How Luxury Brands Are Winning on TikTok (And What They're Actually Doing Differently)

For years, the conventional wisdom in luxury marketing was simple: stay distant, stay polished, stay exclusive. TikTok, with its lo-fi aesthetic and 30-second attention spans, looked like the antithesis of everything a heritage brand stood for.

That thinking is now costing brands audience share.

According to a study of over 3,000 luxury consumers across the UK, US, France, and Italy, around two-thirds of first-time luxury buyers say their initial brand discovery came from social media rather than traditional channels. A further 38% discover brands specifically through user-generated content, and 32% through creator videos. TikTok is no longer a platform luxury brands are experimenting with. It is where the next generation of luxury customers is being won or lost.

The real question isn't whether to be on TikTok. It's whether you understand the rules well enough to play.

The brands doing it well are not simply repurposing campaign content or chasing viral trends. They have each developed a distinct strategic posture, one that balances brand integrity with platform fluency. Here is what they are actually doing, and what any luxury or premium brand can learn from it.

Why TikTok Changed the Rules for Luxury

The tension between luxury and TikTok is real, but it is also overblown. The platform's average engagement rate sits above 5%, significantly higher than Instagram or Facebook. More importantly, Gen Z and Millennials now account for 70% of the global luxury market, and TikTok remains their dominant discovery platform.

The shift is not just demographic. It is behavioural. Luxury consumers are no longer waiting to be told what is desirable. They are researching purchases through creator reviews, validating authenticity in comment threads, and discovering new brands through algorithmic recommendation rather than editorial placement.

"Around 26% of luxury shoppers now wait for creator reviews before buying. Nearly one in four say TikTok trends led them to purchase vintage or second-hand luxury." — LOOP, luxury consumer study, 2025

This creates a specific challenge for luxury brands. The platform rewards content that feels native, spontaneous, and human. But luxury brands have spent decades building equity through the opposite: controlled imagery, aspirational distance, and carefully curated scarcity. The brands winning on TikTok have found a way to hold both at once.

The Five Strategic Postures

Not every luxury brand takes the same approach. Looking across the brands performing strongest on the platform, five distinct strategies emerge:

• Brand: Burberry — Followers (TikTok): 5M+ — Core Strategy: Community-first, UGC amplification
• Brand: Loewe — Followers (TikTok): 2M+ — Core Strategy: Cultural fluency, long-game brand building
• Brand: Gucci — Followers (TikTok): 1.5M+ — Core Strategy: Participatory campaigns, inclusive virality
• Brand: Jacquemus — Followers (TikTok): 1M+ — Core Strategy: Playful authenticity, creator collaboration
• Brand: Marc Jacobs — Followers (TikTok): 1M+ — Core Strategy: Intentional chaos, internet-native content

Each of these brands has made a deliberate choice about how to show up. None of them are doing the same thing.

Burberry: Building a Community, Not Just an Audience

Burberry is the standout case study for any heritage brand asking whether TikTok is compatible with a 170-year-old identity. With over 5 million followers on the platform, it has built one of the most loyal brand communities in luxury social media.

The strategy is not built on polished campaign content. It is built on participation.

What Burberry actually does

• Tiered influencer strategy: Burberry works across the full creator spectrum, from major musical artists like Loyle Carner and Chy Cartier down to mid-level creators, deliberately targeting different audience segments through different voices.
• Active community engagement: The brand responds to comments, reposts fan videos, and actively features user-generated content. This is unusual behaviour for a heritage luxury house and it signals to the algorithm, and the audience, that the brand is genuinely present.
• Personalised content delivery: Rather than broadcasting a single brand message, Burberry uses TikTok's algorithm to deliver different content to different audience segments, letting the platform do the targeting work.

The result is a level of brand loyalty that most luxury brands only achieve through physical retail. Followers feel a sense of ownership over the brand's TikTok identity, which is exactly what drives organic sharing and long-term retention.

The lesson: Exclusivity on TikTok is not about who can access the content. It is about making your audience feel like insiders. Burberry achieves this by treating its followers as collaborators rather than consumers.

Loewe: Playing the Long Game

Loewe's TikTok presence is arguably the most strategically sophisticated of any luxury brand on the platform. Under creative director Jonathan Anderson, the brand has achieved something rare: content that does not immediately register as brand content.

It slots into the feed like a creator you already follow. Witty captions. Organic trend participation. Surreal, cinematic visuals that blur the line between fashion and contemporary art. The effect is that Loewe feels culturally relevant rather than commercially present.

Why this matters strategically

Loewe is not using TikTok as a direct sales channel. The brand's primary TikTok audience, predominantly Gen Z, largely does not yet have the spending power to buy a Loewe bag. That is not the point.

The brand is making a calculated investment in future customers. By embedding itself in the cultural conversation now, it is building the kind of brand affinity that converts when that audience's disposable income grows. This is long-horizon brand building, and it requires the confidence to measure success in cultural relevance rather than immediate conversion.

• Content feels creator-native, not brand-produced
• Aesthetic is consistent but never rigid, allowing trend participation without compromising identity
• Engagement is driven by genuine cultural interest, not promotional incentive

The lesson: TikTok does not have to be a performance channel. For luxury brands with strong creative direction, it can be a brand equity channel, one that builds the next decade's customer base rather than this quarter's revenue.

Jacquemus: When 14 Seconds Beats a Full Campaign

In 2024, Jacquemus produced what many in the industry called the best 14 seconds of marketing of the year. A collaboration with London-based creator Aunt Bemi racked up over 11 million views in two days. No media spend. No campaign infrastructure. Just the right creative partnership executed with perfect timing.

This is Jacquemus's signature move: high-impact, low-pretension content that carries the brand's playful, eccentrically French identity into formats that feel native to the platform.

The Jacquemus content formula

The brand's approach combines several elements that individually seem contradictory for a luxury house:

• Founder-led identity: Simon Porte Jacquemus uses his personal presence to shape the brand narrative, giving the brand a human face that most luxury houses deliberately avoid.
• Mischief as a brand value: Content is deliberately playful and irreverent, qualities that resonate with Gen Z without diluting the brand's premium positioning.
• Creator collaboration with genuine fit: The Bemi collab worked because the cultural fit was authentic. Jacquemus does not force partnerships; it finds collaborators who genuinely inhabit the brand's world.
• iPhone-shot campaigns: The brand has run campaigns shot entirely on a phone, making a deliberate statement that accessibility and aspiration are not mutually exclusive.

The result is a brand that feels both luxurious and approachable, a combination that most heritage houses struggle to achieve without compromising one or the other.

The lesson: Virality in luxury is not accidental. The Jacquemus x Bemi moment succeeded because the brand had already established a clear, distinctive identity on the platform. The collab was the spark; the brand equity was the fuel.

Gucci and Marc Jacobs: Two Versions of Controlled Chaos

Gucci and Marc Jacobs represent two different expressions of the same core insight: on TikTok, brands that feel like participants outperform brands that feel like broadcasters.

Gucci: Making the audience the campaign

Gucci's most effective TikTok moment was not a polished brand film. It was the #GucciModelChallenge, a participatory campaign that invited everyday users to become stylists and self-expression became the product. The campaign worked because it aligned with Gucci's "more is more" maximalist identity while handing creative control to the community.

Collaborations with creators like Francis Bourgeois, the train-spotting enthusiast turned unlikely fashion icon, reinforced the same principle: Gucci chooses partners who feel like genuine fans, not paid ambassadors. The authenticity is legible, and that is what drives engagement.

Marc Jacobs: The beauty of being "beautifully unhinged"

Marc Jacobs has taken a deliberately different route. The brand's TikTok feed is intentionally chaotic: grainy filters, lo-fi edits, absurdist humour, and glitchy aesthetics that feel more like a Tumblr archive than a luxury brand's content calendar.

This is not a loss of brand control. It is a strategic choice to speak the visual language of the audience. Gen Z's aesthetic sensibility has always been drawn to the offbeat and ironic, and Marc Jacobs has leaned into this without apology.

The brand also shares influencer-created videos directly on its own channel, blurring the line between brand content and creator content in a way that signals genuine platform fluency rather than managed presence.

The lesson from both: Participation beats perfection. Whether through participatory campaigns like Gucci's or deliberately imperfect content like Marc Jacobs', the brands winning on TikTok have accepted that the platform's native aesthetic is an asset, not a threat to brand identity.

The Counterintuitive Play: Dominating TikTok Without Posting

Not every successful luxury brand on TikTok is posting content. Chanel and Hermès maintain official presences on the platform but post infrequently or not at all. Their cultural footprint on TikTok is built entirely through fan videos, creator remixes, and organic community conversation.

This is a viable strategy, but only for brands with the kind of cultural weight that generates unsolicited content at scale. For Chanel, millions of unboxing videos, styling clips, and heritage retrospectives circulate without the brand lifting a finger. The mystique is preserved precisely because the brand does not appear to need the platform.

This is not a strategy most brands can replicate. It requires decades of brand equity and a level of cultural iconicity that gives creators a reason to post without prompting. For any brand that does not already command that kind of organic presence, the passive approach is not a strategy. It is an absence.

The more useful takeaway from Chanel and Hermès is that luxury brands do not need to chase every format or trend. The brands that perform best on TikTok are the ones that have a clear point of view, and the discipline to stay in their lane even when the algorithm rewards novelty.

What Every Luxury Brand Can Take From This

The brands covered here have different aesthetics, different audiences, and different content approaches. But looking across all of them, the same principles keep surfacing.

The transferable lessons

1. Distinctiveness beats polish TikTok's algorithm rewards content that stops the scroll. For luxury brands, that does not mean lo-fi for its own sake. It means having a strong enough creative identity that your content is recognisable even without a logo. Loewe achieves this through art direction. Marc Jacobs achieves it through deliberate chaos. The common thread is clarity of voice.

2. Creator partnerships require genuine cultural fit The Jacquemus x Bemi collab and Gucci's Francis Bourgeois partnership both worked because the creators genuinely inhabited the brand's world. Forced partnerships are legible to TikTok audiences, and they erode rather than build credibility. Vet creators for cultural alignment, not just follower counts.

3. Community engagement is not optional Burberry's 5 million followers are not the result of great content alone. They are the result of a brand that shows up in the comments, reposts fan content, and signals that it values its audience's participation. On TikTok, the algorithm rewards engagement signals. Brands that broadcast without listening are leaving reach on the table.

4. Define your success metric before you start Loewe is not measuring TikTok success by direct conversion. Burberry is measuring community growth and brand loyalty. Jacquemus is measuring cultural reach and earned media. None of these are wrong, but they require different content strategies. The brands that struggle on TikTok are often the ones trying to optimise for the wrong metric.

5. Consistency of identity matters more than consistency of posting TikTok rewards brands that have a clear point of view. Posting daily with no coherent identity is less effective than posting weekly with a strong, recognisable creative direction. According to Vogue Business, the luxury brands gaining the most ground on the platform are those that have invested in a distinct content identity rather than a high-volume content calendar.

The platform has rewritten the rules for luxury marketing. The brands that understand this are not abandoning their identity to chase virality. They are using TikTok as a new medium for expressing an identity they already have, and finding that a new generation of customers is ready to receive it.