# Kait Stephens

Kait Stephens writes about how consumer brands can grow across ecommerce, retail, and social commerce. At Brij, Stephens focuses on helping brands connect purchases made through retailers and marketplaces with their marketing and measurement.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/kait-stephens/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kait-margraf-stephens
- LinkedIn followers: 30,842
- Topics: artificial-intelligence, ecommerce, tiktok-shop, dtc-ecommerce, social-commerce, performance-marketing
- Based on 18 dated posts, latest 2026-10-08

## Summary

Most useful for practical briefings on social commerce and omnichannel measurement for consumer brand operators.

- Best for: Digital marketing agencies and brand-side growth, ecommerce, retention, or performance marketing teams.
- Not for: Consumer product campaigns, beauty product demos, affiliate conversion, or general consumer audiences.
- Check first: Confirm audience demographics, scope, price, and sponsor policy directly with Stephens or Brij.

### Takeaways

- Ad platforms need evidence from retail buyers, not just website customers.
- Better tracking on a brand's own site does not reveal every buyer.
- Social commerce can close the sale while leaving customer questions open.

## Main ideas

- **Ad platforms need evidence from retail buyers, not just website customers**: Stephens argues that when a brand sells through stores and marketplaces, Meta, Google, and TikTok may see only part of its customer base, leaving their systems to learn from incomplete purchase signals. They present verified retail and marketplace purchases as a way to give those platforms a fuller picture. Brij Signal is intended to address this problem.
- **Better tracking on a brand’s own site does not reveal every buyer**: Stephens distinguishes improving data from a brand’s own digital properties from learning about people who bought elsewhere. They argue the approaches complement each other: server-side tracking can strengthen owned-channel signals, while retail and marketplace purchase data addresses a different gap.
- **Social commerce can close the sale while leaving customer questions open**: Stephens sees TikTok Shop’s expansion into less obviously impulse-driven categories as a sign that more kinds of shopping may happen inside social platforms. They view convenience and fulfillment as part of an omnichannel experience, but ask what brands learn about customers when transactions happen on someone else’s platform.
- **Demand can be created in one place and captured in another**: Stephens argues that discovery, consideration, and purchase can happen together in a feed or shopping platform, often outside the brand’s own channels. That can make the resulting retail sale hard for the brand’s advertising platforms or CRM to see. In their Shoptalk recap, they connect this problem to the need to create demand and measure where it is ultimately captured.
- **Peak-season growth is about what happens after the sale, too**: In posts about a BFCM webinar, Stephens frames success as more than increasing seasonal sales. They focus on the quality of signals used for paid media, measuring revenue that attribution may miss, and turning newly acquired holiday shoppers into repeat customers.

## Work to read

- [Best Buy joins TikTok Shop, and the question of who owns the customer](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kait-margraf-stephens_best-buy-is-coming-to-tiktok-shop-with-activity-7513261991558352897-93hO)
- [Shoptalk Nashville: why the funnel now collapses into one scroll](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kait-margraf-stephens_my-biggest-takeaway-from-shoptalk-nashville-activity-7512891132129918976-lrwU)
- ["I'm just not sure Meta does": the omnichannel signal blind spot](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kait-margraf-stephens_a-brand-said-something-to-me-recently-that-activity-7511119126564597760-dSiM)
- [Server-side tracking does not fix the retail blind spot](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kait-margraf-stephens_brij-vs-server-side-tracking-activity-7498043221042892800-R1Zc)
- [BFCM planning: 48% of new customers, and what to do across the funnel](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kait-margraf-stephens_48-of-a-brands-annual-new-customers-can-activity-7506415130994298881-mknK)
- [Omnichannel Unlocked: the newsletter and the topics it keeps returning to](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kait-margraf-stephens_i-may-or-may-not-spend-a-slightly-unreasonable-activity-7506053679993753600-2Zby)
- [An advisory-board conversation with Saarthak Malik on paid media visibility](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kait-margraf-stephens_the-first-time-i-spoke-with-saarthak-he-activity-7499144489966637057-eOq_)
- [A stroller warranty as an example of retail purchase signal](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kait-margraf-stephens_my-uppababy-stroller-has-truly-been-through-activity-7508251277504430080-uLIe)

## Brand relationships

- **Brij** (employment)
- **UPPAbaby** (mention)

## Partnerships

Kait Stephens writes about commerce and measurement for consumer brands, and the partnership activity in these posts sits within their work at Brij rather than a personal sponsorship offer. The clearest example is a Brij-run webinar: Brij assembled speakers from Skullcandy, AeroPress, SteelSeries, HexClad, Power Digital, Fospha and Postscript for a Battle for Black Friday and Cyber Monday session on September 28, 2026, covering signal quality, measurement and retention across the peak-season funnel. Brij sent a recording and BFCM checklist to registrants who could not attend live. It has also brought operators into a deeper relationship, such as adding a paid-media leader who had worked at Estée Lauder and SharkNinja to its advisory board. Elsewhere, a post about an UPPAbaby stroller recounts a personal purchase and warranty repair as firsthand customer experience, not a disclosed sponsorship; no post states that a brand mention was paid. Buyers should confirm availability, price, deliverables and turnaround time with Brij before planning a campaign.

## Alternatives

- Ashley Wright: Choose Ashley Wright when the agency’s clients are past their first TikTok Shop test and asking how to scale it across everything else they run. The posts make the case: creator content generated on TikTok Shop feeds a brand’s Meta ads; audiences that discover a brand on TikTok then look for it on Amazon, DTC, and in retail; and that momentum gets a brand into conversations with Walmart, Target, Boots, or Superdrug. A second post offers a concrete tool-testing angle for agencies advising clients on vendors: one customer profile shared across channels, the case of a customer who signed up under three emails and was billed three times, and attribution models with the buyer’s own lookback windows. That suits a session focused on channel expansion and stack decisions, not just the opportunity itself.
- Amy Leffingwell: Choose Amy Leffingwell when the agency needs to convince a hesitant client to enter TikTok Shop. The posts build the business case directly: there is no auction dynamic like Meta and no keyword intent curve like Google; a creator-driven sale can be traced to the content and SKU that produced it; and the constraint shifts from how much a brand can spend before acquisition costs break to how many creators it can activate before operations become the limit. The framing—that the real question is not whether TikTok Shop works but whether waiting helps—is a ready-made opening for a client workshop. The posts also offer free planning calls as a next step.
- Don “eCommerce” Brett: Choose Don “eCommerce” Brett when the agency’s clients are consumer packaged goods brands focused on retailer-level ecommerce growth rather than social commerce. The posts draw on public retailer filings and NielsenIQ data: 85% of tracked U.S. retailers reported positive comparable sales in Q1 2026, with median comparable sales growth of 2.9% against median digital growth of 12.5% across the 22 companies reporting it; Amazon perishables shoppers spent $5,121 a year and shopped Amazon 105 times, against $3,771 and 76 times for the average Amazon shopper. The recommended next steps are to separate retailer growth from digital growth, follow the growth with people and media, and treat Amazon grocery as a frequency and data play. For an agency selling retail media, Amazon execution, or shelf-and-marketplace work to CPG clients, that evidence can open a budget conversation.

---
AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/