75Many people lament that cross-border business is becoming increasingly difficult, especially for new entrants, who feel confused about everything from product selection to brand positioning.
In fact, to achieve hot sales, the core is to return to the real needs of consumers. As long as the product can effectively solve life's pain points, orders will naturally follow.
But avoid rushing into highly competitive popular categories, because facing established leading brands, it is difficult to break through without innovation and technical barriers. It is better to focus on niche tracks, and exploring opportunities in segmented scenarios can also yield surprises.
Taking the European and American markets as an example, local consumers are willing to pay a premium for refined kitchen tools that are easy to use and maintain. They do not favor complex large kitchen appliances, but instead prefer specialized tools that focus on a single scenario with high efficiency. The demand for kitchen tools used in vertical scenarios such as making salads, processing cheese, and shredding fruits and vegetables continues to rise.
Image source: SUSTEAS
There is a niche brand in our country that saw these segmented needs. Starting with a hand-cranked cheese grater, it polished the product, accumulated overseas reputation, and then gradually expanded its product line.
This brand is SUSTEAS from Ningbo, Zhejiang.
According to Echotik data, since joining TikTok in August 2023, the cumulative sales of the SUSTEAS brand store have exceeded $28,928,900 (approximately 200 million RMB).
Among them, the sales of the flagship product, the hand-cranked cheese grater, reached as high as 517,900 units, and the store sales of this single product exceeded $15,921,900 (over 100 million RMB).
Next, let's take a look at how this domestic niche kitchen brand transformed from an OEM white-label to building its own brand, step by step winning over overseas consumers, achieving a single product explosion and sustained hot sales across categories.
Image source: Echotik
Brand Birth: From White-Label OEM to Building an Independent Brand
According to public information, the SUSTEAS brand originated from Ningbo, Zhejiang. The founding team established the operating entity in 2017, entering the cross-border track and deeply cultivating the kitchen and home goods export track. Relying on the local mature supply chain of hardware and plastic kitchenware, it mainly undertook foreign trade OEM orders in the early stage, while also operating Amazon drop-shipping business.
But it soon encountered common industry problems: rising platform traffic costs, fierce price wars among white-label similar products, continuously squeezed profit margins, and the simple drop-shipping model hitting a growth ceiling.
In 2022, a major turning point for the brand arrived. The founding team officially registered the SUSTEAS trademark, abandoned the pure white-label OEM approach, and established its own brand.
And it avoided the main battlefield of large comprehensive kitchen appliance giants like Philips and OXO, focusing on niche segmented manual kitchen tools such as graters, salad spinners, and small food processors, leveraging differentiated products to open up the European and American home consumer market.
Image source: Amazon
In August 2023, SUSTEAS heavily invested in the TikTok e-commerce track, joining TikTok Shop US region to open a brand store, using a hand-cranked rotary cheese grater as a breakthrough. This product supports shredding, slicing, and wave cutting, quickly capturing overseas consumers' needs with its rich and practical functions.
It is reported that within just 16 months of joining, the brand store's sales broke through $30 million, with this core single product generating over $14 million in revenue, creating a phenomenal hit product.
Image source: TikTok
Multi-Channel Synergy: Building Third-Party Platforms + Independent Site
To continuously expand market coverage and ensure consumers are reachable through multiple channels, SUSTEAS has built a comprehensive sales channel matrix.
In addition to the TikTok Shop brand store, the brand has also laid out core sites like Amazon North America and Europe, relying on platform search organic traffic to meet precise buyer needs and ensure stable and continuous shipments.
Image source: Amazon
At the same time, SUSTEAS also established an overseas independent site.
The independent site focuses on promoting product combination sets and mid-to-high-end electric kitchenware, thereby increasing the average order value and avoiding homogenized price comparison competition on various e-commerce platforms. Moreover, the brand uses an email marketing system to push new products and marketing campaigns targeted at browsing but non-purchasing customers and returning customers, continuously driving repurchase.
At the online level, SUSTEAS has formed a closed-loop sales synergy of Amazon third-party platform + TikTok Shop store + brand independent site. On this basis, it continues to expand offline supermarket and home furnishing channel distribution businesses. Through this online-offline synergistic approach, the brand gradually improves its business landscape and establishes a foothold in overseas markets in Europe and America.
Image source: SUSTEAS
Content-driven growth: Mastering social commerce on TikTok
The TikTok Shop US region store is the core battleground for SUSTEAS to achieve explosive growth. The brand's breakthrough is inseparable from its mature overseas social media operations system.
Relying solely on parameters and text descriptions makes it difficult for overseas consumers to intuitively perceive product advantages, and global short-video platforms like TikTok provide an excellent real-scene communication medium.
Overall, SUSTEAS's operational layout on TikTok is mainly divided into three major sections.
First, build the brand's own account matrix
As of now, the brand's TikTok accounts have a total of 160,000 followers, among which the main account @SUSTEAS is the most outstanding, with 92,800 followers and a total of 31,500 likes.
Image source: TikTok
The account content mainly consists of real-person real-scene operation demonstrations. Through intuitive hands-on usage footage, potential consumers can witness the actual effects of the products, deepen their understanding of product functions, complete user seeding, and thus drive purchase decisions.
Image source: TikTok
Second, normalize the deployment of live-streaming e-commerce
TikTok live-streaming is not a temporary test channel for SUSTEAS, but a core position for normalized exposure and stable shipments.
The background wall of the live-streaming room displays the full series of kitchen appliances, showcasing a rich product line through a dazzling product matrix, which helps broaden viewers' add-to-cart options and stimulate cross-selling.
During the live stream, the host conducts real-time operation demonstrations and detailed explanations in response to questions from the audience in the comment section. On one hand, this narrows the distance with users and enhances goodwill; on the other hand, it verifies product functionality and alleviates user concerns.
Image source: TikTok
Third, continuously carry out vertical influencer collaborations
For example, the brand deeply collaborated with TikTok influencer @PromoCodePal, who has 278,900 followers, to shoot multiple product promotion short videos for the cold press juicer. The single video views reached 8.6 million, 5.3 million, 4.8 million, 3.9 million, and 3.3 million respectively.
The videos mainly feature real operation scenarios of making fresh juice at home, showcasing the lifestyle experience of easily making natural juice with a cold press juicer. They convey the core selling points that the product can enhance home happiness and is simple and easy to use, which greatly helps in continuously stimulating users' purchase intention and promoting order conversion.
Image source: TikTok
Conclusion
Looking back at SUSTEAS's journey from OEM to own brand, its essence is a microcosm of the transformation that many domestic enterprises with manufacturing advantages are undergoing or will soon undergo.
The overseas market has huge capacity, but demand is becoming increasingly fragmented. In such an environment, rather than engaging in fierce competition in the existing market, it is better to deeply understand the daily details of the target market and find your own foothold in the corners overlooked by giants. The flexibility and responsiveness of China's supply chain are themselves a competitive advantage that is difficult to replicate quickly in the international market.
Currently, various emerging channels and content formats are constantly appearing, providing unprecedented convenience for brands to directly reach end consumers. For domestic companies still on the sidelines, the door to overseas markets remains open; the key lies in whether they are willing to take the step from 'making products' to 'building a brand'.
This path certainly requires patience, but once it is successfully traversed, what you gain will no longer be a single order, but long-term value with continuous compounding.
