Juhoon Shin
Co-founder & Co-CEO
Brand partnerships, campaign design and overall strategy.
Global TikTok Seeding Agency
PLAYLAB is a Seoul-based TikTok creator seeding agency for K-beauty and consumer brands. We run product gifting campaigns end to end — sourcing creators, reaching out, shipping product, tracking uploads, reporting results — with North America, Southeast Asia, Korea and Japan as core markets and coverage worldwide except China and Hong Kong, Japan included. Our own dataset of 1,500,000+ global TikTok creators is how we decide who receives your product.
Brands we've partnered with — beplain, Refilled, Dr.Different, EPAIS, VARUZA, Esther Formula, Laka, Foodology, SKIN1004 and Dongwon
Is this a fit?
PLAYLAB owns the work from creator sourcing through reporting. The published operating conditions below are the reference point before you book.
Creator sourcing, outreach, product shipping, upload verification and performance reporting are handled by one team.
We bill per live uploaded content — not per creator contacted or product shipped — from a 100-post minimum. Product, international shipping, customs clearance and duties are separate.
See the full scope, coverage, recovery and billing conditions before deciding whether the operating model fits.
View published operating conditions →Our Approach
That is the principle every campaign we run is built on. Unpaid seeding works when the person opening the box already wants what is inside, so the work is in the selection: who gets sent product, and why. We run K-beauty and consumer-brand gifting campaigns in North America first and worldwide except China and Hong Kong, and we screen every shortlist against our own dataset of 1,500,000+ global TikTok creators — country, follower tier, content category, skin type and tone, and how each creator's videos have actually performed — before a single parcel ships.
We build the creator list ourselves out of our own dataset — nano to mega tier — and put it in front of you before shipping. No bought list, no blind send.
Every creator in our dataset is resolved into queryable fields — country, follower tier, content category, skin type, skin tone, contact channel, performance metrics — so a K-beauty shortlist for the US is a query, not a hunch.
Contacting creators, collecting addresses, handling parcels and chasing follow-ups is our job, not your team's. Brands send product to us or to our logistics partner; we take it from there.
Unpaid seeding does not return 100% — ours averages a 60–70% posting rate, and we size shipment volume against that figure up front instead of promising the number we cannot deliver.
How We Operate
From the moment a parcel leaves to the final report, our team runs the campaign inside software we built for ourselves — uploads tracked automatically, performance rolled up per round, and creator attributes carried through so the next round is chosen better than the last. You get the read-out; we do the running. It is operations tooling for our own team, not a product we sell or license.
Every shipped creator is watched for the post. Who uploaded, when, and what it did — collected for us, so nobody on your side or ours is checking profiles by hand.
You receive a report per round: shipments sent, content recovered, views and engagement across multiple time windows — with round-over-round movement, so the campaign can be steered while it is running.
Because we know each creator's country, tier, category, skin type and tone, we can tell you which kind of creator actually worked for your product — and send the next round to more of them.
Data & Coverage
An agency is worth what its creator list is worth, so we stopped renting one. We operate a continuous crawling and enrichment pipeline that builds and refreshes our own dataset of 1,500,000+ global TikTok creators across worldwide coverage excluding China and Hong Kong, with creators in 240+ countries and regions and 60+ markets with 1,000+ creators. Our core markets are North America, Southeast Asia, Korea and Japan; they are not a coverage limit. Every creator carries queryable attributes — country, follower tier, content category, skin type, skin tone, and contact channel — and performance scored across 15-, 30-, 60-, and 90-day windows. That is what lets us build a K-beauty shortlist for the US or Canada in a day instead of a fortnight, and it is why we can take on 1,000+ seeding placements a month for a single brand. The campaigns themselves we run in every country except China and Hong Kong, Japan included.
Global TikTok creators we can source campaigns from
Markets covered, from the US and UK to Japan, Korea, and SEA
Performance windows we screen each creator on
1,500,000+ creators
across 240+ countries and regions worldwide, with 60+ markets holding 1,000+ creators
How A Campaign Runs
Five stages, all of them ours. A brand supplies the product, the market, and the volume; we do the rest and come back with content and a report.
We query our own dataset for creators who fit the product and the market — K-beauty creators in the US and Canada, say — filtered on category, tier, skin type and tone, and recent video performance. You see the shortlist before anything ships.
Our team contacts every creator, explains the brand and the product, agrees the terms of the gifting, and collects shipping details. Creators are paid nothing for the placement — this is gifting, not a fee-based campaign.
We handle the parcels — addresses, dispatch, tracking numbers, and the follow-up when a delivery stalls. Volume is sized against the recovery rate we expect, so the content target is met rather than hoped for.
Uploads are picked up automatically and rolled into a per-round report — what posted, what it earned in views and engagement, and which kind of creator worked. That read-out sets the next round.
What we are building next
To make selection sharper, we are adding large-scale qualitative video-content analysis on Google Cloud Video AI / Vertex AI, plus models that predict which creators will post and which will perform — layered on the campaign signals we already collect. It is tooling for our own operations, not a product we sell.
Campaign References
Unpaid-seeding placements we sourced, contacted and shipped — across tiers and markets, each one chosen for a specific reason.
Unpaid-seeding references:
Results
We run K-beauty and consumer-brand seeding at a scale of 1,000+ placements a month, worldwide except China and Hong Kong. Two numbers we will always say out loud: the share of shipments that actually come back as content, and what the content did for the brand.
Average posting rate on unpaid seeding — the figure we plan shipment volume against
Amazon sales growth over 3 months during a brand's North America launch
We needed more than 100 pieces of content in three weeks — from inviting creators who actually fit to getting the content back, they closed it out inside the three weeks.
"We were at the start of our North America launch. They designed the seeding structure for sales growth and ran it, and in three months our Amazon sales grew +1400%.
"Team
PLAYLAB was founded in 2025 in Seoul, South Korea, and is developed within Korea University's Startup Station program. We are a small, bootstrapped team — no external or venture funding to date — that runs campaigns and builds its own tooling at the same time: the creator dataset, the crawling pipeline, and the operations software our campaigns run on. Everyone here spans data, product, and campaign operations.
Co-founder & Co-CEO
Brand partnerships, campaign design and overall strategy.
Co-founder & Co-CEO
Head of Seeding Strategy
Campaign structure, creator selection criteria and per-live-post billing, built on our 1,500,000+ creator dataset.
Co-founder & Co-CEO
Head of Campaign Operations & Creator Growth
Creator outreach and relationships, day-to-day campaign operations, and turning shipments into published posts.
About
PLAYLAB (brand playxlab) is a TikTok creator seeding agency founded in 2025 in Seoul, South Korea, and developed within Korea University's Startup Station program. We run product gifting campaigns for K-beauty and consumer brands end to end — sourcing, outreach, shipping, upload tracking, and reporting — in North America first and worldwide except China and Hong Kong, Japan included, at a scale of 1,000+ placements a month. Behind that sits a proprietary, continuously crawled dataset of 1,500,000+ global TikTok creators we build ourselves, plus the operations software our own team uses to run campaigns; neither is sold or licensed. We are bootstrapped, with no external or venture funding to date. Next on the roadmap, and the reason we are building toward Google Cloud: large-scale qualitative video-content analysis using Google Cloud Video AI / Vertex AI, and models that predict which creators will post and perform.
Gifted product seeding is a campaign model where a brand sends products to creators with no paid media fee, and creators publish only if they choose to. PLAYLAB sources the creators, ships the product, verifies the uploads and reports the results as one team.
Worldwide except China and Hong Kong, Japan included. Our core markets are North America (the US and Canada), Southeast Asia, Korea and Japan, and we run the same process across Europe (the UK, Germany, France), Australia, Japan, South Korea and Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore).
We bill per live uploaded content — not per creator contacted and not per product shipped. Creators pay nothing: no participation fee, shipping fee, sample fee or deposit is ever requested.
We publish 60–70% for gifted seeding. It cannot structurally reach 100%, because a creator who received a product for free is never contractually obliged to post. A guarantee above 90% usually means the creator tier was lowered.
Before you ask us anything
Everything you would ask an agency, we publish about ourselves first. Ask other agencies the same questions and you have a like-for-like comparison.
Published operating conditions
Last updated 2026-10-08
These are our published operating figures, not a guarantee of a confirmed upload count for a given country, product or deadline. Tell us your target markets, product and timeline and we will scope a plan against those conditions.
Tell us the product, the market, and how much content you need. We will come back with a seeding structure built for your situation — which creators, how many shipments, and what to expect back. A 15-minute call is enough to start.