Retail Stores Have Taken Over TikTok

Parody accounts of popular brands are filling up everyone’s feeds.

A few different brands have started to advertise on TikTok — Chipotle, NYX Cosmetics, and Wendy’s, just to name a few. But compared to other platforms such as Instagram or Twitter, TikTok has remained largely untouched by clothing and food stores and their products.

That is until now. For many users, things were business as usual until just a few days ago, when something strange started happening. As they were scrolling through their “For You” (the main page of TikTok where the content users see is generated through an algorithm) pages, they were no longer filled with the normal dances, skits, and comedy. Instead, were filled with videos of department stores. Lowe’s, Home Depot, Menards, Justice, and Walgreens, just to name a few. They were even seeing different products — Fiji Water, Colgate Toothpaste, and other household items that you wouldn’t think would have TikTok pages.

This all started just a week ago with the TikTok user @/theburlingtoncoatfactory, who uploaded videos of a storefront or the various coats and clothing items available at its stores, but in the surreal, strangely-edited and music-overlayed style of a typical Gen Z TikTok. Here’s an example (if you aren’t familiar with this very bizarre style of video, be warned):

Correction: The earliest retail accounts are actually @/purellofficial and @/thevaseline, while @/theburlingtoncoatfactory is the account that really brought this trend into the mainstream recently. In fact, there is currently a #justiceforpurell movement aiming to give the Purell account more recognition.

And suddenly, there was an influx of other different brands and stores as well.

Many wondered what was up with this. Was this the actual stores themselves attempting to get in on a TikTok goldrush? Well, actually no.

You see, these accounts aren’t actually the official accounts of the brands and stores themselves. Instead, they seem to be created by random teens on TikTok looking to get in on the fun trend that was popularized by the Burlington Coat Factory account. In fact, this account, which had been posting discount codes for people to use, recently captioned a video “The real corporate Burlington reached out and said I’m not allowed to give out discount codes anymore, sorry gang.”

Now, the list of (unofficial) stores on TikTok has grown to include Bed Bath & Beyond, Trader Joe’s, Justice, The Home Depot, Claire’s, Banana Republic, Walmart, Walgreens, Subway, Hot Topic, Lowe’s, Tuesday Morning, Hobby Lobby, Yankee Candle, Target, Build-A-Bear, Rainforest Cafe, Gucci, Dollar Tree, Menards, T.J.Maxx, Sears, 7-Eleven, Nordstrom, Goodwill, Michaels, Bass Pro Shop, Olive Garden, the list goes on. Products include Head and Shoulders, Dove, Fiji Water, San Pellegrino, Tylenol, Colgate, and Aquafina.

Here are a few more examples of the weird, even unsettling content that these accounts post (again, be warned):

The accounts even interact with each other in the same way that normal users would: they duet each other and comment on each other’s videos. They even try to compete with one another and “cancel” each other. They also participate in popular trends and use popular songs and audios.

These parody accounts figured out how to use TikTok in a way that the real brands just couldn’t. TikTok is a very unique platform because of the sheer number of teen users it has, as well as the often very casual and even surreal type of humor and content that gets produced on there. The humor perhaps goes further and is edgier than on any other platform — it’s also weirder, with extremely distorted and oversaturated video and audio being very used in TikToks.

And ultimately, I think this is one of the challenges for brands on TikTok. On Twitter, for example, brands can balance being funny and “relatable” while also maintaining professionalism. But on TikTok, where extremely edgy and weird humor as well as audios filled with expletives is typical, making this kind of content would definitely go over the line (and would probably be offensive to any non-teen users on the app). But the kids and teens who created these fake accounts weren’t afraid of crossing the line into edgy and weird. They knew that the official brands themselves weren’t going to do TikTok justice with their advertising, so they went ahead and did it for them. They beat the brands at their own game.

It will be interesting to see where this goes from here, and what real brands will have to say, if anything. Because many account names are either just the brand name itself or “[brand name]official” and don’t indicate anywhere in their profiles that they are parody accounts, it would be easy for someone to think these are real accounts. And even if people know they’re parodies, they’re still controlling the narrative of the brands on TikTok and could contribute significantly to teens’ perspectives of them, good or bad. In the age of the internet, one thing is clear for brands: either you decide and establish your message and PR, or someone else will.