Wahl is a leading international manufacturer of personal care grooming products. The market faces competitive pricing, low brand loyalty, and lower profit margins, especially with numerous domestic and foreign brands vying for market share. Low-cost competitors from brands like Remington are forcing them to pivot their marketing strategy to align with shifts in consumer behavior. Our discovery call revealed a critical gap: Wahl's e-commerce strategy needed modernization. While they were selling on traditional platforms, they were missing out on Gen Zs.

The Challange

Wahl serveses many very different audiences, with varying product categories.

• Haircare & Beauty Professionals: Expect reliable equipment that translates their skills into an income-generating business.
• At-Home Hair Care: Want to look their best with minimal daily maintenance without having to visit the barber shop.
• Leasure Comfort: Such as massagers that are separate target market from haircare.
• Pet Products: Varying from their usual consumer base but staying within the lines of pet-hair care.

While Wahl has a significant moat within the Haircare & Beauty professionals’ community, the consumer market is up for grabs. Customers view trimmers and clippers as low-involvement, single-buys, restricting repeat purchase behavior and lowering brand loyalty potential, where small price variations can influence customer decisions. Their varying product categories also led to different product groups being available for market presence.

Our Solution

We chose to sell Wahl’s products on the TikTok shop using GMV Ads. TikTok is dominated by Gen Z consumers, the generation that will define personal grooming trends for decades. Establishing brand preference with this demographic positions Wahl as the category leader for the next generation.

TikTok Shop's native purchasing enables seamless transactions without leaving the platform. Consumers discover products through engaging video content and complete purchases immediately, eliminating the conversion drop-off typical of external redirects.

Given declining industry margins, profitability is our north star metric, not just revenue. We measured success through Return on Investment (ROI).

Our targets are:

• 5.0+ ROI within 90 days (Standard ROAS Target)
• 10.0+ ROI by the end of 2026 (sustainable growth)

Strategy: Selling Wahl’s products with GMV Ads & TikTok Affiliate Influencers

Reaching Wahl's global home grooming audience required both scale and credibility. Rather than building from scratch, we partnered with Outlandish to recruit established affiliate influencers whose audiences already demonstrated purchase intent.

Affiliates earn commission on sales generated through their content, aligning creator incentives with business outcomes. This performance structure ensures quality standards. Influencers promote products that their audiences genuinely want.To rapidly expand our video library, we structured package agreements with top-performing affiliates. This approach allowed us to create a diverse content ecosystem spanning multiple demographics, geographies, and use cases, reaching global audiences with authentic, localized messaging.

Maximizing Sales Volumes during GMV Ads Learning Phase

We launched campaigns in Max Delivery optimization mode. It may seem like a counterintuitive choice for our profitability-focused target. But TikTok's algorithm requires substantial conversion data in the beginning to identify high-value customer segments.— Felix Hoo Paid Ads Specialist

Max Delivery accelerates this learning by prioritizing volume over efficiency, rapidly generating the sales signals needed for algorithmic optimization. If we had gone with the Target ROI optimization mode from the start, it would have restricted delivery to preserve efficiency. Sales volume would be limited and starve the algorithm of data needed to achieve the ROI of 3, outlined in our plan for the first 90 days.

Initial TikTok Shop Strategy

• Optimization mode set to Max Delivery, to prioritize sales volume and rapid data collection.
• We ran on Max Delivery for 2 to 3 weeks to gather sufficient conversion signals.
• Campaign Structure: Individual campaigns per SKU for isolated performance tracking and learning

Maximizing ROI after Learning Phase

Once products achieved critical sales volume, we implemented a performance-based portfolio strategy: retaining high-performing SKUs while phasing out underperformers.

With a refined product mix, we shifted optimization focus to Target ROI bidding. Simultaneously, we consolidated all clippers and trimmers into a unified campaign, pooling conversion signals to accelerate TikTok's algorithmic learning and improve ROI precision.

This consolidation stabilized performance and enabled systematic ROI growth through gradual Target ROI increases. High-performing video creatives that exceeded SKU benchmarks received budget amplification, creating a compounding effect on account-level ROI.

TikTok Shop ROI Improvement Strategy

• Optimization mode changed to Target ROI, set at 5, and gradually increased week-over-week.
• Campaign Structure: All the SKUs are combined into a single campaign.
• Video creatives that surpassed the ROI benchmarks are boosted to amplify the growth in ROI.

Outcomes & Impact

We began managing Wahl's TikTok Shop account in October 2025. Through strategic GMV and affiliate optimization, we transformed account performance, growing ROI from under 1.0 to over 5.0 within three months (by January 2026).

Performance continued to accelerate. By February 2026, account ROI surpassed 5.0, with peak performance reaching 6.0.

Through collaborative efforts between Voosh and Outlandish, Wahl's TikTok Shop is on track to achieve a sustained 6.0 ROI by Q2 2026.

Key Takeaways

• Sustainable ROI improvement requires 20-30 sales per SKU weekly. Below this threshold, the algorithm lacks sufficient data to optimize effectively.
• Identifying top-performing products early is critical to account-level ROI success. Hero SKUs drive disproportionate performance.
• Grouping SKUs into a unified campaign pools conversion data, enabling higher ROI across the entire product portfolio.
• Continuously refreshing video creatives while scaling budget on winning ads accelerates ROI improvements.