Cait Oberg ’11 fosters relationships between big beauty brands and influencers on the app.
In 2021, the KVD Good Apple Foundation, a creamy balm packaged in a clear compact, broke the internet. The product was reviewed by influencers on TikTok, where it went viral for its lightweight consistency and full-coverage finish.
One of the leaders of TikTok beauty is Cait Egler ’11 Oberg, who fosters relationships with Fortune 500 beauty brands and the content creators who influence the masses. Some of those brands include MAC Cosmetics and CoverGirl. “Our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy, and to be a place where everyone is welcome to show up as they are,” Oberg says. “It celebrates authenticity and we say realness is the new currency on TikTok.”
Oberg’s career at TikTok started when the company was on the rise in 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The company’s chief demographic of 15- to 25-year-olds were working and going to school remotely, and their newfound free time allowed the app to grow 180% among that group, according to Statista. “It was such an awesome time to come to TikTok because it was brand new, it was booming,” Oberg says.
The Colgate philosophy major was brought on by her former Refinery29 colleague to build the platform’s beauty vertical partnerships by leveraging content and TikTok’s native advertising solutions. At the same time, the pair grew the in-house beauty team, which has since expanded to 23 members.
That team manages owned, earned, and paid advertising for brands, meaning they assist companies on determining content for their own channels, partnerships with creators, and formal advertisements that play between videos.
In the last decade, Oberg says, “beauty has been flipped on its head. For almost a century, it was always the case that beauty was built in a boardroom, that big beauty decides who’s beautiful, what looks beautiful, what feels beautiful…. Then with the rise of social [media], every single person had a microphone, every single person had a platform, and beauty became way more grassroots.”
One recent project Oberg worked on fit into that grassroots model. A creator posted a selfie video of herself dashing down the street in New York City. She recounts how a bystander stopped her and asked her what perfume she was wearing. Flattered, she responded “Glossier You.” Oberg’s team helped Glossier turn that video into an advertising campaign, and the scent consistently sold out. “It turned into the most impactful campaign of the year for them,” she says.
“What other platform does that happen on?”