Sign up to receive the Vogue Business newsletter for the latest luxury news and insights, plus exclusive membership discounts.
TikTok Shop so far has been associated with buying supplements, bodysuits, hair tools or beauty products. Now, it’s levelling up. Via partnerships with luxury resale companies, scrollers can now purchase used designer handbags, like a Louis Vuitton monogram shoulder bag or a Bottega tote, on the platform.
Launched on Friday in the UK and the US, the new vertical taps five UK-based luxury resale companies: Luxe Collective, Sellier Knightsbridge, Sign of the Times, Hardly Ever Worn It and Break Archive, who have already found success converting sales on their own sites from TikTok videos. The TikTok Shop tie-in lets them create shoppable live streams and list inventory in the TikTok Shop tab.
Gen Z is the clear target. TikTok is capping these sellers’ listings at £4,000, while encouraging them to post a variety of price points, in order to reach the platform’s entry-level luxury consumer. TikTok Shop more broadly has a single-item price cap of £500, so sellers have had to go through an approvals process with the platform’s Singapore HQ to be able to retail above it.
TikTok content
This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
TikTok Shop has previously been criticised for its high saturation of low-quality, low-cost goods. The marketplace launched with 2 per cent seller fees and free delivery for sellers, which attracted a swathe of ultra-fast fashion and mass-market players to the platform, raising questions about seller responsibility and promotion of impulse buying. Last week, TikTok raised fees to 8 per cent, which some experts feel might encourage higher-end players, and discourage low-quality selling. Until now, luxury brands by and large, have steered clear. But the new pre-loved category could be a smart way for the platform to prove out its potential as a luxury shopping channel.
It is, after all, TikTok Shop’s make-or-break year if it wants to be the first social platform to truly crack shopping. Part of that hinges on expanding beyond cheaply priced goods and suspicion of unknown sellers. Another relies on enriching the platform with a broader range of inventory and securing buy-in from fashion players beyond high street and fast fashion brands.
Starting with secondhand means TikTok Shop doesn’t need buy-in from luxury brands to get their names on the site. It’s also territory with ripe interest. The hashtag #prelovedfashion has generated 62,000 videos, and the partners selected already have sizable followings that will help promote the initiative. “We know the TikTok community is increasingly searching for more sustainable and accessible ways to invest in and enjoy luxury fashion, and the launch of this new category means that pre-owned luxury brands and pieces can now be discovered and bought seamlessly all without leaving the platform,” says Flavia De Pfyffer, fashion lead at TikTok Shop. There’s an appetite for pre-loved luxury on TikTok already, she adds.
Who is TikTok’s (used) luxury shopper?
Resale platform Luxe Collective has over a million followers, built by co-founder Ben Gallagher, who regularly posts educational content about fashion. Some of its videos have 10-16 million views. The resale company launched its TikTok Shop on Friday via a series of live streams, offering 50 per cent off some bags from Louis Vuitton, Loewe and Bottega Veneta to drum up interest.
It sold 10 items across the two lives, including a Louis Vuitton Keepall (£1,500), a Louis Vuitton Wight bag (£1,500), a Louis Vuitton Multi Pochette (£900), a Bottega Veneta piece (£400) and a Fendi bag (£400), Gallagher says. Between 3 and 5pm, 20,000 people visited the stream; then, another 11,000 people joined from 6 till 8pm. Gallagher is doing 20 hours of lives over the next five days, so TikTok can test the audience and the algorithm can learn who to thrust the lives to going forward.
Can TikTok Shop really be a destination for pre-loved luxury shopping? “You know what, before the live tonight, I would have said no,” Gallagher says. “I genuinely didn’t think that people would part with four to five hundred quid on average on social media. But some spent £1,500.” Of course, for some users, it’s aspirational entertainment. During one of the lives, one user commented: “Really wanted that if only I was £1,500 richer.”
London-based resale business Sellier’s TikTok conversions make up around 25 per cent of total sales, compared with 35 per cent from Instagram. The rest are direct via e-commerce, says founder Hanushka Toni. She’s seeing increased interest from TikTok and predicts high conversion in TikTok Shop. Lives she’s hosted have drawn 650 viewers, with many converting into sales.
During the last live, Sellier sold a Louis Vuitton Loop denim monogram bag, a black Gucci Diana and a Chanel vintage classic flap, converted from TikTok to its e-commerce. “It was a huge surprise to us because our Instagram converts really, really well. But Instagram is more, I would say, a millennial audience. They do spend. We were so surprised that TikTok did so well.”
Break Archive founder Gabriel Rylka is also anticipating high conversion, but he says the key is curation that reflects what people are talking about on TikTok. His selection includes the Balenciaga City bag, which has been trending on TikTok lately; some Fendi baguettes, a couple of “reasonably priced” Chanel bags and some Louis Vuitton denim styles, which Rylka says are big right now.
Luxury bags are becoming harder to purchase for entry-level consumers, as brands make their most-coveted items more exclusive. And Gen Zs feel intimidated by luxury boutiques, which means they’re turning to resale, says Toni. With such a high proportion of Gen Z on TikTok, it makes sense that they would engage with resale via TikTok Shop. “We are already seeing many of our creators post about vintage and pre-loved fashion, so our aim is to make it even easier for our community to buy those pieces directly, and enable retailers to reach entirely new customers through social commerce,” says TikTok’s De Pfyffer.
TikTok content
This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
Break Archive’s consumer base is aged 17 to 23, and Rylka is confident they will buy luxury from Shop. “The success we have seen in the last two years and, you know, the continuous growth is proof of the fact that, yes, young people will buy luxury products online or even on TikTok.”
Building brand aura
To promote their new TikTok Shop accounts, the resellers have gone bold. Sellier made a video on Thursday of founder Toni writing ‘buy me on TikTok Shop’ on a Birkin bag (Toni hopes to sell Birkins on TikTok in future, if they will increase the pricing cap). The video garnered 600,000 views. But when Toni went to clean the bag for a second video, she ran into some difficulty — the ink wouldn’t come off. “It was completely accidental because I thought I would wipe it and it would come off. But it’s driven 2.2 million views, which is quite fun.”
Fun is part of the point. “The luxury market can feel so exclusive. I like reaching a younger audience,” says Toni. “So this is me growing our account and growing Sellier brand recognition. If we get sales off the back of that, excellent. But that’s not the only driver.”
Of course sales are the goal, but for the sellers it’s also about brand building. “Once people know that we’re about on TikTok Shop, when they’re filming their unboxings, they can tag our products and drive people to our Shop which is fantastic,” Rylka says.
For now, the pre-owned luxury category is still in the testing phase, and time will tell if all the sellers will convert. There are some bugs to work out. Break Archive, for example, was still waiting for its approval from TikTok’s Singapore HQ on Friday to sell any items above £500 (a lot of its inventory). Sellier also ran into some technical issues on Friday with caps on pricing.
Luxe Collective’s Gallagher was lucky. After Friday’s early wins, he added some more high-ticket inventory and improved his live stream set-up for subsequent streams. “I’m sitting here in the office on my own after the live, absolutely buzzing to get back tomorrow and do it again,” he says. “I think it’s just going to be incredible for us.”
Comments, questions or feedback? Email us at feedback@voguebusiness.com.
More from this author:
The Vogue Business guide to TikTok Shop
How resale platform Luxe Collective is riding TikTok fame to compete
Meet the young entrepreneurs making thousands from archival luxury
