Stormi Steele sold $2.6 million of beauty products in one TikTok livestream on Black Friday 2024, and she says the livestream was never the hard part.
Steele is the founder and chief executive of Canvas Beauty Brand, the body glaze and hair care company she built after mixing products in her own kitchen while working as a salon owner and licensed cosmetologist. In May 2024, she became the first known seller to clear $1 million in a single TikTok Live, and it took her about four and a half hours. Black Friday that year more than doubled the figure.
Asked what the record actually took, she answered with everything that happened before the camera went on. “That million-dollar live wasn’t an overnight success,” she said. “It was years of preparation meeting the right opportunity.”
What came after is the part she talks about now. Growing at that speed, she said, teaches a founder that the systems that carried the company to one level will not carry it to the next. She hired into three new roles, a chief marketing officer, a social media manager, and a data analyst, and she describes her own job in those terms. “I’m transitioning from being the person making the sales to building the machine that makes the sales,” she said.
About 65 percent of Canvas Beauty customers come back and buy again, which is the figure that decides whether a viral day turns into a company. Steele separates the two skills out loud and says generating revenue and building a sustainable business are not the same work. “You must master both,” she said.
Her advice to anybody watching a livestream to clear six figures is one sentence. “Don’t just prepare to go viral,” she said. “Prepare to stay in business.”
