329On TikTok, the #cooking topic has gathered over ten million creative videos, ranging from home-cooked dish tutorials to molecular gastronomy experiments. Overseas users’ passion for food preparation has long spilled over the screen.
Image source: TikTok
Recently, however, a “rotary cheese grater with handle” from the Chinese brand SUSTEAS has unexpectedly become the focus of discussion. With its multifunctional design and intuitive usage scenarios, it set a record of $860,000 in monthly sales on TikTok, with cumulative sales exceeding $11.48 million.
This achievement not only made the SUSTEAS brand stand out in the overseas kitchen tools market, but also reflects another possibility for Chinese brands going global.
Image source: SUSTEAS
From Cross-border E-commerce OEM to Independent Brand: A Differentiated Path of Evolution
The parent company of the SUSTEAS brand, Fuzhou Senyinxing, was established in 2017, initially focusing on Amazon cross-border e-commerce, mainly dealing in kitchen, home, and outdoor products. Founder Mr. Su led the team to accumulate supply chain resources and overseas market experience on the Amazon platform, but gradually realized the limitations of traditional e-commerce platforms: rising traffic costs and intensified homogeneous competition.
In 2022, the team officially registered the “SUSTEAS” trademark, started brand-oriented operations, and set their sights on the emerging TikTok e-commerce.
Image source: Aiqicha
Behind this decision was precise industry insight: the global small home appliance market is expected to exceed $301.24 billion by 2032, and the kitchen tools category, due to high-frequency use and low decision-making threshold, has become one of the fastest-growing segments.
Image source: FORTUNE BUSINESS INSIGHTS
SUSTEAS chose to enter with “vertical single products,” focusing on clearly functional products such as cheese graters and salad makers, and creating differentiation through “functional stacking and design innovation.” For example, its best-selling rotary cheese grater supports three modes: shredding, slicing, and wavy cutting, priced at $32.99. In August 2024 alone, it sold 28,800 units, with sales exceeding $860,000.
Image source: TikTok Shop
Influencer Matrix and “Hardcore Advertising”: The Traffic Code of TikTok
The explosive growth of the SUSTEAS brand is inseparable from its strategy of betting on TikTok short videos.
Since 2022, TikTok’s penetration rate among US users has rapidly increased, especially with the continuous growth of interactions under hashtags like #kitchenhacks and #easytools, providing the brand with the perfect timing and environment for promotion on TikTok.
Image source: TikTok
In terms of content strategy, unlike the popular plot-based soft placement in China, the SUSTEAS brand chose “hard ads” that directly showcase product functions.
This “no prelude, strong demonstration” style fits well with the preference of European and American users for practical information, enabling the SUSTEAS brand to quickly accumulate a large amount of attention and recognition in a short period of time.
For example, in influencer Kim Pauckner’s video, she gave a comprehensive demonstration of the product’s structure and actual use in just 1 minute and 58 seconds, and used the copy “FLASH SALE!” to enhance the sense of urgency. The video garnered over 27.6 million views and directly drove over 27,000 orders.
Image source: TikTok
In addition to content control, the SUSTEAS brand also attaches great importance to cooperation with influencers. According to third-party platform data, a single store of the brand has over 37,700 associated influencers, with 129 new influencers and 349 new promotional videos added in the past 7 days alone.
Image source: Echotik
The cooperation model between SUSTEAS and influencers is mainly “product exchange,” meaning influencers receive the product for free and shoot trial videos, while the brand provides exclusive discount codes.
For example, food influencer @thezachchoi, who has 28.9 million followers, sold over 24,000 units through a single cheese grater video, with the cost being just one sample unit. This model not only reduces trial-and-error costs but also enables word-of-mouth diffusion through a large amount of UGC content.
Image source: TikTok
After influencers publish promotional videos, the SUSTEAS brand also uses paid traffic (advertising) for precise targeting, strengthening the long-tail effect of traffic.
The combination of paid and organic traffic has enabled the SUSTEAS brand to achieve “snowball-style” growth in the fiercely competitive TikTok ecosystem. Data shows that the GMV conversion efficiency of its paid videos is 40% higher than that of pure organic traffic. Cases of small and medium influencers like @TruckinToby (74,000 followers) further confirm the effectiveness of this strategy. A paid promotional “rotary grater review” video achieved 22.5 million views, 791,000 likes, and finally converted 23,000 orders, contributing $746,000 in sales.
Image source: Echotik
In addition to high-frequency video coverage, the SUSTEAS brand also regularly conducts live streaming. Unlike previous large-scale influencer collaborations, they prefer to select influencers for long-term cooperative live broadcasts.
For example, they have cooperated with home influencer @dealsbyzen for 83 consecutive live streams, focusing on scenario-based demonstrations of kitchen tools. A single account has driven a cumulative GMV of over $523,800. This “less but better” live streaming strategy not only avoids the high slotting fees of top influencers but also cultivates a core user group through frequent interaction.
Image source: Echotik (top) TikTok (bottom)
Looking at Chinese Manufacturing Going Global from SUSTEAS: Opportunities and Challenges Coexist
The SUSTEAS case proves the disruptive value of short video e-commerce for brands going global, but challenges also follow: cultural adaptation, platform policy fluctuations, and supply chain response are still chasms that many companies find hard to cross.
How to break the deadlock? The “TikTok Shop US Billion-Dollar Brand Strategy and New Opportunities in Europe Summit” (May 29, 2025, Shenzhen), hosted by Goodidea, will provide practical answers. Manke, as the innovative supporter of this event, will join top industry sellers and platform officials to focus on the SUSTEAS-style growth path (scan the QR code at the end of the article to register).
This event will bring together several billion-dollar sellers and platform managers to deeply analyze the traffic model of SUSTEAS-like brands, from “product selection logic in the cold start phase” to “breaking cultural barriers in emerging European markets,” and even provide replicable viral content formulas (such as 3 high-click-rate opening templates + 5 major conversion hooks).
For industrial and trade sellers who are watching TikTok Shop or shelf e-commerce sellers struggling with content transformation, this industry dialogue focusing on “long-term growth” may be the first key to unlocking overseas markets.
The “No Man’s Land” of Overseas Markets Awaits the Pioneers
The story of SUSTEAS using a cheese grater to leverage a multimillion-dollar market proves the strong response of overseas markets to the “ultimate single product + precise traffic” model.
Today, spinning cheese slices in North American family kitchens, coffee cups snapped up in Southeast Asian live streams, and camping lights hotly discussed on Middle Eastern social platforms... These seemingly small scenarios are actually incremental stories waiting to be written in the blue ocean market where global e-commerce penetration is less than 20%.
For domestic enterprises, instead of competing in the red ocean, it is better to turn to overseas markets: what is needed there is not a perfect solution, but the courage of pioneers.
