About the episode 

Social commerce only works when a brand treats TikTok Shop as infrastructure, not a campaign. Pete D learned that from the inside: years at TikTok, and now his own agency, Grant Digital, helping beauty brands win on TikTok Shop.

Pete D joins Mike for a candid conversation about treating TikTok Shop as omni-channel infrastructure, how to tell whether the channel is even right for a brand, the real difference between affiliate creators and traditional influencers, and where creator sampling goes next. Pete came up the long way, from the beauty counter at Clinique and Estée Lauder to a seat inside TikTok during the UK TikTok Shop rollout, and that path is why he reads the channel as one piece of a bigger system. Discovery happens on the feed, but the purchase often closes in a store.

🔗 MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

Pete D on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pete-dick/

Grant Digital: https://grantdigital.co.uk/

Kyra State of Beauty report: https://www.kyra.com/state-of-beauty

Chapters

0:00 – Social Commerce Is Infrastructure

2:24 – From the Beauty Counter to TikTok

6:49 – Why Beauty Leads on TikTok

12:32 – TikTok Shop as a Closed Loop

15:23 – Joining the Dots Across Channels

18:44 – Is TikTok Shop Right for You?

22:52 – Affiliate Creators vs. Influencers

28:59 – Getting Sampling Right for Creators

36:34 – AI and the Next Five Years

ABOUT PETE D

Pete D is the founder and CEO of Grant Digital, a UK social-commerce agency and Official TikTok Shop Partner that runs TikTok Shop strategy, store management, affiliate networks, and live shopping for beauty, wellness, and CPG brands. Before founding the agency, he spent over two years inside TikTok in e-commerce roles for the beauty category during the UK TikTok Shop rollout, and earlier ran UK and EU e-commerce at Apotheca Beauty. He started his career on the beauty sales floor at Clinique and The Estée Lauder Companies.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/pete-dick/ | https://grantdigital.co.uk/