Single Item GMV Exceeds One Million in 20 Days! How Does Soo Slick Women's Shapewear Seize the First Mover Advantage in TikTok's US Small Shops? | EchoTik Product Insights

Summer is an anticipated season for global consumers, often associated with holidays, parties, celebrations, and travel. Aspiring women all over the world are searching for summer fashion on various shopping platforms and social media, seeking recommendations and guidance. TikTok, a platform with a remarkable number of daily active users, also plays a significant role in consumers' purchasing decisions. TikTok's popular summer-related topics receive high views, such as hashtags #BeachVibes (960 million views), #Summer2023 (1.3 billion views), #BeachWear (307 million views), and so on. Users actively share their summer activities and outfit inspirations under these trending hashtags while interacting with their favorite brands.

Y2K cargo pants, vintage fashion trends... TikTok always leads the fashion forefront, cultivating popularity for numerous fashion items. As TikTok’s focus on e-commerce raising, more and more DTC clothing brands and platforms are entering TikTok, making the women's fashion category highly competitive.

The third-party data selection tool EchoTik (https://echotik.live) discovered that the top-selling single item in the TikTok Shop's US closed-loop stores in the past 30 days is the shapewear from Soo Slick, available in the Soo Slick store. Based on the sales trend in the past 7 days, there is still room for further growth.

The average order value for this item is $23.99. From May 2nd to May 21st, within 20 days, it sold 5.8K units, with an estimated GMV of $137.97K, equivalent to 970,000RMB.

Soo Slick has not started live-streaming marketing yet. Instead, they have focused on short video commerce that is simplified, more concise, faster and has a long tail effect. They invite influencers who align with their brand's characteristics and target audience to participate in product distribution. In the past 30 days, the total views of their short videos exceeded 4 million. Despite having a relatively small number of videos, they achieved a GPM of $31.86 per thousand video views.

Soo Slick's TikTok account is relatively designed in a simplified style, primarily showcasing products through a large number of influencer short videos. In addition to seeing the TikTok shop on their profile, users can also click on Linktree (a multi-link collection website) to view Soo Slick's other e-commerce channels, further promoting the closed-loop process from display to purchase.

Soo Slick originally started the business on Amazon, and its founder, Elizabeth Adeoye, is an African-American woman. Soo Slick's flagship product, the seamless shapewear, comes in various sizes from S to 4XL, but talking about product displays, they prefer to use plus-size models with a low waist-to-hip ratio and collaborate with similar body types KOLs to promote their products, enhancing the visual impact of their body curves. The brand's loyal customers are mostly full-figured individuals from ethnic minorities. Soo Slick further solidifies its position in the "plus-size women's clothing" niche through its product displays.

Soo Slick is not a traditional DTC brand and is relatively less popular in North America. According to research by Koala Inspector, Soo Slick just launched its independent website on December 17th last year. Prior to that, they had been selling their products on mainstream e-commerce platforms such as Amazon and eBay, categorized as a "Small Business" on Amazon.

However, the team pays great attention to social media promotion, including not only TikTok but also Instagram, Pinterest, and other mainstream social media platforms. This year, they chose to join TikTok Shop, marking the beginning of their brand development. Currently, the #sooslick brand hashtag on TikTok has already reached 1.3 million views.

Apparel is a category that often presents a love-hate relationship for most sellers. The "love" aspect is its high markup potential, while the "hate" aspect includes its tendency to become outdated, high return rates, size discrepancies, and difficulty in sourcing, especially for novice sellers. However, a factory seller who has been deeply involved in the North American women's clothing market for many years expressed a different perspective: compared to the 50% to 60% return rates commonly seen in the domestic market, the apparel return rate in Europe and America is only 15% or lower, with higher profit margins. If they can attract repeat customers in the long term, it can be a profitable business.

So, what makes fashion sellers like Soo Slick stand out among thousands of products? What are the characteristics of enduring fashion bestsellers?

TikTok for Business has previously published the "2022 European and American Popular Consumer Category Insights," summarizing fashion trends on TikTok into four major categories: opportunity trends, head trends, fatigue trends, and stabilization trends.

From the perspective of novice sellers, it is recommended to choose head trends and stabilization trends with sustained popularity and low volatility, ensuring a large user base, and then finding their loyal followers through differentiated competition, which means targeting both a broad audience and a niche fanbase.

And Soo Slick perfectly fits this formula of "broad audience + niche fanbase" as a fashion bestseller. The pursuit of exaggerated body curves and extreme waist-to-hip ratios by European and American women contributes to the success of shapewear, especially among women with wider body types. At the same time, shapewear has strong adaptability regardless of season or outfit. Its highly elastic fabric can fit various body types and is versatile in terms of pairing—it can be worn as an inner garment or paired with jeans for a street-style look. Moreover, what's even more important is that shapewear, swimsuits, and underwear all fall under the category of intimate clothing, which gives it an unmatched advantage in terms of return and exchange policies compared to regular clothing.

In terms of visual presentation, shapewear is highly suitable for showcasing the immediate before-and-after effects, prompting customers to make quick purchases. Customers spend an average of $30 per person to buy not just a piece of clothing but also the dream of achieving a perfect figure without the need for dieting or exercising.

Although TikTok e-commerce in Europe and America has faced challenges and its development speed hasn't been as rapid as expected, and the promotion methods heavily rooted in domestic business culture have made overseas consumers somewhat hesitant, Soo Slick's success proves one thing: overseas social media platforms may be the optimal solution for low-budget small brands to break through and even the necessary path to success.

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