This story was first reported on and published by Glossy sibling site Modern Retail.
Makeup brand MAC Cosmetics is heading into Cyber Week and the new year with live shopping on the brain.
MAC has hosted livestreams on the Chinese platforms Tmall and Douyin for years and has found each to be a strong sales driver, Emily Bromfield, svp of global marketing at MAC, told Modern Retail. In fact, the company calls itself a “first mover” in China’s social-selling space, having joined Tmall nearly a decade ago. But this will be the first holiday season MAC has sold on TikTok Shop in the U.S. — an occasion MAC hopes will help it to reach new audiences and rack up sales. MAC joined the platform a few months ago, and it’s already sold more than 160,000 units on TikTok Shop.
This Cyber Week and beyond, MAC is taking a multi-pronged approach to livestreaming. It involves going live with external creators on its own channels, going live with external creators on their own channels, and going live with its own makeup artists in its own stores. For Black Friday, MAC offered discounts and bundles on TikTok Shop, as well as 30% off its entire website. It expects certain products, like lip combos, to do especially well on TikTok Shop. MAC has 1.2 million followers on TikTok (@maccosmetics), and its products have gone viral on TikTok in the past.
Live shopping has taken off in Asia on platforms like Taobao and Douyin, but it has had more of an uphill battle in the U.S. Live-shopping sales are expected to account for just 5% of total e-commerce in the U.S. by 2026, per Coresight Research.
Still, appetite is growing. A 2024 survey from digital commerce platform VTEX found that 45% of U.S. consumers had browsed or purchased from live-shopping events in the past 12 months. TikTok Shop has been vital to this growth and, despite concerns about a ban, is now as big as eBay. What’s more, live-shopping platforms like Whatnot and Palmstreet have raised millions of dollars in funding at a time when other sectors have struggled.
“We’ve seen so much demand from our brand partners to learn about this medium,” said Avery Akkineni, CMO at VaynerX, a global media agency that held its first live-shopping summit in October. Akkineni has been monitoring live shopping in China since 2019.
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“We’ve been waiting patiently for that wave to hit the United States,” Akkineni told Modern Retail. “Over the last year, we’ve started to feel the tides shift. More and more brands are interested, because more and more consumers are interested. We are really seeing live shopping as the next evolution of social, for this holiday season.”
Modern Retail sat down with Bromfield to learn more about MAC’s plans for live shopping for Cyber Week and beyond. Below are excerpts of the conversation, edited for length and clarity.
MAC’s history with livestreaming
“MAC has been doing livestreaming for a while, because we have quite a strong business in China. Livestreaming in China has happened for years now, on Tmall, and then, more recently, on Douyin. Half of our Douyin sales are from livestreaming. … We’ve taken a lot of those learnings and applied them to our U.S. TikTok Shop. Our U.S. TikTok Shop launched about five months ago, so it’s relatively new. We’re doing a lot of experimentation.
[One thing we’ve learned] is that it’s particularly powerful to go live when it’s paired with a specific moment in your brand — whether you’ve got a really exciting new launch, a new face that you’re announcing or a really high-traffic moment. We just had Double 11 [also known as Single’s Day] in China. Our lives on Douyin were incredibly successful. So, those are learnings we’re applying to America.”
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MAC’s approach to TikTok Shop
“A brand like MAC is founded in artistry. I think education — showing product — is key. And also, TikTok is about immediate gratification. You see immediate payoff. You see a result. You see a transformation. That’s what [viewers] are there for. For us, it’s more of a show than a tell. But also, we need to provide entertainment. That’s why QVC worked. It was entertainment and shopping at the same time.
So, we’re defining our own version of edutainment. How can we educate and show, but also entertain and wrap in selling? … We haven’t yet launched a product exclusively through [TikTok Shop]. It’s my ultimate dream. I really want to test it. We have a distinctly younger audience on TikTok Shop, so it’s really interesting to us.”
MAC’s plans for Cyber Week
“We’ve got a series of lives planned on our own channel, lives planned with external creators on our own channel, and lives planned with external creators on their channels, as part of a multi-brand [activation]. We’re also going to be working with a big TikTok seller and star on TikTok Shop.
[Sales] are the name of the game for Cyber Week. We were expecting more sales to be done through discount, but the reality is that our new consumer just wants to try. They’re not necessarily shopping on discount; they’re looking for newness or something that really works.
What we find works well on TikTok Shop and on lives is bundles. They’re almost like starter kits for the brand, and naturally, with a bundle, you get a bit of a discount. But I wouldn’t say that’s the reason why people are shopping [with us]. It’s more because of the education behind how one product works with another. For example, we do incredibly well with lip combos, which is one of the fastest-growing hashtags on TikTok Shop and has great conversion.”
Tapping store employees to tape content
“We’re very privileged at MAC to have a strong community of tens of thousands of amazing makeup artists, as a brand, internally. They’re all very versatile, very good orators, very good at communicating and educating. So, they’ve been utilized to a great effect on Douyin in China to go live for content.
We are lucky enough to be able to do an omnichannel live play where we can go live with the artist, from our stores. That’s an interesting thing we’ve started doing in America, as well. That has been incredibly powerful for us, and that has actually driven people into our stores, which we didn’t expect. We’re looking to increase the [time] we go live and the frequency, … but we have to balance the mix of distribution and the way we utilize our makeup artists.”
Forming relationships with external creators
“We have a database of amazing influencers and creators we work with across TikTok and Instagram and YouTube. For TikTok Shop, we found a whole new group of creators that we’ve never worked with before. They’re top TikTok sellers, … and they bring a whole new audience and a different way of talking about the brand. That’s been really exciting for us, and it’s significantly increased the number of creators that we are talking to on a monthly basis. … Every month, we’re sending out thousands of mailers to new creators that we’ve never worked with. All of that generates EMV [earned media value], let alone converts that EMV to GMV [gross merchandise value]. It’s exciting to establish new pathways to get to new consumers.”
MAC’s plans for live selling (and going beyond TikTok) in 2026
“What’s really important is that you establish a channel. You don’t just move on. It’s really tempting. You saw it with the rise of social media. Everyone was on Instagram, and then Snapchat, and then something else. No one could figure out what they were doing on each one. Now, everyone’s very developed. They understand what each channel means and why. So, for us, with live selling [in the U.S.], we will stick with TikTok Shop for now, see what other channels have to offer and go from there.
I think the biggest mistake you can make as a marketer — and just generally, as a brand — is getting your head turned too quickly. We wouldn’t do that. We’re working on our 2026 livestreaming plans right now. I would say the one thing we really love is the omnichannel approach of having our own artists go live from our own stores. Having that interplay of the three channels [e-commerce, social media and in-person retail] is incredibly interesting.”
