TIKTOK SHOP · JUL 4, 2026 · 9 MIN

How to Create a High-Converting TikTok Shop Creative Brief with Claude Code, Cruva, and Gemini

Brands pay thousands for a creative brief that tells a creator exactly how to film a converting video. You can build a better one in an afternoon with Claude Code pulling the brand's winners from Cruva, Gemini watching the top video frame by frame, and Figma assembling the brief. Here is the full workflow, end to end.

Brands pay thousands of dollars for a creative brief: the one-page document that tells a creator exactly how to film a video that will actually convert. Most of those briefs are one marketer's guess dressed up in nice typography. The higher-leverage version is grounded in the brand's own top-performing content, and you can build it in an afternoon with Claude Code driving Cruva for the data, Gemini for the video analysis, and Figma for the layout.

The short answer, for anyone who landed here from a search: use Claude Code with the Cruva API to pull a brand's top-selling product and the creators driving its GMV, find the single best-converting video in that set, download it and hand it to Gemini so it can watch the footage and extract the lighting, framing, and pacing that make it work, then assemble those elements into a branded one-pager in Figma and export it as a PNG you send through your outreach tool. The whole run is an afternoon, and the brief is grounded in real winners instead of guesses.

The rest of this piece walks through each step, the reason Gemini does the video work while Claude Code drives everything else, and a worked example from a run against Medicube.

Why the Creative Brief Is the Highest-Leverage Asset in Creator Outreach

When you sign a creator, the brief is the last thing that stands between the relationship and the content. A vague brief gets you a video that misses the hook, buries the product, or reads like an ad. A specific brief — one that says "film it like this proven video, with this lighting, this framing, this opening two seconds" — gets you content that converts on the first take.

The problem is that a good brief has always been expensive to produce, because it required a human to study what works, translate it into filmmaking direction, and lay it out cleanly. That is exactly the chain of steps that Claude Code, Cruva, and Gemini collapse.

Step 1: Pull the Brand's Winners from Cruva

Start with the brand you are building the brief for. In Claude Code, prompt it to hit the Cruva enterprise API, search for the brand, and pull the last 30 days: the top-selling product ranked by GMV, the units sold, and the creators driving that product's sales.

You are not looking at the whole catalog. You want the single hero SKU, because the brief is going to be about one product, and you want the creators already winning with it, because their videos are your reference set.

A condensed version of the prompt, ready to adapt:

Using the Cruva enterprise API, search for the brand [BRAND]. Pull their last 30 days. Return their top-selling product by GMV with units sold and price. Then pull the creators driving that product's GMV and their recent videos for it. Output as an HTML table I can scan: creator handle, video, GMV, units.

Step 2: Find the Exact Video Worth Modeling

From that creator set, the goal is to find the one video worth modeling — the highest-converting piece of content for the hero SKU. This is the video the brief will be built around. Have Claude Code surface the top candidates so you can pick the one to study, then download it (and a couple of runners-up) so Gemini has the actual footage to work from.

This is the move most brief-writers skip. They write from the product page or from memory. You are writing from the single best-performing video that already exists for this exact product.

Step 3: Let Gemini Watch the Video (Not Just Read the Transcript)

Hand the downloaded video to Gemini. Gemini is Google's model, and the reason it belongs in this pipeline is that it watches the video — the actual frames — rather than reading a transcript and guessing from the words.

That distinction is the whole game. A transcript tells you what was said. It tells you nothing about the lighting, the camera angle, how the product is held, how tight the cuts are, or what happens in the first two seconds before anyone speaks. Those softer elements are what separate a creator's converting video from a flat one, and they are exactly what Gemini extracts when it watches the footage:

That extracted list becomes the filmmaking direction inside the brief.

Step 4: Build the Design Kit (When You're Not in the Brand's System)

If you are inside the brand's design system, you already have the fonts, colors, and logos. Often you are not. In the Medicube example below, I was not in the Medicube design system and did not have their tokens.

The fix is to point a web-search agent — Exa AI or Claude web search — at the brand's storefront and scrape down the products, fonts, and colors. From that you assemble a design kit and load it into Figma. The brief still comes out on-brand without you ever having access to the brand's internal files.

Step 5: Assemble the Brief in Figma

Now build the one-pager in Figma. Pull the pieces together: the hero product, the hook, the key selling points, the filming setup, and the "study the winners" section that shows the reference creators and the specific replication tips Gemini pulled out of their videos.

The output is a clean, vertical creative brief that a creator can open and immediately understand how to film. Everything on it traces back to something real — the top SKU from Cruva, the winning video, the elements Gemini extracted — rather than to a marketer's opinion.

Step 6: Export and Send Through Your Outreach Tool

Export the finished brief as a PNG and send it directly through whatever outreach tool you use to contact creators — Cruva, Reacher, or your CRM of choice. A PNG opens on any device, needs no software, and looks like something a brand paid for. That is the whole loop: data in, brief out, sent.

A Worked Example: A Medicube Run

I ran this workflow against Medicube. Claude Code hit the Cruva enterprise API, searched for the brand, and pulled the last 30 days. The top-selling product came back as the PDRN Pink Collagen Volume Multi Balm, with the units, price, and the roster of creators driving its GMV attached.

From there I picked the strongest video for that SKU, downloaded it, and sent it to Gemini. Gemini watched the footage and returned the filmmaking breakdown — the lighting, the framing, the way the balm was applied on camera, the opening seconds — which became the replication direction on the brief.

Because I was not in the Medicube design system, I ran a web-search pass over the Medicube storefront to build a design kit: the rose-pink accent, the charcoal ink, the product imagery. Then I assembled it all in Figma into a vertical brief and exported it as a PNG, ready to send through an outreach tool. The result looks like the thousand-dollar deliverable, built in an afternoon and grounded in Medicube's own winning content.

Why Gemini for the Video, Claude Code for Everything Else

It is worth being clear about which tool does what, because the instinct is to try to do it all in one place.

Claude Code is the driver. It writes and runs the Cruva pulls, handles the downloads, orchestrates the web-search agent, and does the Figma assembly. It is the terminal-native tool that turns "find the winners and lay out the brief" into scripts you can rerun for the next brand.

Gemini does exactly one job: watch the video. That is the piece Claude Code hands off, because reading footage frame by frame is what Gemini is built for. Using the right model for the video step is the difference between a brief grounded in what actually makes the content convert and one grounded in a transcript.

Where This Sits in the Affiliate Stack

The creative brief is the handoff asset — the thing you give a creator once they have signed. It sits directly downstream of recruiting. The dark horse creator workflow is how you find and sign the under-the-radar creators in the first place; this brief is what you hand them so the content they post actually converts.

Zoom out and the same Cruva data layer powers the whole operation. The competitive analysis workflow tells you which brands to learn from. The dark horse pull tells you which creators to recruit. This brief tells them how to film. And the weekly reporting workflow tells you whether it worked. For the strategic case on running brief production at volume across an entire program, see the piece on AI-generated affiliate briefs.

If you run a TikTok Shop program and want help wiring this brief workflow into your own stack, get in touch.

Frequently Asked Questions

What tools do I need to build a TikTok Shop creative brief this way?

Four: Claude Code as the driver, the Cruva API for the TikTok Shop data, Gemini to actually watch the reference videos, and Figma to lay out the finished brief. If you do not have the brand's design system, add a web-search agent like Exa or Claude web search to build a design kit first.

Why use Gemini instead of just reading the video transcript?

Because the transcript is the least important part of a converting video. The lighting, the camera angle, the pacing of the cuts, the way the creator holds the product, the first two seconds before anyone speaks — that is what carries. Gemini watches the actual footage and extracts those elements. A transcript-only model is guessing from the words.

Do I need the brand's fonts and colors to make the brief?

It helps, but you do not need to be inside the brand's design system. If you are not, point a web-search agent at the brand's storefront to scrape the products, fonts, and colors, then assemble a design kit from that and load it into Figma. The brief still comes out on-brand.

How is this different from writing a creative brief by hand?

A hand-written brief is one person's guess about what will convert. This brief is grounded in the brand's actual top-performing content: the real top SKU from Cruva, the real winning video, and the specific filmmaking elements Gemini pulled out of it. You are handing the creator a proven pattern to model, not an opinion.

Can I use a data source other than Cruva?

Yes. Any TikTok Shop data source with API or MCP access to brand, product, and creator-level performance works. Cruva is what the workflow is built on here, but the moves — find the top SKU, find the winning video, model it — are tool-agnostic.

How long does the whole workflow take?

An afternoon for the first one, less once you have the prompts saved. The Cruva pull and video download are minutes. Gemini's video analysis is minutes. The time goes into the Figma assembly and, if you need it, building the design kit for a brand you do not already have tokens for.