Social commerce is dividing brands into two camps: those running experiments and those running machines. Dan Albert, co-founder and CEO of 456 Growth, has spent the past two years building the latter and watching most of the industry do the former.

Founded in January 2022 and headquartered in New York, 456 Growth operates across three interconnected entities: 456 Growth Media, a performance-led influencer and social commerce agency; 456 Growth Talent, a creator management company with over 300 creators on its roster; and 456 Growth Investments, a venture arm focused on digital-first consumer brands.

Together, they employ more than 50 full-time staff, split between a U.S.-based core team and roughly 25 offshore members concentrated in Latin America, with additional hires in Mexico City, Venezuela, the UK, and Spain. The agency made its first hire in Hong Kong in late 2025.

The firm’s founding premise has shaped every structural decision Dan has made since. “Our unified mission at 456 is that we believe creators are the drivers of commerce activity, agnostic of what way that’s happening,” he says.

That philosophy has found its commercial purpose as TikTok Shop matured from a speculative side channel into a measurable revenue driver. Dan argues that most brands and most agencies still have not built the infrastructure to capture it.

From 100 Creators to a Pillarized Commerce Roster

When 456 Growth Talent launched, its roster resembled that of most influencer agencies: around 100 creators drawn from Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, oriented toward conversion-based KPIs. The shift came when Dan identified what he calls “accidental influencers,” micro creators driving notable gross merchandise value on TikTok Shop without the professional infrastructure to manage brand partnerships at scale.

“They were getting slammed with bot messages and thousands of emails a day,” Dan explains. “They didn’t know the industry of Influencer Marketing, the players in social commerce.”

456 Growth signed over 200 of these social sellers and built a management layer around them, processing close to 7,000 inbound brand emails per day across 55 creators to identify serious partners, understand pricing structures, and map the emerging TikTok Shop ecosystem. Together, that cohort was driving between $2.5 million and $3.5 million in aggregate GMV per month. Within three months of formalizing the management model, the agency moved from zero to $300,000 to $500,000 per month in flat-fee partnership deals with that creator group, according to Dan.

Today, the talent roster is organized by commerce function: TikTok Shop social sellers (200+), Amazon affiliate creators, UGC producers, and commerce drivers on platforms like ShopMy and LTK. “Rather than look at every creator and influencer as one type of creator, we’ve pillarized our roster to plug into how brands are actually working with creators,” Dan says.

U.S. Brands Were Late to TikTok Shop. Some Still Are.

Dan watched U.S. brands hesitate on TikTok Shop for reasons he considers preventable. Political uncertainty around the platform’s ownership held back larger companies. A lack of internal infrastructure, a lack of a head of TikTok Shop, and a lack of an affiliate strategist left marketing teams unequipped to evaluate the channel seriously.

“The P&L comes at a certain investment. How the model works was not like traditional performance-driven Influencer Marketing,” Dan says. “I think half of it is education.”

The brands that moved early, often newer direct-to-consumer players and Asian brands entering the U.S. market, gained a structural advantage. Dan points to Korean skincare and similar categories as examples. “Because of TikTok Shop, some of these brands became 10 to 50 million ARR brands in 12 months,” he says. 

456 Growth developed relationships on both sides of that dynamic, says Dan, including a partnership with one of the largest influencer ecommerce agencies in China, which transacts billions in Chinese brand dollars into the U.S. market annually.

TikTok Shop also has structural limits that Dan does not minimize. “TikTok has openly said they have a rampant problem with repurchase rate,” he notes. 

Consumers who discover products on TikTok Shop often migrate to Amazon to complete the transaction, where trust in delivery and customer service is higher. Dan frames that behavior as a signal about the channel’s role in the funnel: discovery and acquisition, not retention.

Why Every Channel Feeds Every Other Channel

456 Growth Media organizes its brand-side services across four pillars: Amazon influencer programs, direct-to-consumer, in-store retail programs (Ulta Beauty, Sephora, Target, Walmart), and Social Commerce marqueed in TikTok Shop as a certified TikTok Shop Agency partner.

The premise connecting them is what Dan calls the “halo impact,” the idea that impression volume on one channel creates measurable lift across other channels.

Dan reveals that a Korean skincare brand the agency manages had generated approximately $5 million in GMV on TikTok Shop over roughly 16 months. When 456 Growth launched an Amazon affiliate program in parallel, the brand crossed $100,000 in Amazon GMV within the first 30 days. The TikTok Shop activity had already warmed the demand. The Amazon launch gave hesitant consumers a place to convert.

A separate hair care accessories campaign illustrates the full-activation model. 456 Growth contracted around 100 creators to produce organic TikTok content over four to six weeks, cross-posted to Instagram Reels, then layered in paid media amplification and coordinated email and SMS lifecycle campaigns. Total budget: approximately $250,000. The campaign generated 40 million impressions at a $6.25 CPM and drove a 140% increase in online store revenue in one week.

“Just like most brands don’t understand how to evaluate this halo impact, it’s not an influencer marketer’s job,” Dan says. “It’s a growth marketer’s job to look at the data, build trend lines, show correlation, and communicate that to the operators.”

Where Influencer Budgets Go to Die

Dan is direct about where brands lose money. The largest single source of waste is structural: one-off influencer deals with high upfront fees, one or two posts, no iteration, and no usage rights. There is no compounding effect, no data loop, no flywheel.

“You’re basically renting attention instead of building an engine,” he says. The fix is not more spend, but volume and testing. “The brands that win aren’t betting on three creators, they’re activating 30 to 100 and testing hooks, formats, and offers daily.”

He cites attribution as a related failure point. Many brands cut programs too early because they cannot perfectly track performance, missing signals that emerge over longer timelines, including search lift, Amazon rank movement, and repeat-purchase behavior. “At that point, attribution stops being a blocker and becomes a refinement layer,” Dan argues. Incentives compound the problem. Flat fees with no revenue share lead to low creator ownership and poor content quality.

Misaligned expectations lie beneath it all. “A lot of brands are impatient,” Dan says. “They became impatient with Instagram story. Boom, story goes up, 24 hours, either 10x ROI or bust. It’s not like that anymore.” The minimum viable commitment, in his view, is three months: the first building content and awareness, the second generating early GMV signals, the third establishing a repeatable operational structure.

The Infrastructure Problem Nobody Talks About

The hardest part of building a commerce-driven creator model, Dan says, is not strategy. It is operationalizing at scale. “Everyone talks about the upside of creator-led commerce, but no one talks about the complexity behind it,” he notes. “You’re managing hundreds of creators, dozens of brands, real-time inventory, offers, payouts, and content that never stops.”

That complexity is also where 456 Growth claims its differentiation. Dan is skeptical that technology alone solves the operational challenge. “The stalwart in success is not the tech,” he says. “It’s the ability to build relationships with creators and to get them to trust you so that they’re willing to work for you.” 

According to Dan, many TikTok Shop social sellers are part-time operators running content production alongside full-time jobs. Without a managed service layer that provides education, communication, and accountability, the relationship degrades.

He frames the fundamental strategic question for anyone building in this space as: “Are you building campaigns, or are you building a system that compounds?”

YouTube Shopping and the Cost of Waiting

Dan’s near-term focus beyond TikTok Shop is YouTube Shopping. His thesis is that YouTube Shorts creators, including micro accounts with low subscriber counts, can now be activated as top-of-funnel social sellers, building the infrastructure ahead of YouTube formalizing an agency model similar to TikTok Shop’s certified partner program. “I think all that can happen in the next 12 months,” he says.

For brands still hesitant about TikTok Shop, Dan’s assessment is unambiguous. Delay compounds. “You pay the ultimate time tax, which is you’re already behind, and you pay higher premiums for partnerships,” he says. The window for capturing the early-system advantage is closing, though he does not call it closed.

“Smart brands will use this for what it is, which is growth marketing, fast growth, and revenue, and they’ll build it on the channel as a diversified business so that they’re not necessarily a prisoner to one commerce channel,” Dan says.