On Friday, fashion and beauty brands were bracing to hear what would happen to TikTok as the looming deadline for its parent company, ByteDance, to sell the platform approached. By Saturday, the already-delayed deadline was extended once again for 75 days. On Sunday, those brands were back to playing the waiting game.
Over the last few months, the combination of TikTok’s flip-flopping status — going offline, then coming back again, and now soon to be transformed under new leadership — and the devastating effect of the new tariffs has rocked the industry. Brands are facing a spiraling economic disaster and an unpredictable presidential administration that’s made planning for the future difficult.
“Fashion is unpredictable enough, when what is in style today could be completely out of style tomorrow,” said Amy Ekren, founder of the Minnesota-based fashion brand Inherit Clothing. “With the current unpredictable state of TikTok, it makes it hard to plan our marketing strategy. TikTok has been a great way for us to get the word out about our brand, but if it is erased, what is the point in investing in this strategy further? Right now, we are in a holding period to wait and see what happens.”
The sense of being in stasis, waiting around to see what the fate of an essential platform will be, has recently been common across fashion and beauty, according to Quynh Mai. Mai is the founder of Qulture, a marketing agency that has worked with major fashion brands like Prada and Ralph Lauren and led the TikTok Shop campaigns of brands like Michael Kors.
“Brands are paralyzed right now,” Mai said. “They’re just holding until they hear the news. Most brands I work with are operating under the assumption that TikTok won’t be banned. But many are cutting back on their media budgets because they don’t know if the customer will be scared off by the stock market fluctuations, the tariffs or the TikTok sale. They want to time their marketing for times of stability, but things are not stable right now.”
Lauren Petrullo, the founder of online Asian beauty marketplace Asian Beauty Essentials, told Glossy that the uncertainty has put some of the company’s plans on hold.
“TikTok is the only social platform giving social selling legs,” Petrullo said. “It’s put a pause on our setup investment, including hiring a shopping content creator. So, we’re working on that. Do we still do live shopping on other networks that don’t have the performance? Or will one of the other platforms fill the need by creating something similar themselves? While we hire and work with international [companies] all the time, U.S.-based shipping was the place where we were investing more into the U.S. job economy than with any other platform we’ve explored, but all of that is currently on hold.”
As for what will happen if or when TikTok finally does get sold, it no longer seems likely that the new owner will operate it as business as usual, Mai said. TikTok has multiple bidders, including major tech giants like Amazon and Microsoft, as well as private equity and investment firms like Blackstone. Mai said that it’s likely TikTok’s new owner will try to turn the platform’s valuable 170 million users toward its own ends. If the owner is Amazon, TikTok could turn it into even more of a commerce platform and extension of Amazon’s omnipresent e-commerce empire. If the owner is Microsoft, Mai expects the company to integrate its AI investments like Copilot and harvest as much data from TikTok as possible to train its AI models.
“But for fashion and beauty, we really have no choice but to hang on to TikTok,” Mai said. “Stay with it at all costs. It’s really the only platform left where organic reach is still possible. Nothing else out there — not YouTube or Instagram or Facebook — gives our brands organic reach or connection to culture the way TikTok does.”
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