Kerry G. Stephens - Amelia Hitchcock-Merritt launched her jewelry business on Instagram in late 2020, when she was 18.
- In February 2021, she partnered with a TikTok influencer whose post went viral and sales doubled.
- Hitchcock-Merritt shares the TikTok strategy she used to hit $85,000 in sales per month.
During lockdown 2020, 18-year-old Amelia Hitchcock-Merritt came up with the idea for an affordable jewelry brand aimed at Gen-Z consumers. She founded Bijoux de Mimi in June of that year, beginning with a collection of colorful huggie hoop earrings.
After a few months of steady growth, primarily marketing her jewelry via Instagram, Hitchcock-Merritt created a TikTok account for the company in January 2021. She knew it was key to attracting her Gen-Z audience, but didn’t know. not how to make the most of the relatively new platform for business.
Hitchcock-Merritt was posting TikTok videos on his company’s account, but none of them had much success. She decided to start sending her products to TikTok influencers who already had a large following to draw attention to her brand.
The first gifted Hitchcock-Merritt influencer is known by the username @lozeak on TikTok. She is an 18-year-old musician whose TikTok profile has amassed 45.5 million likes. Hitchcock-Merritt sent her a selection of earrings in exchange for a TikTok in February 2021 and the video went viral in less than a week.
The impact of this video was immediate. After publishing in late February, Hitchcock-Merritt said it had “nearly doubled our March orders”.
Hitchcock-Merritt realized the sales potential of partnering with influencers and started offering other influencers regularly after seeing the correlation between TikTok exposure and sales.
Giving away influencer giveaways has become a key part of the brand’s marketing strategy, and by June 2021, Hitchcock-Merritt was reaching around 500 influencers per month.
“I prefer to work with known influencers for their TikTok accounts,” she said. “I really think TikTok is going to take over Instagram. I think it’s going to take over all social media. I know a lot of people who don’t have Instagram anymore and just use TikTok.”
When offering TikTokers, Hitchcock-Merritt focuses on influencer engagement levels more than anything else.
“Their videos should consistently receive a large number of views and be proportional to their subscribers, rather than having just one viral video,” she said.
As Bijoux De Mimi is aimed at Gen-Z women, they primarily offer influencers who are popular with this demographic. Hitchcock-Merritt adds that she prefers giving gifts to fashion influencers rather than lifestyle influencers, because people who follow fashion influencers are more likely to look to them for inspiration and purchases. items they suggest.
However, it is still important for influencers to have a substantial following on Instagram, even if their content is primarily TikTok-based.
She makes sure that in all of her video content on TikTok and the influencers she works with redirect consumers to Instagram. The platform offers features like Instagram Shopping, swipes on stories, and the ability to put a link in your bio that make click-through sales more accessible.
“Instagram has a grip on sales,” Hitchcock-Merritt said.
Although influencer giveaways were part of their strategy, Hitchcock-Merritt continued to create content on Mimi’s Jewelry account. Their own video also went viral in April. “After our first viral video, my sales were steadily at £30,000 a month, down from £10,000 [before either of the viral videos] and from there it just went up,” Hitchcock-Merritt said. Insider checked those earnings.
She credits some of her success to the app’s algorithm. Once a video has gone viral, it’s much more likely that you’ll continue to appear on users’ For You page. While there’s no easy formula for going viral, Hitchcock-Merritt suggests using trending audio, background music or sound clips often used on TikTok, to create a video that’s totally unique from others. videos using the same sound.
While TikTok was the most crucial factor in Mimi’s Jewelry growth, the founder recognizes that it presents serious disadvantages for companies.
For example, only business accounts on TikTok can have a link in their bio directing users to their online store, but business accounts are limited in the amount of sounds they can use in videos, which can delay their growth ; the popularity of the background music or audio clip behind the video plays an important role in the explosion of a video.
When it comes to influencers, however, TikTok is the place to be, according to Hitchcock-Merritt. “[What were once] Instagram influencers are now TikTok influencers and Instagram influencers are kind of dead,” she said.
The influencers Bijoux De Mimi works with create daily content on TikTok and only post on Instagram a few times a month at most. Hitchcock-Merritt has held regular events for its community of influencers over the past year with the aim of building brand loyalty and creating a “cult following” for the brand.
“No one comes up to me and says, ‘Oh my god, you have that Instagram brand’ — it’s always ‘that TikTok brand,’” Hitchcock-Merritt said. “Community is so important to brands because you want to be the go-to place and I feel like I definitely touched a certain social group of teenage girls that way.”
Having now used TikTok for just over a year, Mimi’s Jewelry sales have grown more than a dozen times, with the business averaging £60,000 ($85,000) each month in revenue verified by Insider. Hitchcock-Merritt, 20, aims to continue growing the business through TikTok, alongside a social media manager she recently hired.
