Q&A: PrettyLittleThing head of social Beckie Turnbull on the power of social commerce

Following the departure of former CEO Umar Kamani earlier this year, as well as the influencer Molly-Mae Hague stepping down from her role as creative director, this year has been one of many changes for Manchester-based fashion brand PrettyLittleThing.

With fierce competition from the brands within its owner Boohoo’s group, as well as the likes of Shein and Temu on the rise, PLT remains determined to stay ahead of the competition.

Following its launch on TikTok Shop in the UK in May, head of social Beckie Turnbull sat down with Retail Week to discuss PLT’s TikTok journey and the importance of its success on the platform to date.

How did you decide the brand was ready to launch on TikTok Shop?

“In terms of TikTok, we launched three or four years ago when everyone was unsure about it. We were able to beat everyone to it and a lot of our growth was because we were the only ecommerce brand on there. It made us really take advantage of our engagement at the time and we grew rapidly in the first six months. We’ve grown the account and we got it to around 2 million followers before we launched our TikTok Shop.

“We don’t have a Shopify plug-in, so everything with PLT is made bespoke from an IT perspective. That had been a barrier in terms of us launching on TikTok shop. We’d seen other small brands having really good success on there and we had a lot of demand from our followers to make TikTok Shop available to them.

“We were the first brand in our group to launch and we are by far the most successful ecommerce brand out there since launching. When we launched in May this year, it was the biggest launch TikTok Shop has seen in the UK.”

Do you have plans to launch TikTok Shop in other markets?

“In terms of diversifying and making sure it is more international, a lot of our following is US-based. We are planning to do the same but TikTok Shop has only just launched in the US.

“It is still new to the UK and doing really well but it is even newer for the US so we are just trying to observe it and make sure we have a US offering within the next six to 12 months.”

How do you select which products from to sell on TikTok Shop?

“At the moment, we limit the amount of products on the shop to around 160, so we aren’t putting every single item on the website on TikTok Shop because that doesn’t make sense. If I’m honest, 160 is a bit too high. We want to make sure that we are focusing a lot of our efforts on the key drivers.

“A lot of our items don’t have a lot of stock behind them; it is part of our test-and-play process across our ecommerce brand. If something is new in and doesn’t have a lot of stock behind it, we might not use it on TikTok Shop just yet. We use a lot of trend-based products that have a lot of stock behind them, in order for us to make sure people can shop it for a while.

“We are fully aware of what products on the TikTok Shop environment are selling, whether that is jeans or jackets or what types of products people are tagging in their content.”

Why is it important to sell via social media?

“As a brand, we want to make sure our customers and followers are offered the best opportunities possible in terms of content and value. Social commerce is just one of the ways that we can make sure our customers get the best of everything. It gives them instantaneous shopping, it is the quickest way to shop the brand without having a disjointed journey.

“Instagram launched [a similar model] in years prior but it has not hit it off as well as TikTok Shop. We do have Instagram live shopping, which works well for us, but it is nowhere near as successful as what we’ve seen with TikTok Shop.”