areas—through several channels, including its own website, Ulta, Amazon, and more than 20,000 wholesale partners.

“To be a nimble brand, you have to be where the consumer is,” Tung says.

So when the marketer noticed in 2024 that members of her team were starting to discover and purchase products through TikTok, she decided to experiment with the social media platform’s e-commerce service. “It’s not like I felt like TikTok all of a sudden was this amazing golden opportunity,” she says. “It was more like, eyeballs are there, consumer buying habits are there, so we should be there.”

At first, Tung outsourced the work to a TikTok Shop agency. “If I had to go back, I wouldn’t do that,” she says. “I don’t think we really learned that much. We just burned a lot of dollars.” Throughout that time period, Tung estimates that her bootstrapped business spent tens of thousands of dollars without seeing a return on investment that justified the expense. She then tried to delegate the task to various different Fur employees, but they also failed to gain traction on the platform.

Exasperated, Tung decided to run the brand’s TikTok Shop herself in June 2025. She approached it like an experiment, setting out to accomplish only two goals within the first three months. First, don’t screw up Fur’s operations—since, she says, things can get complicated when you connect the e-commerce service to your Shopify. Second, send no more than 300 units of free product per month to affiliate content creators. (Fur’s products range in price from $16 to $160.)

While Tung says she learned a lot about TikTok Shop during that testing period, it wasn’t until she layered in paid advertising in August that revenue started growing.

In November, Fur’s TikTok Shop sales increased 5x month-over-month. That fact wasn’t shocking to Tung, since the brand typically experiences holiday sales spikes across all channels. But she was taken aback when that momentum didn’t slow down in consecutive months. “December was equally large,” she says. “January was even larger. February was even larger than January—it’s just continuing to grow.”

Tung adds that incorporating paid ads wasn’t the only thing that helped her achieve that growth, though. Scaling Fur’s outreach to affiliate creators was just as important. Last June, she would contact about 1,000 creators each month and send the brand’s products to about 300 of them. That effort would then result in about 50 affiliate posts on TikTok. Now, Tung sends roughly 17,000 messages per month to both start conversations with affiliate creators she’d like to work with in the future and maintain relationships with those she has already partnered with. She typically nets about 600 to 1,000 posts in exchange.

The founder projects that Fur, which declined to share total revenue, will earn six figures through TikTok Shop in 2026, a 10x increase year-over-year. 

“A delegated test-and-burn bucket is really important,” she says. “And aligning leadership around that is really important so that you have the freedom to execute, which then allows for consistent execution. You need to be able to be consistent.”