How Chewy Fetched a Creator Empire on TikTok (HBBIP #121)

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I’m so glad that you’re spending this Thursday morning (or whenever) reading this newsletter. Not only because I love to spread knowledge about creator marketing, but also because I get to vent and gossip with you a little.

After all, that’s the most underrated part of having a newsletter (or podcast, or social media account, or street-corner soapbox): getting to talk about stuff in your personal life that’s on your mind at the moment, and somehow construe that material as being productive or relevant or interesting to your audience.

So anyway, my upstairs neighbors. Nice people. You don’t know them, probably, and I’m not about to doxx them, but they’re a 30-something recently married couple. We’re on a solid nod-and-smile basis. No issues with them whatsoever. Except sometimes I hear a certain sound from the ceiling. Sort of a scuffling, scampering noise. Like something running quickly across the floor.

Now normally, barring anything weird or supernatural, this conundrum has a pretty standard explanation: they have a pet. However:

1. My lease forbids pet ownership, and my landlords, while also very kind people, are sticklers about the rules. (Turns out composting isn’t optional—who knew?)
2. I have never, in my eighteen months of living beneath these neighbors and running into each other in the street or the stairwell, seen them with a pet.

Well that is certainly a mystery, you’re probably saying to yourself right now. But what does that have to do with creator marketing? And why am I still reading this newsletter?

Because, dear reader: here’s the big reveal. The other day, I saw a box from a certain company being delivered to one of my neighbors. And at that point, the game was up.

Where did this box come from, you ask?

The Top Brand  of All Time (of the Week): Chewy

Granted, I might have originally mistook them for a purveyor of granola bars, but the fact remains: you don’t get a Chewy box if you don’t have a pet. So my neighbors better hope that my landlords are under the same misconception that I was.

Unfortunately for my neighbors, fewer and fewer people are under that misconception. Chewy is doing big things, and creators are playing a key role in that growth.

It stands to reason, too: with multiple reputable sources pointing to the pet industry’s continued expansion, and an anecdotal survey of my pet-owning friends confirming that they spend a lot of money on their furry friends, HBBIP is long overdue for covering the space. 

Let’s run through Chewy’s recent growth, and take a look at the brand’s most impactful creators and content.

Chewy Creator Count, 2020 - 2025

We’ll start with an area where Chewy is showing impressive, but not absolutely crazy, improvement. With 1.4k creators in 2020 and 3.7k creators in the first 11 months of 2025, that’s a 2.5x growth.

Chewy Post Count, 2020 - 2025

But those creators are punching above their weight when it comes to productivity. Starting at 3.2k posts in 2020, Chewy surged to 13k posts in 2025, a roughly 4x improvement. As any pet owner or friend-of-pet-owner knows, you tend to take a lot of pictures of your favorite living being, and so naturally creators are doing the same thing.

Chewy EMV, 2020 - 2025

But here’s where the growth starts getting astronomical. All those pet photos garner a great deal of digital attention—after all, cute critters + social media is a long-established formula for drawing eyes. That’s why Chewy’s EMV has shot up from $4.8M in 2020 to $53.3M in 2025, an 11x growth.

Chewy Engagements, 2020 - 2025

Advice to creators and brands: if you’re looking to spark engagements, try sticking a dog or a cat in the post. It worked for Chewy (granted, it was probably a lot more organic for them). Here’s a jump from 1.8M to 29.8M engagements, a cool 17x improvement.

You might think the growth ends there, which would be impressive enough, but wait, there’s more! This one really blew my mind:

Chewy Impressions, 2020 - 2025

That’s 18M impressions in 2020, and 1.7B impressions in 2025. In other words, a modest, mild, nothing to write home about growth of 93x.

How did Chewy grow its digital impressions 93x from 2020 to 2025? Well, beyond having a social and influencer manager who clearly deserves a raise, it had a little something to do with a certain platform that burst onto the scene during those years.

Chewy Share of Engagements by Platform, Jan - Nov 2025

Chewy’s share of engagements by channel from January 2025 to November 2025 tells the story. You’ve heard of SkinTok, and this newsletter has previously profiled the profound effect that dermatologists have had on brands, but now we might have to reckon with the power of PetTok (PeTok?), too. Just when I was getting used to GroceryTok!

Things were even more lopsided when it came to YoY growth for these channel engagements: it was a 141% surge for TikTok, compared to a 12% decline for Instagram.

And then things were even even more lopsided when it came to Chewy’s impressions:

Chewy Share of Impressions by Platform, January - November 2025

Pac-Man’s eating the whole pie! The growth figures were a little more even—a 79% YoY increase in Instagram impressions, and a 97% YoY increase in TikTok impressions—but what really stood out to me was the sheer volume of TikTok impressions that Chewy received: 1.4B (with a B) from January to November 2025. For perspective, that’s nearly as many as Microsoft (1.5B).

For the record, according to the AI I just asked, Chewy’s market capitalization is $13B-14B (again with a B). Microsoft? $3.5T (with a T). That’s a pretty big difference, but in terms of TikTok impressions, they’re dead even. Social media users prefer dogs to software—I don’t make the rules!

So who are the TikTokers fueling Chewy’s dominance? Most of them were new to the brand in 2025: Chewy retained 89 TikTokers from the previous year, compared to an influx of 843 newcomers. In fact, apart from Chewy’s single highest EMV-driver on TikTok (A Girl and a Doodle), who was a retained creator, the brand’s next nine top earners were all new in 2025. These newcomers comprised 21 of Chewy’s top 25 TikTok EMV-drivers, underscoring the brand’s successful expansion strategy.

These creators ran the gamut of PetTok, featuring both cats and dogs! Whether it was paid promotion or pet humor, Chewy Partners emerged as a dominant force on TikTok. And look, while any brand that gets to feature dogs in Halloween costumes in advertising and have it be both relevant and informative is going to have an advantage when it comes to social media, Chewy has done as fine a job of community-building as any brand I’ve ever seen. It even convinced my neighbors!

So there’s one mystery solved: they have a secret pet, and like many pet owners, secret or otherwise, they favor Chewy. Now the only mystery is why I took so long to cover Chewy in the first place.

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