Happy Sunday!

If you're reading this, I hope you got a real break this weekend and you've got a few minutes before the week kicks off.

Quick personal note first. After about a year out of the day-to-day at Sharma Brands, I've been getting back in the mix over the last couple of months with Pierson and the Lunar team, and honestly it's been a lot of fun. A good chunk of that time has gone into TikTok Shop, and specifically the question every brand on it eventually hits: we seeded a bunch of creators and the sales started trickling in... now what?

I'll be honest, I've seen this exact meeting more times than I can count. A brand sends out 300 samples. They get 60 or 70 videos back, a handful of them actually sell something, and the Shop does maybe $40K in a month. Then someone says "imagine if we sent 1,000." Nobody in the room can tell you which of those 60 videos did the selling, or where the people who watched them went after. But the sample budget doubles anyway.

So today is what I'd look at first, before you approve more samples or more GMV Max spend. Most of it comes from how the Lunar team runs TikTok Shop for clients, and it's about as tactical as it gets.

But, before we get into that...

Vendor of the Week

Jurni - landing pages that follow through on your BFCM ads.

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I’d make the landing experience part of every BFCM creative brief. If your ad sells a holiday bundle, the page should make that exact bundle easy to buy. Sending shoppers to a standard PDP and making them find the offer is begging them to drop off.

When you’re approaching your biggest spend of the year, those lost conversions add up.

Jurni connects to Meta and scans your ads and catalog, building a context layer around your brand. Combined with performance learnings from AG1, ThirdLove, SpoiledChild, Dose, and ARMRA, it recommends which experiences to build and which existing pages to optimize.

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If you don’t know where to start just yet, take the ads you’re putting the most budget behind. Give those clicks a matching experience, test it with Jurni and scale what converts.

Book a Jurni demo and see what you could launch before BFCM.

More samples is not a strategy

Here's the thing. GMV Max is hungry. You give it products and a target, it goes and finds the videos and the placements, and it'll run on your own content or on authorized affiliate content without a mature affiliate program behind it. That's the easy part. What it can't do is make a bad video teach somebody why to buy. So when a TikTok Shop program stalls, the fix is almost never "more money into the campaign." It's something upstream of it. Usually the creators, or what the videos are answering, or the listing the viewer lands on. Sometimes all of it.

Build creators, don't just ship to them

Davanna, who runs TikTok Shop for us at Lunar, said something that stuck with me: nurturing affiliate relationships is not optional. The creators who actually move product post about it over and over, series-style, where each video shows the thing solving a real problem in their actual day. One post is a sample that got opened. Five posts over two months is a creator who adopted the product.

Hudson at Comfrt has said this a hundred different ways. 600,000 affiliates, and the ones that matter aren't the celebrities, they're the micro creators who post about the hoodie constantly because they actually wear it. That's the model.

Which changes how you pick creators. Historical GMV is fine as a filter, but it's not the answer. The question is whether they can demonstrate your product naturally and whether the people watching are the people who'd buy it. A 40K-follower creator who actually hauls groceries up three flights of stairs will outsell a 2M-follower creator holding your bag for four seconds. I've watched it happen.

Then support them like a partner, not a vendor you sent a box to. Give them accurate product info. Forward them the questions coming into customer support (your CX inbox is the best creative brief you own and nobody reads it). Tell them which angles are working. What you don't do is write their script. The second a creator sounds like your PDP, the comments will say so and the video is dead.

The distinction I'd tattoo on every affiliate manager's arm: repeat content versus duplicate content. Take Hulken, the foldable-rolling tote. They came over to Lunar as part of the Sharma Brands acquisition (we built their website, and Lunar runs a lot of their digital now). The useful version of a creator sequence is a first video loading the bag with groceries, then a follow-up a few weeks later answering a question from the comments, like whether it fits in a trunk. Two videos, two different buying questions answered. The useless version is the same opening line filmed in three different rooms. Nobody learned anything from video two, and the algorithm knows it.

And sample economics are real. Every sample has a product cost and a handling cost, sure, but the real cost is that every creator you seed is someone your team has to follow up with. If you can meaningfully support 25 creators, seeding 300 does not get you 12x the result. It gets you 275 orphaned relationships and a bunch of your product on Facebook Marketplace. Build the seeding plan around what you can actually nurture, not around whatever number a playbook told you.

The move this week: open a sheet. One row per creator you've already seeded. The use case they're credible on, what they've posted, the questions in their comments, and the one specific next video you'd ask them for. Twenty minutes in and you'll see which relationships have a next step and which ones were just a shipment. You can even have GrokBot help you manage this part of the process.

Let search tell you what the next video should answer

Once you know who makes the content, the question is what it should answer. TikTok search is the cheat code here, and almost nobody uses it.

Creator Search Insights (it's inside the app, under creator tools) shows what people are actually searching on TikTok, and the Content gap filter surfaces topics with search interest and barely any videos covering them. It's a research input, not a guarantee... demand with no content doesn't mean the orders show up. But it's the best free signal you have for what to make next.

The process is simple. Start with a product use case. Look at what people search around it and what videos already exist. Pick the question your product can honestly answer, then brief a creator to make that answer unmistakable. Nine times out of ten, that same search will show you something missing from your listing too.

The judgment call is fit. A popular search is worthless if your product can't credibly solve it, and a creator reading keywords into the camera is worse than no video at all, respectfully. Search tells you what to answer... the creator decides how to say it.

The video made a promise. Does the listing keep it?

Before you blame the content for weak results, walk the path a shopper takes after the video. I do this with every brand I look at and it's shocking how often the answer is "oh."

Is the product in stock? Does the listing explain the thing the video just promised, or does the viewer land on three photos and a size chart? Is the delivery promise realistic for what your 3PL can actually do this week? And go read the reviews and the complaints, because I promise nobody on the team has this month. Fulfillment problems and unanswered complaints hurt twice. The buyer has a bad experience, and your shop health takes a hit, which limits what programs you're even eligible for. Hulken lived a version of this early on. Operational issues limited what the brand could do inside the Shop until they got cleaned up, and no amount of content was going to fix that.

Category rank is a diagnostic, not a goal. Look at where your product sits versus the listings around it and use the comparison to find the confusing copy or the use case you never explain. And please don't pick the wrong category to rank higher. Being #2 somewhere nobody is shopping is worth exactly nothing.

Pick one product tonight. Watch the best creator video about it, then open the listing and ask what a shopper would still be unsure of. That gap is your next fix, and it's a lot cheaper than another round of samples.

Feed GMV Max, then read the number honestly

Now the media side, which is where most brands start and should actually end.

Lunar's framing is that GMV Max is the Cookie Monster, except it eats videos. It wants volume. But a thousand near-identical videos gets you a thousand near-identical results, so the question for every new piece of content is whether it adds a different, relevant explanation of why to buy. Your media buyer needs to know which videos are actually authorized for ads (check, don't assume, because plenty of creator posts aren't) and what's already been tested, and then that has to flow back to whoever's briefing creators. It's a loop. Most brands run it as a drop-off.

Then the measurement part, and this one matters. While a Product GMV Max campaign is running, TikTok attributes every order for the promoted products to the campaign. Paid and organic. Affiliate orders. Orders from people who never saw an ad. That's how the product works, and it's fine as long as you know it. What it means is the ROI number on your GMV Max dashboard is not an incremental return on ad spend, and it is definitely not profit. Do the math yourself: GMV, minus ad spend, minus affiliate commissions, minus product and fulfillment and everything else that moves per order. Then ask whether that number holds as spend goes up, or whether you've just been paying to re-buy orders you were already getting.

Hulken is the clearest example I can point to of all of this in order. When the Lunar team picked it up, the shop had a low Shop Score that was restricting affiliate capabilities and access to GMV Max, with visibility and fulfillment problems stacked on top. Great product, broken plumbing. The sequence was exactly the one above. Fix the operations first. Rebuild the affiliate program around creators who'd post repeatedly, feed the content with what people were actually searching, and only then turn GMV Max on. Once the affiliate side was healthy there was finally enough creative for the campaigns to hit their spend targets.

GMV was up 124% in the first 90 days, and the newest product launch climbed to #2 in its category in under 30 days with the majority of that GMV coming through affiliates. A before-and-after doesn't prove which lever did what, and I'm not going to pretend it does. The order of operations is the lesson.

Four questions before you spend another dollar

Back to the meeting from the top. Before anyone approves more samples or more GMV Max budget, make them answer these:

• Which creator we've already seeded has a credible next video to make?

• Which buying question should the next piece of content answer?

• What would a shopper still be unsure of after opening the listing?

• What business number tells us this spend was worth it?

If you can answer all four, spend. If you can't, the money is going to buy you more of whatever you already have.

And if you want a second set of eyes on your TikTok Shop program, the Sharma Brands and Lunar team is doing audits and growth roadmaps for brands heading into Q4 and planning for 2027. Reach out here and we'll take a look.

That's all for this week

Go build the creator sheet tonight. It'll tell you more about your TikTok Shop program than the last three weeks of dashboards did. If TikTok Shop is a channel you're trying to get right, reply and tell me where you're stuck. I'm happy to go deeper on this one.

It's Sunday night, so I hope you plan to get a full 9 hours of sleep tonight and have an incredible week. BFCM is close... drink some water, get a walk in, take care of yourself.

I'll see you next Sunday. Same time, same place!