Sourcing top DTC brands has become a high-stakes game for modern investors. As consumer discovery shifts toward TikTok Shop and social commerce, the ability to detect high-performing brands early offers a serious edge.
Traditional investment signals tend to arrive after a brand has already taken off, which can limit opportunities. Investors need to track breakout products while they are still gaining traction, not after they have gone viral. This early visibility offers a significant advantage. By acting before a product reaches peak awareness, investors are better positioned to shape growth trajectories and strengthen their DTC portfolios.
Traditional methods like tracking funding rounds or revenue reports are lagging indicators that often reflect the past rather than current consumer demand. This delay can lead to missed opportunities or paying a premium after a brand has already peaked. Not to mention, it can be tedious to try and gather these signals for each prospective brand, and you’ll be left wondering what you’re leaving out.
Modern brand sourcing relies on acting early using leading indicators. Data on employee growth, viral videos, and social commerce sales help investors spot brand momentum as it forms, not after it’s already taken off.
With trends moving quickly, especially on platforms like TikTok, investors who wait risk arriving too late or entering during saturation. DTC and TikTok shop insights give investors a chance to engage with emerging brands while they are still building, leading to better deal terms and stronger influence over early growth.
This shifts sourcing from a reactive model to a proactive, data-first strategy that aligns with how fast digital commerce moves.
Smart brand discovery today depends on data insights and a clear understanding of consumer behavior across ecommerce and social platforms. Investors no longer wait for funding updates or quarterly reports, but instead act on live performance signals to find brands with strong traction and long-term potential.
By analyzing sales, engagement, and creator activity, investors can spot DTC brands gaining momentum and validate them for sourcing or post-investment growth. DTC and TikTok Shop insights reduce risk, reveal what is trending, and guide smarter decisions on how to scale portfolio brands based on what is working now, not last quarter.
Investors do not just need data. They need it to drive action. Data insights become most valuable when they are integrated directly into the sourcing and diligence process. With the right tools, investors can filter brands by revenue range, growth rate, ad spend trajectory, funding history, and demographic alignment, all in one platform.
This functionality allows teams to prioritize outreach, focus on high-fit prospects, and move quickly on brands showing early signals of success. Benchmarking portfolio companies against category leaders using objective growth and success metrics provides additional validation. Investors can also identify revenue-backed hashtags, products, and creators trending on TikTok Shop to inform both sourcing and growth strategies.
By embedding this intelligence into CRM systems or via API, teams can score and organize leads based on recent data and easily work data into current databases. It also empowers direct founder outreach with relevant context, and strengthens post-investment support by revealing which content, product formats, and audience segments are performing best in real time.
Data insights help investors not only identify fast-growing DTC brands but also validate which ones are breaking out across TikTok Shop.
Using the Charm platform, investors can access growth and success scores to inform deal sourcing and due diligence. For those managing active portfolios, TikTok Shop sales data such as top-performing shops and products from September 2025 offers a valuable lens into what is resonating with consumers now and how their current portfolio stacks up. This dual view supports both early investment decisions and ongoing strategies for helping brands succeed, scale, and outperform competitors on Shopify and beyond.
According to Charm's DTC platform, the following brands are leading the beauty category based on strong performance metrics like Growth Score and Success Score. These multi-dimensional category-specific rankings provide investors with a clear view into comparing brands based on growth or success, showing them which brands are gaining traction across ecommerce channels and are most likely to sustain momentum.
According to Charm data, Beauty is the top-performing category on TikTok Shop in 2025, generating $2.7 billion in revenue and selling 147 million items, with an average price of $18.57 per item. Within Beauty, Skincare leads with $597 million in sales, followed by Makeup at $562 million and Fragrance at $401 million. These numbers show that Beauty continues to be one of the strongest and fastest-growing categories on TikTok Shop.
As of full-year 2025 (Jan. 1 – Dec. 31), these were the top performers:
On the Charm platform, investors can dig deeper using both DTC and TikTok Shop datasets to surface high-potential brands and understand how they scale. The DTC platform allows users to filter brands in Prospector by revenue band, growth rate, ad spend, funding amount, and demographic fit.
It also enables benchmarking of portfolio companies against category leaders using Growth Score and Success Score, integration with CRM systems to score and prioritize outreach, and access to DTC founder contact details for direct engagement.
Meanwhile, TikTok Shop data offers a closer look into the brands that are gaining traction in the social commerce space, as brands and products that gain traction on TikTok sell across all channels from Amazon to brick-and-mortar retail. Investors can also use this data to gain competitive intelligence for and support brands within their portfolio.
Together, both platforms provide a holistic view that helps investors understand which strategies and content formats are fueling brand growth. This empowers smarter brand sourcing from both the DTC platform and TikTok Shop, providing the insights needed to build and optimize high-performing brand portfolios on Shopify.
Tracking growth signals provides investors with a clear view of which brands are scaling effectively and may just be the next big DTC brand. Instead of reacting after peak performance, investors can act early by watching signals, identifying trending brands before the rest of the market reacts.
Book a demo to see how Charm data insights can help you source faster, validate smarter, and invest with confidence.