The Beachwaver Co. — one of the earliest beauty brands to break through on TikTok Shop — is looking to translate its digital success into brick-and-mortar sales.
First launched in 2012 by celebrity hairstylist Sarah Potempa and sisters Erin Potempa-Wall and Emily Potempa, the brand is bringing its assortment of hair care and tool offerings to Target doors nationwide in October. The brand has also launched at Dillards, Von Maur, online at Ulta Beauty and in all Anthropologie stores.
The shifts mark a return to retail for the brand, which got its start selling on QVC with Sarah Potempa conducting live demonstrations using the brand’s debut offering and hero product, the $229 Beachwaver Pro rotating curling iron. The brand shortly after rolled the tool out to Target, Ulta and Nordstrom, before pulling out of retail in 2016 to focus on growing its direct-to-consumer business.
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“QVC was phenomenal in the sense that we got to demo our product for an audience, but with that kind of show you get a very limited amount of time — usually 10 minutes — and we were like, ‘how do we really get to know our customer? How can we get feedback?’” said Potempa.
Indeed, 10-minute QVC demos are a far cry from the six- to eight-hour livestreams that have catalyzed Beachwaver’s sales on TikTok Shop, where the brand has sold more than 1.1 million units in just one year, and ranks among the top 1 percent of all TikTok Shop merchants. Data from Charm.io, too, indicates the brand netted more than $11 million in TikTok Shop sales during the first half of 2024, making it the fourth-biggest beauty brand by sales on the platform during the period.
Usually consisting of hairstyling tutorials or order-packing videos — streamed from the brand’s warehouse in Illinois — the livestream sessions are similar in structure to those which the brand began conducting in the late 2010s via its direct-to-consumer website, though TikTok has brought them to a much wider audience.
“When I’m doing a livestream on our website or on social media, I can literally see the flood of questions and comments from viewers, so it’s more of a two-way stream where I’m also getting to experience the consumer,” said Potempa, who this summer opened a 5,100-square-foot content studio in Brooklyn’s Domino Sugar Factory. Complete with an office and boutique salon space, the outpost doubles as a venue for influencer and community events.
Since its initial withdrawal from retail, Beachwaver has amassed a 750,000-member-plus “Text Fam,” most of whom are women aged 34 and up, who have opted into texts notifying them when the brand is going live on its website or on TikTok Shop.
“The line of communication we’ve been able to build with our consumer has been a direct result of our decision to invest in our community and building the brand, versus trying to push full force at the time into retail,” said Potempa-Wall.
The step back also allowed the brand to focus on building its product assortment, adding flat irons, hair dryers and different iterations of the signature Beachwaver, as well as foraying into hair care products — from hair sprays to mousses to purple shampoo — in 2019. “We only had the one stock keeping unit for a long time, and that wasn’t a big assortment for our retailers. Now, we have well over 100 stock keeping units — we’re a very different company than we were back then,” said Sarah Potempa.
Though the founders did not comment on sales expectations for the launch, industry sources estimate Beachwaver could do $5 million in retail sales during its first three months at Target. While hair tools comprise the majority of the brand’s business — more than 90 percent — the foray also offers the brand a chance to build momentum for its hair care offerings.
“Selling hair care is different than selling a hair tool, where you can understand the before-and-after just by watching it, right?,” Potempa-Wall said. “With hair care, you want to feel it, you want to see the container, smell it and see how it holds up.”
“We’ve done the work to build a phenomenal assortment of hair care products — now, we want consumers to be able to find the place where they can walk in and shop it,” said Sarah Potempa.
