铁打的抖音、流水的白牌 蒂洛薇会是例外吗？

This article profiles Dilovi, a new Chinese beauty brand that claimed Douyin's top spot in color cosmetics sales just four years after its founding. The brand is on track to hit roughly 2 billion yuan ($278 million) in annual sales in 2025, and retained its first-place ranking on Douyin's color cosmetics category in Q1 2026. Both its rapid growth strategy and ongoing challenges offer valuable takeaways.

1. Core growth drivers: The founder previously served as the full-channel distributor for Korean color cosmetics brand Aegis in China. Dilovi focuses on high-performance skin-nourishing base makeup priced between 100–200 yuan, filling a long-unmet gap in the mid-price tier of domestic Chinese beauty. It concentrates resources on just four core hero products, each tailored to cover distinct customer needs with clear positioning.

2. Douyin growth tactics: The brand uses a "hero product + founder IP + celebrity endorsement + creator matrix + round-the-clock in-house livestreaming" playbook. It partners with nearly 3,000 creators annually in a pyramid structure, and runs 24/7 in-house livestreams across 13 verified brand accounts. Paid traffic accounts for 18.55% of its total traffic, above the industry average. All high-converting viral content follows a standardized script designed to directly target common user pain points.

3. Key challenges: Dilovi faces polarized user reviews, overreliance on its small set of hero products and the Douyin platform, and outsources most R&D and production to third-party contract manufacturers. It has not yet successfully completed its brand transformation, leaving its long-term growth trajectory uncertain.

Dilovi's breakout success on Douyin offers a actionable case study for new beauty brands, while also laying bare common risks for unbranded white-label beauty players on the platform, with key takeaways for all beauty brand owners.

1. Product and pricing strategy: Brands can target the under-served mid-price gap untapped by most domestic Chinese beauty players, focusing on high-quality skin-nourishing base makeup in the 100–200 yuan range. A hero product strategy that concentrates resources on a small number of core items, with product innovation built around common pain points like caking, fading, and dry base makeup, delivers strong results.

2. Brand marketing and channel operations: On Douyin, the "hero product + creator matrix + round-the-clock in-house livestreaming" combination works effectively. Brands should structure creators in a pyramid model: top-tier creators drive sales volume, while mid and long-tail creators build mass awareness and organic buzz. Increasing paid traffic investment and using standardized high-converting scripts for content also improves conversion efficiency.

3. Long-term growth guidance: Brands must mitigate risks from overreliance on a single platform and small set of hero products, as well as outsourced R&D and production. Brand transformation should be prioritized early, via signing celebrity spokespeople, expanding to full-channel distribution, and increasing in-house R&D to build long-term brand equity and improve resilience.

Dilovi's growth path on Douyin provides replicable actionable lessons for Douyin-based beauty sellers, while clarifying current industry opportunities and risks, making it highly valuable for reference.

1. Replicable tactical lessons: Target an under-served price gap, concentrate resources on building hero products to avoid SKU fragmentation. For traffic, combine a pyramid creator structure with multi-account round-the-clock in-house livestreaming, and moderately increase paid investment. For content, follow a proven viral script structure — create awareness of pain points, challenge existing assumptions, show before-after effect comparisons, add social proof, and close with a clear call to action — to precisely target user needs and lift conversion.

2. Current market opportunities: The 100–200 yuan skin-nourishing base makeup tier still has room for growth in China's beauty market. During the brand transformation phase, opening offline retail locations and expanding to Southeast Asian cross-border markets offer new incremental growth opportunities; strong repeat customer retention can deliver sustained long-term growth.

3. Risks to watch out for: Overinvestment in paid traffic drives up operating costs and erodes margins. Overreliance on Douyin and a single hit product leaves businesses vulnerable to market shifts. Outsourcing R&D and quality control to contract manufacturers often leads to inconsistent product quality and polarized user reviews. Brands should pursue transformation early to move beyond pure growth driven by paid traffic.

Dilovi's growth model unlocks new business opportunities for beauty contract manufacturers and clarifies the path forward for factories in the e-commerce era, with multiple key insights.

1. Product manufacturing and design demands: Today's new beauty brands overwhelmingly pursue a hero product strategy focused on the high-value skin-nourishing base makeup category, with strong demand for product and process innovation — such as high-extract formulations, no-activation powder cream processes, and ultra-fine powder patent technology. Factories need to align with brands' innovation needs and offer process and ingredient solutions that directly address user pain points.

2. New business opportunities: A growing number of new beauty brands use a co-development model where brands define product requirements and factories handle process development, including joint patent applications. This model has become industry standard, generating large volumes of steady orders for R&D-capable contract manufacturers. Top R&D-focused factories can even lock in long-term partnerships by providing exclusive licensed technology to brands.

3. Insights for digital e-commerce development: Factories need to keep pace with the growth timelines of e-commerce-native brands, speed up R&D response times, support rapid product launches for brands' hero product strategies, and open up to deep partnership models to win more cooperation opportunities with emerging brands.

Dilovi's rise and ongoing transformation reflects new trends in Douyin's beauty category and clarifies core pain points for brand clients, providing guidance for beauty-related service providers adjusting their business strategies.

1. New industry trends: There is still room for new brands to break out in Douyin's beauty category. The new generation of white-label beauty brands on Douyin has moved beyond the early era of low-price quick profits, and is gradually shifting toward full brand transformation. A growing number of brands are looking to expand into full-channel distribution and cross-border expansion, driving sustained increasing demand for diversified service support.

2. Core pain points for brands: Most new brands lack in-house R&D capacity in their early stages and need support connecting to high-quality R&D resources. On the traffic side, they need help optimizing content and paid traffic efficiency to lift conversion. For long-term growth, they need to address overreliance on paid traffic and build sustainable brand equity.

3. Solutions to develop: Service providers can build R&D matching businesses that connect brands with high-quality contract manufacturers and ingredient suppliers. For traffic needs, they can offer standardized viral content development and paid traffic optimization services. They can also offer brand positioning planning, full-channel expansion support, and cross-border entry consulting to meet the long-term growth needs of brands undergoing transformation.

The growth of new generation white-label beauty brands like Dilovi on Douyin reflects the current state of the platform's beauty ecosystem, and offers key insights for platform operators on management and risk mitigation.

1. Core brand demands from platforms: Douyin has become the core launchpad for new beauty brands to scale. Brands need platforms to provide mature traffic targeting and buying tools, as well as a fair, orderly competitive environment, to support their transition from early scaling to full brand transformation.

2. Current issues in platform beauty ecosystems: A large number of white-label beauty brands scale rapidly via platform traffic, but the industry suffers from a pattern of boom-and-bust. Multiple previously popular white-label brands collapsed quickly after being caught violating rules such as false advertising. Most brands rely on paid traffic for growth and lack long-term sustainability, which drags down the overall reputation of the platform's beauty category.

3. Directions for platform operation and risk mitigation: Platforms can increase support for compliant brands actively pursuing brand transformation, standardize product advertising and traffic competition, and crack down on violations including false advertising. They can also build out multi-faceted service systems to help brands expand across channels, guide healthy growth, mitigate the risk of boom-and-bust white-label cycles, and improve the overall platform beauty ecosystem.

Dilovi's rise represents a new direction for white-label beauty in the Douyin e-commerce era, while exposing new industry-wide challenges, providing a representative case study for industry research.

1. New industry development trends: Douyin has become the core scaling platform for new beauty brands. The new generation of Douyin white-label brands is no longer pursuing the old low-price quick profit model, and is instead targeting the mid-price gap, using a "hero product + aggressive traffic operations" model to scale. Today, many leading new white-label brands have started brand transformation, expanding into offline channels and cross-border markets, making them distinctly different from the fast-rise-fast-fall white-label brands of the past.

2. New challenges facing the industry: Most new brands use a co-development model with contract manufacturers, and the long-term risks of this model still require further study. The industry as a whole struggles with overreliance on platform traffic and high paid traffic costs that erode margins. Finding a path to break free from traffic dependency and achieve sustained long-term growth is a shared industry-wide challenge, with no mature replicable model available to date.

3. Research value of the new business model: The new brand incubation model of "brand leads user demand definition + contract manufacturer handles technical development + Douyin aggressive traffic operations" has delivered measurable early results as a new business model for the beauty industry. Its long-term sustainability merits in-depth further research.