Case Study — iHerb
Three quarters. Fourteen markets.
$500k to $3M.
iHerb is one of the world's leading ecommerce platforms for vitamins, minerals, and supplements — shipping over 50,000 products from nearly 2,000 brands to more than 180 countries. In the second half of 2025, iHerb set out to transform its paid social presence by launching a dedicated TikTok strategy across European markets. The objective was to move beyond a US-centric brand identity and become a localised health partner for consumers across key international markets — while maintaining strong commercial returns at meaningful spend levels.
Build a TikTok paid media programme from zero across multiple international markets simultaneously, scale monthly spend beyond $200k, and sustain a strong ROAS throughout. The core difficulty: a one-size-fits-all creative approach collapses the moment markets multiply. Every market needed its own strategy. Every strategy needed to perform commercially from day one.
The account was managed hands-on throughout — campaigns, adsets, and ads built personally in platform, with performance findings and strategic recommendations reported directly to the client. As the account scaled, the team reduced: by Q2 2026, a $3M/quarter international TikTok account was being run as a solo operation. The programme was built on four pillars.
Testing at Scale
Rather than deploying a fixed creative framework across all markets, the approach was structured testing — identifying what worked per market, per audience, per product category, and scaling accordingly. Data drove every reallocation decision. Each new piece of learning fed directly into the next creative brief or campaign adjustment.
Hyper-Localised UGC Creator Network
Creative was the engine of performance — and localising it meant building a portfolio of UGC creators across each target market. Working with the internal talent team, creators were sourced and contracted across the UK and EU, with a clear commercial filter: if their content performed in paid media, the relationship moved to a longer-term partnership. The programme scaled to over 50 pieces of UGC content per month, spanning creator-led video, creator carousels, and AI-enhanced carousel formats.
Market Expansion Blueprint
Scaling from 8 to 14 markets — across the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Netherlands, Italy, Poland, Ireland, Belgium, Austria, Portugal, Switzerland, Norway, and Romania — required a repeatable framework rather than an ad hoc approach. Each new market was launched against a clear blueprint: prospecting first, retargeting second, then an always-on smart performance layer. Markets were structured across three spend tiers, ensuring existing markets continued to grow while new ones were being established. A base ROAS floor of 4x was set for every new market entry.
Strategic Brand Advisory
Beyond platform execution, conversations with the client focused on how TikTok paid media could solve wider brand challenges — not just drive revenue. This included shifting the acquisition mix toward new customers over existing, and redirecting creative investment toward iHerb's own-brand product range rather than third-party brands. Creative tests were built around these briefs — creators briefed on iHerb's own-brand creatine, for example — turning paid media into a channel that answered brand-level questions as well as commercial ones.
The Results
By Q2 2026, a $3M/quarter international TikTok account spanning 14 European markets was being run as a solo operation. The systems, creative frameworks, and market blueprints built in Q4 2025 made that possible — and the revenue trajectory made the case for what structured, data-driven paid social can do at scale.
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