We Acquired the Fastest-Growing TikTok Shop Agency.

Luke Austin (0:00)

We just acquired the fastest-growing TikTok shop agency.

Why does that matter to you? Stick around to see how they are helping some of the largest brands to grow on TikTok shops today.

SPEAKER_2 (0:10)

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That's lutiq.com/ctc.

Luke Austin (1:07)

Hey folks, welcome to the Ecommerce Playbook Podcast. I'm Luke Austin. I'm the president here at CTC, and I'm joined by Tyler and Alex, the co-founders of TBAR Partners. And if you haven't heard the announcement already in some form of fashion on X or via Commerce Roundtable or some other channel, we have officially acquired TBAR Partners and partnered with them at CTC. So Tyler and Alex are part of the CTC family.

TBAR Partners is a Common Thread Collective company, and we couldn't be more stoked about where we're sitting at today. And so I'm sitting down with the guys today, and what we're going to do is we're going to walk through a bit of the origin story, how we got here, why we ended up here. We're going to walk through how they think about growing TikTok shop stores for Ecommerce brands. And then we're going to land with, we've got like two or three specific examples of brands that specific competitions, campaigns, product launches that just belong out of the water and what they've seen work specifically. That will be some interesting stories from Ridge, HexClad and some other brands as well. So got a lot packed in. How are we doing, guys?

Tyler Brechbiel (2:14)

Good, glad to be here. Thanks for having us. Yeah, thanks for having us.

Luke Austin (2:17)

Yeah, if anyone's watching, you'll see we're all in pretty athletic attire. We're cruising to a Hi-Rox workout in about 45 minutes here altogether. A group of us here at the office at CTC are doing Hi-Rox doubles in Anaheim. Tyler and Alex are joining us at our first Hi-Rox workout this afternoon, and I think they're both feeling really, really confident.

No apprehension, one so upper.

Tyler Brechbiel (2:39)

Yeah, I don't know about that.

Alex Rudolph (2:42)

Yeah, we're washed up baseball players. I'm not.

Tyler Brechbiel (2:45)

I'm not.

Luke Austin (2:46)

I'm not.

Especially with the recent Hi-Rox news and what happened in one of the most recent Women's Pro Contests. It's not for the faint-hearted.

Tyler Brechbiel (2:56)

Yeah, it doesn't seem like it. That's for sure.

Luke Austin (2:58)

Okay, so let's dive in. I'm going to set some context for us.

These are things that both of you guys know, but for CTC, we have been pursuing a thesis around TikTok Shop, more specifically, channel expansion to additional sales channels for a while now. And so what we see, the idea that we're oriented around and calling it the e-commerce demand cascade, is that the fastest growing brands right now in D2C e-commerce are ones that have a combination of the core media channels driving growth. So they have Meta, Google, Apple oven is in the mix, is the fastest growing new channel, have TikTok, YouTube, on down the line. But then as a part of that makeup, the sales channel complexity is getting more and more nuanced as well. So where .com would previously be a lot more of where the demand creation and capture both lived. Now TikTok shops and Amazon in particular, and then retail.com or retail channels are a more important piece of the full picture for brands. It's more demand to be captured on Amazon. And then TikTok shop is really unique because some of the fastest growing brands, it is a sales channel where people are making purchases. But TikTok shop actually serves as a net new demand creation channel as well. And that demand trickles down into .com and into Amazon and then into retail as well. So for CTC, this has been something that we've been pursuing for a while through a number of different modes and conversations with partners, other agencies, leaders in the space around, how do we bring the best TikTok shop service offering to our customers, to partner with them in the growth of their brands. And after many, many months of exploration and conversations around this, TBAR Partners was very clearly to us what we're doing.