Breaking records is nothing new for Canvas Beauty founder and chief executive officer Stormi Steele — though the $3 million in sales she generated in a single day via TikTok Shop is nothing to sniff at either.
One of the platform’s earliest breakthrough brands, Canvas has seen a meteoric rise since 2023 thanks to Steele’s streaming prowess and viral body care offerings — particularly an oil-based Body Glaze, which comes in more than 30 varieties and retails for $25.
On Black Friday alone, the brand sold more than 100,000 products on TikTok Shop, generating $2.1 million of its total sales via a 12-hour “mega live” stream hosted by Steele at her Huntsville, Ala., warehouse.
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Not only did Steele break her own platform-wide record for the most products sold in a single live session; she also is now the fastest creator to reach $1 million in sales on TikTok Shop Live, crossing the threshold in two hours.
“Those first two hours were crazy,” said Steele, who was joined by family and team members throughout the session, which — like most of her streams — involved order-packing, giveaways, flash sales and engaging with viewer comments.
“We never know how our lives are going to end — we usually kind of know how they’re going to start, but after the first 30 minutes, you start reading comments, you start to go off-script…what my team and I do best is we don’t stay stuck on a specific formula — we just roll with it.”
This authenticity-focused approach has proven fruitful for Canvas and other brands bringing live shopping to the fore on TikTok, like The Beachwaver Co., whose founder Sarah Potempa also often hosts hours-long sessions from her own warehouse.
“Our lives are always the most fun toward the end — after 9 or 10 p.m., our viewers will call it ‘Club Canvas’ or ‘Canvas After Dark’ because at that point, we’re all in the zone, we’ve been there all day, and we’re having a good time,” Steele said.
While TikTok Shop catalyzed the brand’s sales to new heights, Canvas in fact launched its first products in 2018, long before the platform’s debut. Then a full-time hairstylist, Steele founded the brand with the aim to bring her homemade hair care products beyond her clientele.
“It was pretty grassroots at the time — I had some reality TV clients, and we grew mainly due to word of mouth,” said Steele, whose first viral stint was a video showcasing her hair growth using the brand’s Hair Blossom serum on Instagram in 2019. “From there, we started posting more and then expanded the line to shampoos, conditioners, deep conditioners and so on.”
Business had slowed significantly by 2023, though, which was when Steele launched on TikTok Shop and pivoted to body care in a Hail Mary effort to save the business, then on the brink of bankruptcy.
“I was rebuilding when I got on TikTok. It was me, a stripped-down CEO recording from my warehouse every day, showing people the product we were shipping out, and trying to enjoy the process,” Steele said. “We ended up going viral the first week, and then we just continued to go viral.”
Body care has become Canvas’ core category, though its hair offerings are still available and expansions into home scents are underway. “We launched candles and room sprays on Black Friday; we sold about 4,000 candles and 10,000 room sprays, so the next category we’re going to open up is home.”
On Cyber Monday, Steele and PepsiCo hosted a first-of-its-kind partnership on TikTok Shop, with Steele promoting the company’s snacks in an hours-long live session via her own Canvas Beauty page, which counts nearly 500,000 followers.
“It was a great way to learn how to showcase other people’s products in a way that keeps my audience as engaged as if we were promoting my own,” said Steele, who is focused on further cultivating her brand’s TikTok presence. She added that more partnerships like that could be on the horizon.
“I don’t want to chase retail just yet — I want to hone in on live selling a bit more and continue to build Canvas as a frontrunner in that space.”
