The best evidence that QVC has been doing this for 40 years is not the company's cable channel but its apparent lack of panic about TikTok. While other retailers have approached live-selling on social media with the nervous energy of a brand manager giving a presentation to the board, QVC has simply built 10 small studios, hired hosts with "strong personalities and good selling habits," and started streaming 200 hours a week.

"It's a different style of live selling," said Krystyna Taheri, the company's senior vice president of social commerce. "It's a lot faster. You're talking 20-second, 30-second hooks and sells, versus a seven- to eight-minute segment, which is what we do on TV."

The sets, too, have been miniaturized for the format. QVC Fashion looks like a closet. QVC Beauty features a host with a tray. QVC Home has a fireplace. (One imagines the real-estate savings alone have been considerable.)

Ms. Taheri said the company generated more than one million new customers through TikTok last year — buyers who had never purchased from QVC on television or on its website. The demographics, she noted, skew older than the typical TikTok shopper but younger than the core television audience, which suggests the platform may be functioning as a kind of recruitment tool for future cable viewers, or perhaps the reverse.

The hosts undergo training that includes weekly tape reviews with producers, in which they examine both successful segments and unsuccessful ones. They are taught to focus on engagement metrics rather than revenue, on the theory that conversions will follow. One host, identified only as Paulina, was permitted to create a program called "Girly Girl Vibes," which is either a sign of creative freedom or a sign of the times.

For the holiday season, QVC plans what it calls "mega lives" — eight- to 10-hour livestreams supported by what Ms. Taheri described as "a lot of marketing dollars." The company also stages a "Nonstop Holiday Party" in early November, a 24-hour, three-day event that will be replicated, in abbreviated form, on TikTok.

"If you're in retail and you don't win Black Friday and Cyber Monday, you don't win the year," Ms. Taheri said, stating a truth that has not changed since long before anyone was filming themselves with a phone.

Original story published in Glossy: "QVC is building a flywheel across TikTok and TV for the holidays", by Julia Waldow