Fanttik — a play on “fantastic,” not “fanatic” — had help getting started, too. By 2021, its parent company, Aukey, seemed poised to become the next Anker — the first Chinese electronics company to become a big brand in America by starting with high-quality phone chargers. But that summer, Aukey was among the 600 Chinese brands Amazon permanently banned for review fraud. Some of those companies were caught bribing customers to leave positive reviews on Amazon or to delete negative ones. The ban cost Aukey hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue, and all its profit for the year — it recorded a net loss of $90 million in 2021, according to public records. But it didn’t have much trouble bouncing back, because the flagship Aukey brand was just one of Aukey’s nearly 300 brand names.
Following “the Amazon Incident,” as the company calls it, Aukey renamed itself to AuGroup, refocused on furniture, and publicly said it wouldn’t put more resources behind banned brands. But what about the 5 percent of its business dedicated to power tools? It consolidated those under a subsidiary with a new brand-first strategy: Fanttik. Before the incident, Fanttik primarily distributed other companies’ tools. But in 2021, the company’s CEO, Bo Du, rebooted the entire division, downsizing its staff to around 150 people and building product and brand development teams, he told an audience at the FastMoss Global Short Video Conference in January. Four years later, Fanttik tells The Verge it has sold approximately 5.5 million pieces of gear.
One of the open secrets to Fanttik’s success is paying for reach. It spends millions to sponsor NASCAR drivers, UFC fighters, and NBA teams to build its brand — and it’s attracted a veritable army of over 31,000 TikTok creators competing to make its next screwdriver look like the coolest thing ever. This January, Fanttik CEO Bo Du revealed that 30 percent of the company’s sales come from TikTok alone. In just two years, it sold $25 million in tools that way. As of today, that number may be as high as $40 million, analytics company FastMoss estimates. The overwhelming majority of those sales and views come from creators, not Fanttik’s own channel. In one particularly successful video, a bearded man rushes the camera wide-eyed — “Ladies, mothers, wives: stop!” — before telling them to buy a Fanttik screwdriver for their husband’s or father’s next Christmas present. The video got 21 million views and sold 13,000 screwdrivers, according to FastMoss estimates. (The caption does not indicate that it’s a paid ad.)
Fanttik, the ubiquitous gadget brand, started as a reset after parent company Aukey was banned from Amazon for review fraud. It’s since built its business to astonishing heights by paying over 31,000 TikTokers to hype screwdrivers. Wild stuff in our story: www.theverge.com/report/82926...
26.11.2025 16:31 — 👍 82 🔁 18 💬 3 📌 1
