This Is What a $300 Million TikTok Strategy Looks Like Glow Recipe has mastered the social media sales funnel, and they're opening their playbook.
By Liz Brody Edited by Frances Dodds
This story appears in the March 2025 issue of Entrepreneur. Subscribe »
For most companies, social media is a given. You hire a team, pump out content, try to channel the viral spirits, maybe hire some influencers. It's a lot.
But if that's all, you may be missing out on social media's greatest business potential. When you're fully strategic, your social media can become a virtuous cycle where customers buy, speak, are heard, and see themselves integrated into the product — which they then buy more of, shout louder about, and share like crazy. When that happens, "community" isn't just an overused buzzword; it becomes the capital that fuels your growth.
Sarah Lee and Christine Chang, founders of Glow Recipe, have pulled that off. Their beauty brand has 1.6 million followers on TikTok, who directly fuel their $300 million in annual sales. Social media is "a core part of our business DNA," as Lee puts it. More than a tool to boost sales, it's a strategy that defines their road map, marketing, and brand direction. "We're not just putting out products that look beautiful and hoping for the best," she says. "And we're not just having a one-way conversation. We want feedback from our customers — and a lot of it is incorporated into our next steps. We call it our recipe for success." Here are the ingredients.
Related: How to Build an Online Presence With Social Media
Tactic #1: Build systems to hear your customers.
Social media's power can also be its weakness. As a place where people say anything, you can get honest customer feedback. But "anything" also means a lot of noise — and that can drown out valuable voices and insights. That's why you can't just rely on employees casually checking the comments. You need systems, and Glow Recipe has two.
To appreciate these systems, it helps to know Glow Recipe's founders. Lee and Chang were born in South Korea and loved bonding with family and friends at public bathhouses; that's where they'd splash spoiled milk on their faces, soothe rashes with watermelon rind, and swap tips and strategies together.
The two women met working at L'Oréal in Seoul, and then transferred to New York, where they discovered a very different skincare culture: In America, people tend to apply cosmetics alone in the bathroom, not in public at a bathhouse. So when they decided to start their own brand — pooling $50,000 in savings to build Glow Recipe around fruit-based skincare products — they wanted it to be defined by that sense of warm belonging they'd loved at the bathhouses. Social media became the way to do that, and they prioritized hiring digital natives.
So how do they systematize their social media use?
First, they make it central to their internal discussions. The company's Monday morning meetings always start with the customer care team sharing users' comments and DMs. Then they talk about implications for the business. For example, if many people react the same way on an Instagram post, should that be factored into developing a new product or changing a marketing strategy?
Of course, social media moves faster than a weekly Monday meeting can — so that's why they have a second system: a Slack channel called "#tiktok-ig" where the team shares notable commentary from social media 24/7.
Both systems have helped shape product development. In one Monday meeting, for example, the team noticed a recurring theme in the comments: Consumers kept asking about acne. "Can I use this on acne-prone skin?" one person wrote. "Any products for pimples?" another asked. That led Glow Recipe to develop a formula for adult breakouts. Launched last September, it's called Blackberry Retinol Blemish Serum, and first-year sales are projected at $15 million.
Another example: Glow Recipe has a product called Dew Drops, which gives your skin a "dewy glow." Customers started to mix it with their own makeup bronzer and post their results on social. Glow Recipe had nothing to do with this trend, but immediately noticed it — and took action. The brand hired a chemist to make a dewy serum that also delivered a hint of tint, exactly the way that users on social media said they liked it. The result was a new product called Hue Drops, which debuted last February and it's on track to do $30 million in first-year sales.
Related: 9 Tips To Grow Your Small Business With Social Media Marketing
Tactic #2: Never hide, always respond.
A consumer survey by Sprout Social found that the No. 1 most memorable thing a brand can do is respond to customers. Glow Recipe believes in that deeply. "If you leave a comment on our social media, you will be getting a response from our team," says Chang.
Then they take it a step further.
For example, not all comments are warm and fuzzy, and the bad ones travel fast. Rather than ignore them, Lee and Chang see those moments as an opportunity to engage with their community by responding with the right comeback.
For example, they once launched a product that over time developed an unexpectedly bad smell. Some users compared it to ham; others to hot-dog water. Kathleen Lights, a beauty influencer with over 2 million Instagram followers, described it as "rancid dog-piss."
"We were upset, obviously," says Lee — and they knew they needed to respond. So first, Glow Recipe fixed the product. Then it needed to announce the updated formula, but with the right sense of humor. To do that, the brand posted an edit of Lights' original video, where she repeatedly insulted the product's smell (but praised what it did for her skin). "It brought us so much engagement," Lee says. "I think our community really felt that their feedback was taken seriously."
Related: The Business of Harnessing the Power of Social Media
Tactic #3: Use imperfections to build trust.
In the early days of Glow Recipe, Instagram grids were neatly curated, with carefully posed and skillfully polished posts. But the #nofilter movement soon took off, with more raw, authentic, "catch me in a messy moment" content. Consumer expectations shifted as a result: The less fancy the editing and professional finessing, the more trustworthy a post or video seemed to be.
Glow Recipe tapped into this trend early. They stopped retouching their imagery years ago, and their models don't wear makeup — baring dry, broken-out, and uneven skin.
In 2023, Lee and Chang doubled down on this approach. For their big annual ad campaign, they held a casting call for their customers — and chose people without ever seeing them. Instead, Glow Recipe just asked for essays about how these customers related to their skin. Lee and Chang worked with a third party to blind anything that could potentially lead to unconscious bias, like names and locations. Not only did it build trust and a sense of shared values with their customers, but the marketing basically said: Our products look great no matter who you are, so we'll show it on regular people like you.
Three thousand people applied, and 10 were chosen. Lee and Chang saw the winners for the first time over Zoom. One of the winners had written about having Down's Syndrome. "I remember that call the most," says Lee. "It was just her in the beginning, but when we announced that she was the winner, her whole family who'd been hiding under the screen stood up — and her mom, the siblings — they were all crying. I mean, I had to turn off my Zoom, it was so incredibly emotional."
The campaign was such a success that they did a second one last year, with 4,000 applicants. Will they repeat it in 2025? Lee and Chang hedge. After all, for any good social media recipe, the final ingredient is: You've got to keep switching it up.
