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When Brandon Hurst first decided to sell his plants on TikTok Live in 2023, the 32-year-old Sylmar resident didn’t know what to expect. He said he thought he could sell at least 30 plants, but instead sold 250.

Now, three years later, the internet creator, who goes by Brandon the Plant Guy, sells up to 5,000 plants a week, works out of a 3,000-square-foot greenhouse in Sylmar and has a staff of 13. He credits much of this success to the exposure he’s received on TikTok.

“I’d be out of business if it wasn’t for TikTok,” said Hurst. “I would have ended the business and gone back to working the desk job that I was working prior. I was already on that path, that was where we were headed. And then TikTok really did turn that around.”

Hurst is one of the 920,000 California-based businesses using the social media platform to reach new customers and grow their brands, according to new data from consulting firm PF Global.

In 2025, TikTok helped generate $12 billion in advertising and merchandise sales for those businesses and supported 52,000 jobs in the state, said the PF Global report, which was commissioned by TikTok.

Nationwide, economic activity on TikTok last year helped contribute $81 billion to some 8.5 million U.S. businesses, the report said.

The surge in activity reflects a growing trend toward online commerce, as more small businesses and consumers turn to social media platforms like TikTok to buy and sell goods.

“We enable American culture, American creators, American businesses, to reach an audience around the world,” said Nicole Mason, TikTok’s head of U.S. public policy, said during a presentation on Wednesday morning.

The new report comes as TikTok is increasingly eager to tout its economic impact as a newly formed U.S. joint venture. In January, the company was taken over by three managing investors: Silver Lake, Oracle and Emirati investment firm MGX, each holding 15%, with ByteDance retaining 19.9% of investments. This transition came after TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, was under pressure to divest its ownership in the app’s U.S. operations or face a nationwide ban, due to security concerns.

Last month, TikTok also settled a $400-million lawsuit from the U.S. Department of Justice, ending a 2024 lawsuit alleging the company violated federal children’s privacy laws.

TikTok, which operates its U.S. headquarters in Culver City, where it employs several hundred workers, is mostly known for its viral, short-form vertical videos. But, over the years, the platform has become a hub of curated viral content and a central part of many businesses’ marketing strategies.

The app also has features like TikTok Live, where businesses can host live shopping events, and TikTok Shop, which serves as a direct-to-consumer online marketplace.

For its study, PF Global surveyed more than 11,000 adults in the U.S. and 5,000 businesses. The firm also conducted five case studies with U.S. small businesses and TikTok creators and interviewed over 600 people around the country. The data set combined that survey data with government statistics, industry research and TikTok’s own internal data.

PF Global recently published a similar economic report for the U.K. and is working on reports for 10 other European countries with TikTok.

Neil Ross, a partner at PF Global, said a common global theme is that TikTok users are more likely to see something on the platform and go out and do it.

“People around the world are using it as a kind of digital front door to work out where to go, what to shop, what experiences to have,” Ross said.

The U.S. report states that 27 million Americans “visited an independent shop, cafe or restaurant for the first time after seeing it on the platform.”

The app’s roots date to 2014, when an app called Musical.ly was launched in Shanghai. In 2016, Chinese tech company ByteDance launched a similar platform in China called Douyin.

As the apps grew in popularity, ByteDance picked up on their potential. It purchased Musical.ly in 2017 and combined all these platforms into one, named TikTok. Over the next few years, the app began its rapid ascent, hooking in users with a curated algorithm and viral trends. Today, 200 million Americans use TikTok every month, according to PF Global.

“On a daily basis, TikTok powers real economic impact across the United States, helping entrepreneurs grow their businesses, reach new customers, and create jobs across the country,” said Adam Presser, TikTok’s chief executive in a statement.

DUBAI: A late-night craving for dessert led Hasan Sarwar to leave investment banking and build Peekabox, a Dubai-founded app that sells fresh unsold food from cafes, bakeries and grocery stores at discounts of 50 to 70 percent.

Sarwar was in a Dubai cafe at about 11 p.m. when he noticed the pastry shelves were still full.

“I simply asked them, I said: ‘What do you guys actually do with these items?’ And they said, ‘We make it in the morning, and then throw it the same day,’” he told Arab News. “All of these sort of very high-end pastries are getting thrown every single day.”

He went on to develop the idea, comparing it to Too Good To Go, a model he had used while at university in the UK. “We’ve grown up in Dubai. We know the UAE. We know the F&B space,” he recalled telling his parents.

He started alone. Three months in, he asked his brother Omair to join him as co-founder. “It was way too much work for one person,” Sarwar said.

The first brand to sign was Tim Hortons, part of Dubai’s Apparel Group, after a pitch that ran three months with no app and no demo. “I didn’t leave them alone for three months,” he said. Once the contract was signed, he used the name to bring other brands on, and boxes now come from coffee chains, bakeries, restaurants, grocery stores and hotel buffets.

Customers do not choose what they get. “If you say I have this exact item that you want, people are never going to buy full price,” Sarwar said, describing the surprise box as a way to gamify the purchase without cannibalizing full-price sales. His own highlight came from The Grey, an independent Dubai cafe — a strawberry tart, his favorite dessert, with croissants and pain au chocolat.

Getting there meant fighting the same objection on two fronts. Premium brands worried that discounting would dilute their brand equity, so he pointed them to luxury department store Harrods in London, which runs similar schemes, while customers had to be persuaded the food was fresh rather than left over. Both concerns were successfully countered, he said, pointing to the app’s 45 percent repeat order rate.

Peekabox is now in talks with Ne’ma, the UAE’s national food loss and waste initiative, under the Ministry of Climate Change and Environment.

It plans to open in Riyadh and Jeddah next year with franchise partners that have already committed to the launch. “In terms of Saudi (Arabia) as a market, people are more price sensitive for sure, and also the density of stores is greater,” he said.