This 20-year-old earns $50K a month from TikTok Shop. Here's how she did it.

Yahoo

02-06-2025

Every weekday, like clockwork, Grayson Finks sits down at her desk in Charleston, South Carolina, and enters the digital hustle. From 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., the 20-year-old TikTok creator records, edits, and posts at least 10 videos a day, each one crafted to promote products on TikTok Shop. It's a demanding schedule, but the payoff is massive.
Finks says she earns between $35,000 and $50,000 every month, and over the past two years, she says she's made more than $3 million in product revenue — all from the comfort of her home, with her golden retriever, Beau, often curled up nearby. With over 176,000 followers, her presence on TikTok is her primary engine of success, and remarkably, it's the only social platform she actively uses to make money.
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"I'm trying to move my fashion presence over to Instagram, but as of right now, those aren't really like helping me do anything," Finks told Mashable.
"It's a great learning tool, even if it does disappear."
For now, she's keeping her Instagram personal, but that doesn't mean keeping all her eggs in one basket doesn't scare her.
"It's terrifying," Finks said about the potential TikTok ban. "December through February was excruciating. Sales were crazy. The app was going in and out of the App Store. It's fun to say that this is my job, but my job could be taken away from me tomorrow, and I've still got bills that I've committed to that I'm going to have to pay. I take a risk every single day by choosing to use [TikTok] as my full economic stability. But it's worth it. So far, I can't predict the future, and I don't know what's going to happen, but I know that the marketing tools and the things that I've learned on this app, I'd be able to recreate it on another platform in order to grow again. It's a great learning tool, even if it does disappear."
Mashable sat down with Finks over Zoom to talk about how she makes money, how she separates her real life from her life online, how she built her TikTok Shop empire — and how you can, too.
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How Grayson Finks gets it done. Credit: Zooey Liao/ Image Credit: TikTok/ Getty Images/ Amazon
It depends. I do different kinds of videos. TikTok sometimes rewards no effort at all. You can make really quick videos, and if they have the right hook, the right marketing tactic, people will go for it, and you'll get a bunch of sales. But other times it takes hours of editing. Maybe it's a product that people have already promoted over and over and over again, and you've got to give it something new. That takes a while for me to set up because I'm also setting up all the lighting, background editing, and doing everything by myself. So if you put all the time together, it adds up.
I usually start around 9 a.m. and finish around 4 p.m., but it's pretty relaxed throughout the day. I'm not go, go, go. I can eat lunch and take my dog on a walk.
I get new packages usually every other day. I give myself a package session where I get to open things up in the morning and plan out what I want to film for the day. A lot of opening the packaging also has to do with choosing what's good to be promoted and what's not. Because the truth is TikTok Shop has a lot of really cheap, not-great stuff that you, as the marketer, have to go through and you have to say, "I can make a couple of dollars off this, but when people get this in the mail, they're going to give me really bad reviews. So I really shouldn't do that." You have to go through that, choose what you want to prioritize, and then I usually start from whatever outfit I'm most excited about.
After that, I immediately go to my phone, I edit that video, post it, and then while that video is posting, I start the next one, and I just post them back to back to back to back. A lot of influencers schedule their posts, but I have never gotten into that.
I have a recommended page where I can go in on my own profile and shop for free samples. TikTok makes it really easy. All you have to do is click "get sample," commit to filming for it, sign a couple of things, and then they mail it straight to you, and it gets to you within two days.
So it's a little tricky. TikTok has a lot of hidden rules. One of those rules is that you have to film the samples or you're going to be penalized. People approach this differently. Some people will post these samples and be like, "Hey guys, I got these, these are all trash. Don't buy them, but I have to link them." I don't usually do that because I don't want to rub brands the wrong way. Maybe they come out with something later that's really good, and I've talked bad about them prior. I try to be as polite as possible. So, what you can do on TikTok is post things as UGC content, so that it doesn't go directly onto your profile page.
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Let's say I have 10 samples from this week that I don't think are very good. I'm going to film a short video with all of those 10 samples. I'm going to link the samples, and then I'm going to post it as UGC content so it goes into the world of TikTok somewhere, but it's probably not going to get that many views because it's not actually on my profile page and I'm not promoting it personally. So you get to pick and choose what you want to stick on your page. I wouldn't recommend doing that a lot, and I don't think a lot of people do that, but that's how I get around it.
There's also a new thing called a "product selection score." If we get sales on products that are now rated lower than 4.3 stars, TikTok takes away our views and will completely redirect traffic. So I don't want to get any sales on those bad things. And now I'm going back to a point where I'm really trying to request only samples that I can 100 percent post. But it's always a risk because you don't know if it's going to look like the picture.
My main inspiration, honestly, comes from the app itself. TikTok doesn't get enough credit for how much influence it actually has over fashion today. My For You page is a constant inspiration. I've trained it to be that way. You can manipulate your For You page to give you what you want, depending on what you interact with and what you share, like, and comment on. So right now, my For You page is basically my dream Pinterest board of everything I want to share.
I have been specific with it. At the beginning [of my TikTok journey], I started promoting a health journal. That's what I started with because I was going through my own health journey, and at that time, my entire TikTok was giving me [videos about] vitamins, journals, workouts, things like that. And I was able to work with that for a couple of months, but I only wanted to take my health journey so far. I didn't want my entire page to be about the way my body looked or how my face looked. So by moving over from those products into fashion, the app wrapped its head around that for me and started giving me the inspiration for that. It does a great job.
Honestly, my follower count really hasn't had that much of an effect on my sales. My audience has morphed into exactly what it needs to do, but my follower account has never really skyrocketed. On TikTok, you don't have to have a big following if you have a regular group of people that come to your page and trust you for advice when it comes to clothing or health products, anything like that, that's an influence enough to have them buy the products. You don't have to be this crazy day in my life every single day, have a bunch of followers, in order for people to say, "Hey, that works and I'm gonna try the same thing."
I wouldn't call myself a very typical content creator because I don't give a lot of "day in my life" videos. I don't give a lot of my personal routine because it's very personal to me. And coming from where I was at the beginning of this journey, I knew that what I wanted to create was a platform that I could earn money from, but that didn't put more stress on me and like or make me start acting in a certain way because that's a slippery slope. You can end up really transforming yourself into someone that you don't want to be, but someone that your followers want you to be.
They trust me because I show up every single day and post the same number of videos with new products every single day. That's how I show my commitment to them and connect with them, and people recognize that.
When I wake up in the morning, I get ready, I film the videos, and when it's time to clock out, I'm done with social media.
It has been a learning process. It's always been something that I'm like, "You guys, this has nothing to do with you, so you don't need to know about it." [My personal life] doesn't influence how I act online. It has made me treat this more like a job than anything because when I wake up in the morning, I get ready, I film the videos, and when it's time to clock out, I'm done with social media. I'm ready to go to the dog park. I'm ready to walk around the beach. I live in this beautiful place for a reason. I'm trying to get stuff done during the day so that I can enjoy this place. Treating it like a job has been the best thing for me to not let it creep into all of the different aspects of my life and take over.
Yes, because honestly, my mental health is one of the main reasons I started this job. To have the freedom to work from home and the ability to travel. But if you let it get to you and start thinking about follower count all the time, it becomes way more stressful than a 9-to-5 that you show up for every single day. You have to control it.
It all happened very quickly. I was a freshman [in college], and I had literally never earned money to my name other than painting [artwork] and selling it. That's how I was buying the groceries. I had a couple of thousand followers on my account at the time. And my friend came to me and he was like, "Hey, can I buy your TikTok account?" And I was like, "Why would you buy my TikTok account?" And he was like, "I think that I could start selling things on there, and you already have enough followers to be in the program." So I was like, "Wait, if you're gonna do this, let me do this."
TikTok rewards you if you have already produced a lot of sales. So, today, I could go on TikTok and request 20 samples. They'll come in the mail completely free to me, and I promote those samples. In the beginning, I had to spend all of my own money. I reinvested everything that I made on TikTok into new samples. And I would scroll and scroll on the For You Shopping page, trying to find things that could go viral or that a lot of people could buy. I just spent my own money, the last money that I really had, paying for my apartment to buy these things that I thought had potential in them.
Once those sales happened, brands started to trust me and send me things of their own to do the same thing. I'm lucky enough to have been able to copy and paste the template and do it over and over again.
You have to play with it a little bit, and I think that's why consistency and not caring what people think matter. You have to let go and try everything because this algorithm is a robot that I promise, if you get the right combination, it'll work. But you have to post these videos of you wearing things, and maybe you look silly. You're embarrassed, you're talking about things that you've never talked about. You're uncomfortable, but you just have to post it anyway. And you have to take the risk.
I had so many people text me at the beginning of this, and they were like, "What the hell are you posting on TikTok? This is so weird. Are you in some marketing scheme? What's going on?" And I was just like, "Don't worry about it. I'm just trying something. I'm just gonna keep going." And now obviously people are like, "How'd you do that?"
I was in a unique situation. When I was in high school, I was a super normal, good kid, with great grades. And then I went to college and very quickly slipped into alcoholism. I was sent to a couple of rehabs, and I wrecked my car. Just a lot of embarrassing things happened to me that I didn't really recognize who I was anymore. And I didn't really [care], to be honest. So many things had shaken me to my core that I basically just left everything behind. I left Memphis, I moved to Charleston, and those people weren't here to face me and question what I was doing anymore. I was all alone in a new city, and I was able to really bloom and thrive.
If people are questioning you, pay attention to those people. Why are they not supporting you in something that you believe is going to be good for yourself? Those people who are bringing you down aren't your people in the first place. And that was a process that I had to learn, too.
Consistency is really the only key that I can give you.
I would say that it's important to know that it doesn't happen overnight, but these small victories are going to get you there. One good day is a stepping stone to you becoming the influencer that you want to be. You can't be hard on yourself. Everything's going to ebb and flow. But consistency is really the only key that I can give you. Be yourself, be consistent, be kind to your audience, and promote good things.