Worth the Hype

The company debuted with a six-second video featuring a girl using Wavytalk's curling iron on TikTok Shop. The video went viral, and around a thousand curling irons sold in just a day. "We never expected that video would bring such explosive sales. It had never happened before in all our years of cross-border business," Wavytalk founder Zou Xiu told NewsChina.

The company had been an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) for foreign companies for about a decade, before deciding to develop their own range.　

With a strong supply chain at home, they built an edge based on their comprehensive product line and competitive prices. But rising tariffs, logistics and compliance costs are making it harder.　

Like Wavytalk, many Chinese small-and medium-sized enterprises were invisible, acting as manufacturers for Western brands and retailers. Social media platforms have allowed them to compete on an equal footing, using sites like TikTok Shop, Facebook and Instagram. Employing content creators to assist them, they make emotional connections with consumers, allowing them to sell not just products, but lifestyle brands in overseas markets.

The clip does not introduce the actual cat tree, but still the comment section blew up, with people asking where to buy it and how much it was. The surge in orders demonstrated the power of emotional storytelling over traditional product pitches.　

Cai Fengquan, who manages cross-border trade for Tianyuan Pet, said the company has been in business for many years. Some of their products bring in millions of US dollars a year on Amazon. But their brand barely had any name recognition.　

That is a big problem for the scores of manufacturers scattered across industrial clusters in areas like the Pearl and Yangtze river deltas in eastern and southern China. They have long been trapped at the bottom of the global value chain, earning scant profits amid cutthroat competition. Despite their mature manufacturing and supply chain efficiency, they have little brand premium or pricing power.　

Traditional e-commerce platforms cannot help them much. "What we found as the biggest ceiling to growth is that even though you can sell products, you can barely build brand awareness or earn customer loyalty," Wavytalk's Zou said in an interview with 36Kr, a tech and business news outlet.　

On platforms like Amazon, consumers search for a specific item and a sea of similar-looking listings appears. They compare prices and reviews, and make purchase decisions. This exposes a fundamental flaw in the traditional model: Products are competitive only in price, making it hard for a new brand to stand out and build long-term assets.　

On social media platforms, content and emotions come first. Users are not searching - they are scrolling for entertainment. In this environment, a 12-second cat video has an edge. This "content-first" approach allows brands to build an identity and a personal connection with consumers before a purchase is even considered.　

In this new ecosystem, "content is the shelf and creators are the salespeople," Zou said.　

As Cai Fengquan of Tianyuan Pet puts it, "Amazon solves the problem of selling goods, but TikTok solves the problem of being remembered."　

"The biggest challenge for brands going global is getting consumers to recognize your name in the first place," Cai said. "In the past, that meant throwing money at Google Ads and Facebook, or hiring expensive overseas PR agencies to place articles. The costs were extremely high and results were hard to measure.　

But today, a viral short video might cost little more than the time it takes to shoot and edit, and it can generate more reach than a million-dollar ad campaign.　

Cai said that once a supply chain is in place, the missing piece is an arena where consumers can truly connect with and remember a brand.　

Direct connection with consumers through video platforms allows manufacturers to get instant feedback and make timely adaptations to the market, particularly the overseas markets, where Chinese firms struggle to understand needs of consumers there.　

Comments and interaction from consumers on platforms like TikTok Shop fill the gap. Wavytalk's bestselling curling iron was a direct result of this feedback.　

"We determined there was strong consumer demand for this product, so we moved quickly to develop it as a separate product," Zou told 36kr. Previously, it had been sold as part of a set. Drawing on feedback from the comments, they added adjustable temperature settings and integrated negative-ion technology to combat frizz.　

According to the 2026 TikTok E-commerce White Paper released by Kalodata, a Chinese data analysis platform, TikTok Shop's US site generated US$14.2 billion in gross merchandise value (GMV) in 2025, an increase of 94 percent over the previous year. Influencers and creators drove about 70.9 percent of sales. This is the new approach in interest-based and emotional e-commerce, where a purchase is the conclusion of a story, not the start of a transaction.　

For Chinese sellers, the brand awareness they gain on platforms like TikTok carries over to other platforms as well as offline. Their brand image grown on content-based platforms stimulates growth on Amazon, their own independent sites and even their brick-and-mortar retail stores overseas.　

A viral hit on TikTok often leads to increased search volume on Amazon, in the same way domestic consumers turn to e-commerce sites like Taobao or JD.com after they see products on Chinese lifestyle apps like RedNote or Douyin.

Euhomy, a home icemaker brand, tapped into Americans' passion for iced drinks through scenario-based content. Guo Yiwen, who heads the brand's TikTok operations, told NewsChina that they create ASMR-style videos, featuring close-ups of people crunching on ice. The satisfying sounds trigger an almost visceral pleasure that compels viewers to follow and ultimately buy. "It's a core purchase trigger," Guo said.　

However, this new path is not without pitfalls. On platforms like TikTok, sellers face a new environment that involves users of different backgrounds. Many had a rocky start due to cultural misunderstandings.　

Cai Fengquan said that Tianyuan Pet learned this the hard way. One of their videos that showed a cat jumping from a height was flooded with comments in the US accusing them of animal abuse. "European and US users are sensitive about luring pets to do dangerous stunts," Cai said. Now every piece of content is vetted by an American reviewer before it is posted for European and US markets.　

A viral video can cause an overnight surge in orders, but Chen Yunpeng, a swimsuit manufacturer based in Xingcheng, Liaoning Province, warned that supply chains are not built overnight. "If a video goes viral, you'd better have the goods to ship immediately. Otherwise, even the best content operations are useless," Chen said.　

A viral hit is a double-edged sword: It magnifies a brand's strengths, but it can just as quickly expose its weak spots. Unstable supply chains cause supply shortages and if sellers are slow to ship, they get negative reviews. Quality fluctuations can damage the trust of both the content creators the brand hires and consumers.　

Cai said that when a dog bed video went viral, their inventory sold out within three days, but it took 45 days to restock. By the time the goods arrived, the buzz had already faded. After that, the team created a dedicated product inventory for TikTok, using localized warehouses to support small-batch, high-frequency restocking instead of the large-scale inventory model used for other platforms.　

The low barrier to entry means a hit product will spawn a wave of copycats within days. Zhong Li, who sells squishy toys on cross-border platforms, said that many sellers simply tweak a hit product's design to avoid copyright issues, leading to short product life-cycles and low quality.　

In response, he has updated his products using food-grade silicone, finished with a delicate flocking coating (tactile fibers), which are protected by patents and registered trademarks. "We're building a premium brand with strong pricing power," Zhong said.　

Meanwhile, competition in this arena is increasingly fierce as the number of shops keep growing. This means more cost to capture traffic, including the commission paid to content creators. New and smaller sellers are facing more pressure as the market has become a winner-takes-all battleground.　

On TikTok Shop US, the top 1 percent of sellers generate roughly 60 percent of all sales, while the bottom half of sellers together command only a sliver of the market, according to a survey by New York e-commerce data research firm Marketplace Pulse in June based on nearly 100,000 seller interviews.　

Despite the challenges, more are seeing the potential. Zhong Li told NewsChina that the cross-border business park in Hangzhou where his office is located has nearly 100 companies doing cross-border business. The majority of companies are usually run by just two or three people, and they are relatively young. Zhong has been in the park for over a year, and his office has expanded from dozens of square meters to an entire floor.　

Sun Peisen, 31, who sells beauty products via content platforms, has grown his team from two to dozens of people in the past two years. His GMV reached 20 million yuan (US$2.94m) in 2025. He told NewsChina that the entry threshold for doing cross-border business is lower now. Building a brand overseas used to mean securing local distribution channels, running ad campaigns, hiring foreign agencies and spending years building a physical retail presence. Now, a lean team of just a few people can get started by joining a platform, filming content, using AI to translate and partnering with content creators to generate sales through short videos.　

"Every seller has a dream to build a brand. But making the first breakthrough isn't the hard part. The real challenge is whether you can scale up manufacturing and operations that sustains the brand over the long haul," Sun said.