Influencer Advisory™Creator community group examples
Founder · September 17, 2026 · 64 min read
Fits into: the main playbook's Part 7 and the Community page, gathered here so nothing about communities lives anywhere else.
Goal: decide whether a brand should build a creator community, and how to build one, from one page.
Part 1 · The hook, brands that built a creator community
1a · What a community did for these brands
- Bloom's 54,000+ TikTok Shop affiliates brought in over $8.8 million of TikTok Shop sales directly.
- LMNT works with a roster a third the size of AG1's and gets three quarters as many videos by rebooking the same creators.
- Elix Healing: Elix Healing credits community activated growth through practitioners and healers for 1200 percent growth in a year
- Hot Girl Pickles: Betting on community first let this brand sustain a zero dollar influencer budget, a concrete number for goodwill replacing the fee.
- Liquid Death: At four years old they were the number three beverage in the world on social and number one on TikTok, past Pepsi and Coke, and he credits authentic consumer generated content for it. From JUST Creative, April 2023, 18:23.
1b · What you'll learn
- What every working creator community is made of, as numbered value points.
- Why the brands with one keep their creators, and what our own numbers say.
- Where communities fail, so you can skip what Xbox, Discord and Duolingo shut down.
- Step by step, how the brands in this video built theirs.
1c · The brands, one after the other
Should you build a creator community?
- Brands with a community often do well, but almost nobody has shown that the community is the cause.
Brands that have built a community
| Brand | What the community is | The number |
|---|---|---|
| Olipop | Seeded creators plus a commission ladder, 1,400 codes | Creator sales went from 4% to 12% of all sales |
| Sephora Squad | A paid year long cohort you apply to | 30,000 applications in 2021, running 8 years |
| Gymshark | Seeding, then athletes, then their own event | A £300 a day business took £30,000 in 30 minutes |
| Salesforce | Trailblazers, badges and local chapters | 18 million members |
| Roblox | Creators build the actual product | $410.6M paid out to creators in six months |
| LEGO Ideas | Fans design sets, the designer takes 1% | 3.43 million members, 23 sets shipped |
| Harley-Davidson | Owners group, running since 1983 | Over 1 million members |
Tabs Chocolate
- $11M in 18 months, close to no paid ads
Olipop
Seeded creators plus a commission ladder, 1,400 codes
- Creator sales went from 4% to 12% of all sales
Sephora Squad
A paid year long cohort you apply to
- 30,000 applications in 2021, running 8 years
- More than 250 creators since 2019
- A 12 month term, pay reported at $5,000 to $50,000 a year
Open it: https://www.sephora.com/beauty/sephora-squad
No preview card, the page did not load for us (HTTP 403 Forbidden).
Gymshark
Seeding, then athletes, then their own event
- A 300 pound a day business took 30,000 pounds in 30 minutes
- 125 paid influencers as of 2020, with no published headcount since
Open it: https://www.gymshark.com/pages/athletes
No preview card, the page did not load for us (HTTP 404 Not Found).
Salesforce Trailblazers
Trailblazers, badges and local chapters
- 18 million members
- More than 200,000 members across more than 800 groups in the shapes table
Roblox
LEGO Ideas
Fans design sets, the designer takes 1%
- 3.43 million members
- A 1% royalty on net sales, ten free sets, and a credit on the box
Harley-Davidson Owners Group
Owners group, running since 1983
- Over 1 million members
Open it: https://www.harley-davidson.com/us/en/club/index.html
No preview card, the page did not load for us (HTTP 404 Not Found).
Part 2 · What a successful creator community is made of
Value point 1 · The four parts, in the order a brand builds them
The 4 steps, short version
So whether they're affiliates, whether they're customers, whatever, those are the main ones. Tools like Outer Radar to find them, scraping tagged posts on Instagram, and lots of other mechanisms.
The second is actually bringing them into the community with a deal for the ones that are approved. Then third is running the community, and fourth is then whitelisting, which puts gas on the fire.
- If we break it down into two jobs, the community's first job is to attract new creators.
- Then the second job is to give them a reason to stay and continue to work with the brand.
Value point 2 · What holds creators in place
What a brand can take from this
- A standing relationship with creators beats a one-off placement, and it compounds.
- Every brand in our data with loyalty above 55% has a structure holding creators in place, either a community, an athlete roster or an affiliate program that never closes.
- The structure is needed but not enough, because Notion has an ambassador program everyone writes about and sits at 29%.
- Having the program is not the thing, using it is.
- The community has to be about something other than the brand.
- LMNT's creators are held together by keto, ultrarunning and hiking, not by an electrolyte.
- The closed programs above, My Starbucks Idea, the Glossier reps and Duolingo's forums, all asked people to gather around the company itself.
- A community is hard to build, and that is its advantage.
- An affiliate program buys the same loyalty faster and cheaper, and anyone can copy it quickly.
- A community around a practice takes years and cannot be bought.
- That is why brands that have one are hard to replace, and why most attempts fail.
Value point 3 · The eight shapes a community can take
The eight shapes a creator community takes
| The shape | A brand doing it | The number |
|---|---|---|
| The paid cohort you apply to | Sephora Squad | A 12 month term, pay reported at $5,000 to $50,000 a year |
| The campus rep programme | Red Bull Student Marketeers | More than 4,000 worldwide, running since 1987 |
| The athlete or expert roster | Gymshark | 125 paid influencers as of 2020, with no published headcount since |
| The affiliate ladder that climbs with sales | Abercrombie Creator Suite | Tiers reported at 10% up to either 25% or 33%, and the two sources disagree |
| Co-creation, where the community makes the product | LEGO Ideas | A 1% royalty on net sales, ten free sets, and a credit on the box |
| The event or trip as the centre of it | Revolve Festival | 1,200 to 1,500 invited for 2026, mostly creators |
| Badges, tiers and leaderboards | Salesforce Trailblazers | More than 200,000 members across more than 800 groups |
The affiliate ladder is the worst documented shape on the list, though most brands could start one on Monday. Nobody publishes their tier schedule, and both Abercrombie figures come from a company that sells affiliate software and disagree with each other.
LEGO Ideas is the best documented and still gets misquoted. The 1% royalty is consistent everywhere. The count of sets shipped is not: sources say 50 as of 2022, 82 including sets only announced, and 19 currently in production, which are three different questions wearing one number. Use the royalty, not the count.
Value point 4 · The room it lives in
The rooms brands run for their own creators
| Brand | The room | What is inside it |
|---|---|---|
| Notion | Two Slack workspaces | Around 200 ambassadors across 23 countries, more than 600 applications in the first week. Channels by country and one where members compare what they earn from templates and courses |
| Sephora Squad | An in house portal | More than 250 creators since 2019, with campaigns, events and training sessions run by Sephora's own teams |
| Duolingo | Closed | The volunteer contributor programme was shut down. Contributors were offered paid roles and a shared $4,000,000 fund. What exists now is a fan run server, not a brand one |
Up next: why the brands with one keep their creators, and the study that found a community caused 19% of a retailer's revenue.
Part 3 · Why the communities that work are hard to beat
One study found a causal effect
- Manchanda, Packard and Pattabhiramaiah (Marketing Science, 2015) compared a retailer's customers who joined its community with a matched group who did not, before and after launch.
- Joining caused 19% of the revenue after launch, not just correlated with it.
- The effect held over time and across channels.
- Bapna and Umyarov (Management Science, 2015) gave away Last.fm premium subscriptions at random and watched what friends did next.
- Being connected to a new subscriber raised the odds that a person paid by more than 60%.
What our own numbers say
On the same shelf, the community brand keeps its creators
- AG1 and LMNT sell a similar product to a similar person.
- The two brands started buying creators within a month of each other in 2021.
- AG1 and LMNT behave very differently with creators.
| AG1 | LMNT | |
|---|---|---|
| Creators booked | 1,109 | 414 |
| Sponsored videos | 2,805 | 2,128 |
| Booked more than once | 36% | 56% |
| Average times booked | 2.53 | 5.14 |
- LMNT works with a roster a third the size of AG1's and gets three quarters as many videos by rebooking the same creators.
- LMNT's heaviest creators are a fitness coach with 123,000 subscribers, a keto channel, a hiking channel, an ultrarunner and a farming channel.
- AG1's heaviest are Tim Ferriss, Lex Fridman and a travel channel with 4.5 million subscribers.
- LMNT puts 71% of its creator money into creators under 500,000 subscribers, and AG1 puts 53%.
- LMNT's largest creator group is health, at 36%.
- For AG1, health comes fifth, behind lifestyle, travel, sports and entertainment.
- LMNT buys into practices where an electrolyte is already part of the daily routine, so it can stay.
- AG1 buys attention, so it has to keep finding new creators.
LMNT's creator bookings
- LMNT worked with 414 creators on 2,128 videos.
- 56% of those creators were booked more than once.
- Each creator was booked 5.14 times on average.
AG1's creator bookings
- AG1 worked with 1,109 creators on 2,805 videos.
- 36% of those creators were booked more than once.
- Each creator was booked 2.53 times on average.
Up next: what a brand actually gets out of one, from 500 million views a month to a buyer paying for the community itself.
Part 4 · What a brand gets from a creator community
The problem · why brands need this (2)
- Elix Healing: Elix Healing credits community activated growth through practitioners and healers for 1200 percent growth in a year
- Comfort Clothing: A brand names 250,000 plus ambassadors, more than half of them purchasers who became advocates unpaid
- Bloom's creator network brings in over 500 million views a month.
- From Zipchat AI's Bloom breakdown, March 2026.
- Bloom's 54,000+ TikTok Shop affiliates brought in over $8.8 million of TikTok Shop sales directly.
- From Zipchat AI's Bloom breakdown, March 2026.
- One quit and made $50,000 in about 2 weeks selling its protein on TikTok Shop.
- From Open Residency.
Move 5 · Turning goodwill into posts and deals: new evidence (8)
- Hot Girl Pickles: Betting on community first let this brand sustain a zero dollar influencer budget, a concrete number for goodwill replacing the fee.
- HexClad: Sponsor 40 YouTubers and expect eight to keep cooking with your pans all year.
- Clean Skin Club: A points currency instead of cash: ambassadors earn points for posting about the brand or making a product video, redeemable for products or gift cards.
- Rhode Skin: Rhode Skin turns launches over to its community by reposting creator content instead of paying for the announcement
- C4 and Cellucor: An acquirer names a target's creator community as a reason for the buy, evidence the community itself carries acquisition value.
- Who: Doss Cunningham, CEO of Nutrabolt, the company behind C4 and Cellucor.
- His reason: with that community, Nutrabolt could move into the energy space and go after the female shopper, whom he calls wildly underrepresented up to that point.
- From PricePlow, June 2026.
- SOS: Trades a free bottle for a customer's before-and-after photo to share with the community, a barter mechanic instead of cash.
The community sometimes comes first
- SITS Girls started as a blogging community and became a bookable network of about 50,000 publishers.
- It was bought in 2014.
- The community came first, and the network of publishers is what got sold.
More from the interviews you starred
- Boxed Water Is Better: The company has planted a million trees through user-generated content on social media. From Unconquered, January 2021, 24:40.
- Hims: They turned that free customer content into TV ads and New York City subway billboards so customers felt they were building the brand. From Brydge Club, July 2026, 15:42.
- Midi Health: She gets daily inbound on LinkedIn from husbands asking how to get their wives to Midi, which is an unpaid word of mouth channel she did not build. From HumanizeHer with Erica Lockheimer, October 2025, 25:04.
- Glow: The value of an influencer becoming a long-term fan is greater than paying them for a single promotion. From CreatorIQ, June 2020, 59:02.
- Alex Hormozi: The speaker advocates for building an 'advertising machine' within the business itself, so that the community of customers can generate 90% of ads, and the business only needs to generate 10-20%. From Alex Hormozi, March 2025, 25:07.
Up next: the nuances, and why Xbox, Discord and Duolingo all shut theirs.
Part 5 · The nuances, where communities fail
Where community programs fail
The best designed test found no effect on revenue
- Algesheimer, Borle, Dholakia and Singh ran a year long randomised field experiment at eBay Germany (Marketing Science, 2010).
- Inviting customers into the community raised participation.
- Participation then had no effect on bids or revenue, and lowered listings and how much people spent.
Large companies keep closing these programs
| What closed | When |
|---|---|
| Xbox Ambassadors, after 13 years | October 2024 |
| Discord's own Partner Program | October 2023 |
| Duolingo Clubs, forums and Events | 2022 and 2023 |
| My Starbucks Idea, 190,000 ideas and 277 built | 2018 |
| Glossier's rep program | Discontinued |
Xbox Ambassadors, closed
Shut down in October 2024, after 13 years
Discord Partner Program, closed
Discord closed its own partner program in October 2023
Duolingo Clubs and forums, closed
Clubs, forums and Events all shut, 2022 and 2023
- The volunteer contributor programme was shut down
- Contributors were offered paid roles and a shared $4,000,000 fund
- What exists now is a fan run server, not a brand one
- Duolingo is the company most often held up as proof that community works.
- After listing, it switched to streaks, leaderboards and notifications.
My Starbucks Idea, closed
190,000 ideas and 277 built, then closed in 2018
Glossier rep program, closed
Almost every community return figure comes from a vendor
- Olipop's 982% return, Tabs' 9.8x, Kettle & Fire's cost per engagement and Cozy Earth's 55% of revenue all come from the software vendor each brand was using.
- impact.com, Social Snowball, Aspire and MOGL each want the number large.
- None of these figures has been independently audited.
- Lululemon's 1,500 ambassadors can be verified.
- The return on them is not published anywhere.
- The "high ROI" claim traces back to a marketing blog.
A described community and a working one are different things
- On paper, it is the strongest example of a creator community.
- We hold no TikTok records for Neuro Gum.
- We can see 38 placements across 16 channels, with the top three creators holding half of them.
- Neuro Gum has had no sponsored video since 27 June 2026.
- The community may be real, but it does not show in the only evidence we have.
- One made $250,000 in a single day, during the December Times Square and Steve Aoki push.
- From Open Residency, June 2025, 14:25.
- Creators: about 75 in October 2024, about 25,000 in May 2026.
- Views: almost 875 million impressions in Q4 of 2024, and 5 billion impressions in 2025.
- Rank: fastest growing brand on TikTok Shop's health category in 2024.
Brand success does not follow from having a community
- AG1 has the worst creator loyalty on its shelf and is one of the largest supplement brands in the world.
- PRIME runs collegiate ambassadors and posted a 70.7% fall in UK turnover in its 2024 accounts.
- Temu and Shein became the fourth and ninth largest digital advertisers in the United States with no community of any kind.
In most communities a few people talk and the rest read
- At Atlassian, 12% of users answered 91% of the questions.
- About 85% of Roblox developers earn under $100 a month.
- A community of 500 usually means 20 people talking and 480 reading, and the 20 produce the result.
Where it breaks · new counter evidence (9)
- Gymshark: even Gymshark still gets over 60 percent of new customers through paid ads, a number showing community never replaced paid for the brand already cited on the page
- Gymshark: debunks the viral claim Gymshark hit 700M with zero paid ads, the founder says he saw the P&L and they spent hundreds of millions on performance marketing, undercutting the page's own Gymshark seeding story
- Kill Cliff: Named rival Kill Cliff had the top CrossFit athletes and money but lost the community by treating people as an inner circle versus outsiders, pushing people to LIFEAID instead
- waterdrop: A brand executive admits running per country native language community teams is not cheap to staff, a concrete cost admission for the where it breaks section.
- Spacegoods: founder argues selling product people love starts the community, not the other way round, a direct challenge to the community-first premise
- Puresport: a named brand doubts the community-first model scales past a ceiling, questioning if Puresport can reach 30 million in revenue on community alone
- Ridge: Ridge says on record it has no owned community at all, the only place community forms is organically around the creators it works with, a counter case for skipping the whole model.
- Thesis: A personalized product cannot be recommended friend to friend, which breaks the referral engine a creator community depends on.
- DoNotAge: DoNotAge has advocates talking about it and pays none of them, which is a stated policy rather than a budget limit.
A competition is not a community
Competitions, prizes, and the rooms brands run
The short answer on competitions
The word competition covers three things, and two are not community at all. One is an ad buy with a prize attached. One is recruitment. Only the third, a contest among people already in the room, is a community event, and almost nobody publishes numbers on it.
A competition gets a brand content without taking on creators. A community takes on creators without paying for every video. They are not two versions of one idea, and a brand that runs the first while calling it the second gets neither.
Three kinds of competition, and only one is a community
One, the spectacle. A huge prize, one winner, thousands or hundreds of thousands of entries. Doritos Crash the Super Bowl and Lay's Do Us a Flavor are the famous two. The prize buys press and a pile of entries from strangers, and almost none of them hears from the brand again. It is advertising with a contest bolted on, and it works on those terms.
Two, the audition. The prize is the contract. e.l.f. gave three winners a paid representation deal in 2020. Sephora picks a cohort out of applications every year. Chipotle opened the fifteenth seat of its Creator Class by public contest. This is recruitment: the competition is the door into a community, not the community.
Three, the internal contest. A leaderboard, a monthly sales race, a prize for the best hook, a trip for the top ten, run among ambassadors already signed. It is the only real community event of the three, and it has almost no public evidence, because the numbers sit with the brand instead of in a press release.
What was actually run, and what the prize was
| Competition | Year | The prize and the scale |
|---|---|---|
| Doritos, Crash the Super Bowl | 2025 | $1,000,000, a first quarter Super Bowl slot and a trip. Opened September 2024, thousands of entries cut to 25 finalists, then a public vote. Won by Dylan Bradshaw and Nate Norell for a spot called Abduction |
| Lay's, Do Us a Flavor | Oct 2024 to Feb 2025 | $1,000,000 to the winner, $50,000 to each of two runners up, on more than 700,000 submissions. Won by Paula George for Bacon Grilled Cheese |
| e.l.f., Eyes. Lips. Famous. | 2020 | Three winners, each a $5,000 representation contract and a year of product |
| Chipotle, Creator Class | 2021 | 14 founding creators, the 15th seat opened by public contest. The prize was the contract, with no separate cash figure published |
| Sephora Squad | Yearly since 2019 | A 12 month paid term, reported between $5,000 and $50,000 a year and negotiated per deliverable |
| Snapchat, Spotlight | 2020 to 2021 | $250,000,000 paid to more than 12,000 creators in the first year, against a promised $1,000,000 a day. Cut back, then closed |
| YouTube, Shorts Fund | 2021 to 2023 | $100,000,000 in total, paid at $100 to $10,000 a month, then replaced by a share of advertising revenue |
| Gymshark66 | Annual | A 66 day challenge with a shortlist and a named winner. No prize value published anywhere I could reach |
Doritos, Crash the Super Bowl 2025
$1,000,000, a first quarter Super Bowl slot and a trip
- Opened September 2024, thousands of entries cut to 25 finalists, then a public vote
- Won by Dylan Bradshaw and Nate Norell for a spot called Abduction
Lay's, Do Us a Flavor
$1,000,000 to the winner on more than 700,000 submissions
- $50,000 to each of two runners up
- Won by Paula George for Bacon Grilled Cheese
e.l.f., Eyes. Lips. Famous.
Three winners, each a $5,000 representation contract and a year of product
- Run in 2020
Chipotle, Creator Class
14 founding creators, the 15th seat opened by public contest
- Run in 2021
- The prize was the contract, with no separate cash figure published
Snapchat, Spotlight
$250,000,000 paid to more than 12,000 creators in the first year
- Against a promised $1,000,000 a day
- Cut back, then closed
YouTube, Shorts Fund
$100,000,000 in total, paid at $100 to $10,000 a month
- Ran 2021 to 2023
- Replaced by a share of advertising revenue
Gymshark66
A 66 day challenge with a shortlist and a named winner
- Annual
- No prize value published anywhere we could reach
What our own numbers say
The competition brands do not buy creators
| Brand | Videos we hold | Creators | Booked again |
|---|---|---|---|
| Doritos | 1 | 1 | 0% |
| Lay's | 1 | 1 | 0% |
| Discord | 3 | 3 | 0% |
| Chipotle | 5 | 3 | 33% |
| Duolingo | 5 | 5 | 0% |
| Crocs | 25 | 22 | 14% |
| e.l.f. | 27 | 22 | 18% |
| Bumble | 29 | 14 | 7% |
| Red Bull | 34 | 28 | 14% |
| Glossier | 38 | 15 | 60% |
| Salesforce | 41 | 24 | 29% |
| Roblox | 42 | 19 | 16% |
| Xbox | 46 | 32 | 28% |
| Figma | 54 | 21 | 52% |
| Lululemon | 83 | 48 | 23% |
| LEGO | 101 | 61 | 39% |
| Adobe | 179 | 95 | 30% |
| Sephora | 298 | 105 | 51% |
| Canva | 311 | 117 | 52% |
The top and bottom of that table are two different worlds. The five brands with the most famous creator competitions sit in the first five rows with fifteen videos between them. The two running application cohorts, Sephora and Canva, sit at the bottom with 609 videos and repeat booking above half.
Canva, the videos behind that number
311 videos across 117 creators, 52% booked again.
The biggest community on the list has nearly the worst loyalty
Red Bull has more than 4,000 student marketeers, the biggest community named here, and 34 recorded sponsored videos across 28 creators, of which 14% came back for a second. Only Bumble is lower.
Those 4,000 people are not turning into standing relationships with paid creators. The community and the creator roster are two separate systems inside one company, and neither feeds the other.
Where the prize model breaks
The law treats a prize very differently from a fee
In the United States a contest decided by chance is a sweepstakes and has to offer a free way to enter. New York requires registration and a surety bond for the full value of the prize on any pool above $5,000, filed thirty days before launch. The Federal Trade Commission treats a chance to win as a material connection, so anybody posting about their own entry has to disclose it, and a hashtag on its own does not count. The Commission settled with Publishers Clearing House for $18,500,000 in June 2023 over designs that made people believe buying something improved their odds.
In the United Kingdom the CAP code covers every prize promotion, whether it turns on skill or on chance.
A contest of skill among vetted, contracted ambassadors avoids most of this. An open draw among strangers does not, which is a good reason to keep the internal contest and the public spectacle separate.
A prize can lower the effort it was meant to buy
A long line of experiments on paying people for something they did willingly keeps finding that an expected reward reduces their appetite for the task itself. Leaderboards work the same way: published work on rank comparison reports that only the people near the top read a leaderboard as success, and everybody else reads it as losing again.
The arithmetic of one winner
Doritos cut thousands of entries to 25 and then to one. Lay's took more than 700,000 submissions and paid three people. Every entrant did the work and the brand keeps the entries.
That is fine with strangers. Run it on your own hundred ambassadors and ninety nine of them worked for a prize they did not get, and you face those ninety nine again next month.
An open contest hands the pen to strangers
Mountain Dew ran an open naming contest in 2012 and 4chan took it over, voting an offensive name to the top and leaving a prank on the site. The company pulled the whole thing. It was a consumer contest, not a creator one, and it is why the vetted internal version and the open public version should never share a mechanism.
Up next: a rapid fire of more brands doing it, sorted by the part of the community each one shows.
Part 6 · More brands running creator communities, rapid fire
Move 1 · Warm them up: new evidence (14)
- Sol de Janeiro: Sol de Janeiro sent handwritten thank you notes to people who mentioned the brand organically, before it was even at Sephora
- LIFEAID: LIFEAID deliberately built a cool, fun, open brand identity in contrast to Kill Cliff's exclusive image, throwing parties and folding in some of the Party Aid energy.
- Hot Girl Pickles: It brings micro influencers and friends and family to named events (a hot girl walk in Austin, a launch party in New York) instead of paid influencers.
- Tubby Todd: nearly 100 percent of people sent free product wanted to talk about it on their own blog or social post, unpaid, which became the whole marketing strategy
- BiOptimizers: BiOptimizers launched a new product inside an existing community, the Bulletproof biohacking event, and its early adopters reported doubling both REM and deep sleep.
- Huel: founder personally packed every early box with a free t shirt and a handwritten note, citing the thousand true fans theory as the reason it pays off later
- Book Outdoors: Book Outdoors gifts new product to a dozen person creator family every collection in exchange for content
- Vital Proteins: founder built loyalty with influencers through personal vulnerability, calling them family since 2014 to 2015, an alternate warm up mechanic to PR boxes
- Vital Proteins: trade show relationships with Melissa Hartwig and the Wellness Mama turned them into advocates who gave the brand its early platform
- Bucked Up: inbound ambassador requests come faster than the founder can answer them, liking one photo alone triggers a request, showing brand association snowballing
- Hot Girl Pickles: It partners with other brands' communities on purpose to swap audiences, a warm up mechanic the page does not cover.
- Little Spoon: The first hire in New York was a grassroots marketing person who went to mom events sampling the product and talking about it to get the word out. From Behind Her Empire with Yasmin Nouri, July 2025, 32:05.
- Halfdays: Her recommended sequence for a new brand is founder content, then a community channel, then ambassadors as word of mouth. From Marketing Operators, September 2025, 53:52.
- Qalo: A blogger, not an agency, opened the market that made Qalo, and each later tranche, like CrossFit, came from a community plus its best influencers. From Open Residency, March 2026, 120:40.
Move 2 · Who gets in and what they owe: new evidence (11)
- Caraway: Caraway runs a network of about 3,000 brand ambassadors a year across Instagram and TikTok, a scale number the page lacks.
- Bulletproof: Bulletproof runs an ambassador program with at least 100 unpaid ambassadors, a named brand with a headcount the page does not have.
- Bucked Up: the ambassador program is over 100,000 people with roughly 200 new applications a day, a scale and inbound rate figure not on the page
- Monster Energy: They opened the festival stage with four competition winners run with DJ Mag, one on each of the four nights, as their route to putting new artists in front of an audience.
- Skullcandy: CEO names a concrete size floor for picking who gets a real deal, a fan with as few as 2,500 truly engaged followers can outperform a much bigger name
- Clean Skin Club: The points system is built to be inclusive of members with no large following, so the gate is participation, not follower count.
- Bulletproof: Bulletproof gates entry on niche credibility (CrossFit champs, bobsled champs, memory experts) instead of a sales number or follower count.
- Sephora: Sephora also runs Sephoria, a separate annual event creators must submit an application to attend as a member
"because they also do do this yearly thing where creators have to submit to
participate and become a member" unknown, at the brand, Forever Mood: From Investment Banking to Lifestyle Brand at 15:58, Startup to Storefront
- Eatwith: Ambassador vetting mechanic: a demo dinner at the venue plus an actual background check before anyone joins.
- Quoka Brew: Quoka Brew has 114 student ambassadors.
- Cake's Body: Cake's Body names its ambassador tier the Hype Girls and the group is over 200 people
- Gem: Their formalised version of an advocate programme is a customer advisory board that fans apply to join. From The Voice of Retail #podcast, January 2025.
- Gem: The advisory board meets every month to check in on customers' journey with Gem and learn what they want to see more of and learn next. From The Voice of Retail #podcast, January 2025.
Move 4 · Running it so it stays alive: new evidence (22)
- 1st Phorm: Hires its own transformation-contest winners onto staff, about 12 of its 60 headquarters employees.
- Obvi: The company tapped into five initial community members to help moderate comments, content, and answer questions, offering them a lifetime supply of product.
- O Positiv: O Positiv treats the job as community management, not media buying, hiring TikTok native young talent specifically to coach and nurture the creator community.
- 1st Phorm: 65 headquarters staff answer basic customer questions on the back end of the app every single day.
- 1st Phorm: Runs a roughly 10,000-person rep army alongside almost 400 headquarters staff to support it.
- BiOptimizers: BiOptimizers reads customer and ambassador testimonials aloud every week in team meetings, a standing ritual that keeps the room alive.
- Cann: A named brand gives each regional team a pool of 10 to 20 freelance ambassadors it can activate within a week, a concrete staffing and speed number the page lacks.
- Glow Recipe: Team travels to grab coffee or breakfast with each influencer in person as a thank-you and to keep them updated.
- 1st Phorm: Deliberately keeps the rep relationship human-run rather than automated, even though he says an AI app could convert better.
- Huel: Rather than pay creators, he built a place for customers to talk to each other: one full time person now runs the forum, Instagram, Facebook and a little Twitter.
- Ulta Beauty: Ulta Beauty has a creator program called Ulta Beauties, which are store associates who are also creators and influencers with their own following.
- Cake's Body: One of Cake's Body's community members was hired as a real employee and now runs customer service, a result the page lacks
- Turtlebox: Turtlebox has grown from two communities to about ten, each with its own community manager.
- Ghost Energy: Ghost hires newer team members straight out of its organic fan base, turning community members into staff.
- Huel: He personally answered the Facebook comments every evening for eighteen months, including the nasty ones, because he would not ask the team to do it out of hours.
- Ghost Energy: Runs named weekly rituals with the community: Warzone Wednesdays, a branded game lobby, and Legends Play Mondays.
- Huel: a concrete community running tactic, reply wittily to critics on purpose because the exchange itself buys more engagement and distribution
- Glow Recipe: Spun off a separate community Instagram, Real Glow Gang, for behind-the-scenes, questions and memes, distinct from the brand's polished main account.
- Ulta Beauty: Quadrupled the number of Ulta Beauties creators during the holiday season.
- Cake's Body: Cake's Body runs a virtual happy hour for its ambassador group, a standing call format not yet on the page
- Skratch Labs: A brand's community became a hiring pipeline, a runner it met through events and product use became staff, a benefit of running a community the page does not mention.
- Huel: The community name came from the customers, not from marketing, and the company adopted it and applied it to staff as well. From Dr Simon Chard, April 2021, 16:42.
- MUD\WTR: MUD\WTR's own podcast runs a customer voice memo call to action, paid in mugs, which is a working user generated content loop inside a brand show. From MUDWTR, June 2022, 0:51.
- Bobbie: Their social lead Angela Hanks's Slack idea was to put real customers on a Times Square billboard: moms are the original influencers. From Marketing Operators, April 2026, 40:21.
- 1st Phorm: Asked how integral the Legionnaire ambassador program is to the company, he says it is the backbone of the organization, and that 1st Phorm's differentiation is refusing to win on formula, such as adding 50 extra milligrams of caffeine to call itself the best pre-workout, and instead competing on education. From Joshua Schall, June 2022, 6:20.
- Olipop: He comments back on every video they appear in, inserts the brand into trending videos and sounds, and says commenting on a creator's or celebrity's posts is the easiest way to get hold of anybody now. From partnrUP, March 2023, 28:56.
- Olipop: He is tagged in about 100 videos a day and handles it in 20 to 30 minutes at night or at the airport, sticking to notifications rather than the feed. From partnrUP, March 2023, 33:11.
Notion ambassadors
Around 200 ambassadors across 23 countries, in two Slack workspaces
- More than 600 applications in the first week
- Channels by country, and one where members compare what they earn from templates and courses
Open it: https://www.notion.so/Notion-Ambassador-Program-45448f9b8e704c7bab254bd505c4717c
No preview card, the page did not load for us (a page with nothing to read, matched window.location.replace).
Red Bull Student Marketeers
Abercrombie Creator Suite
Revolve Festival
Open it: https://www.revolve.com/
No preview card, the page did not load for us (https://www.revolve.com/ could not be fetched: TimeoutError:).
What brands told us on our own sales calls (18)
- SHINE FIT (Move 1, call of 2026-06-29): "they get to know me, the owner, the like coaches on the team and have a genuine love for the brand"
- Axolt (Move 1, call of 2026-02-20): "he just became in love with it, and then he became a natural ambassador, because it's just helps him, it helps helps his family, and there's a strong overlap of his audience to our audience."
- Green Revolution (Move 2, call of 2026-06-10): "Our brand ambassadors do post on their personal socials about us, and that's great. Like, sure, we call that, but their job is really like they're in a certain territory, they've got vendor day kits"
- Axolt (Move 3, call of 2026-02-20): "we would offer like a lifetime discounts part of membership, early access to new products that we're planning to launch, and things like that."
- Peptide Telehealth Prospect (Move 3, call of 2026-07-16): "It's 20 off any order. Even if they order they get their money twenty back a hundred dollars. Once they reach the five thousand dollar threshold then it's forty."
- Peptide Telehealth Prospect (Move 4, call of 2026-07-16): "they have a whole port portal on what to say, what to do for these ambassadors to do it correctly."
- Shippo (Move 4, call of 2026-05-01): "He has, like, an eBay community of sellers and things like that. But where he's really big is that he does Facebook lives every day"
- Peluva (Move 5, call of 2026-01-05): "if they have a strong enough community that doesn't really need to happen. Like, for example, David posted us without even having a partnership with us for the first time, and, like, our sales spiked."
- Bonusan (Where it breaks, call of 2026-06-02): "she wanted to start just buy free products and then it kind of stopped there. So it didn't really come to an offer where there was like long range plan with her."
- Pulsetto (Where it breaks, call of 2026-07-16): "he has generated only seven sales, only seven conversions over three Instagram Reels. So that's horrible. And knowing how much we paid him, his community is also longevity biohackers and stuff like that, but I don't know."
Up next: six brands in depth, then Nutrafol, IM8 and HexClad.
Part 7 · Six brands in depth, and how each one runs it
In depth 1 · NeuroGum
- Neuro Gum: A post on Reddit's r/neutropics community led to hitting the Indiegogo goal within the first hour. From The Anatomy of a Dream, March 2026, 38:21.
- Neuro Gum: Creators talk to each other, so a winning hook spreads through the group without the brand pushing it. From Open Residency, June 2025, 5:16.
- Neuro Gum: The system eventually runs itself because creators are the ones calculating what works. From Open Residency, June 2025, 5:24.
- Neuro Gum: A creator community that is friends with each other compounds on itself. From Open Residency, June 2025, 6:40.
- Neuro Gum: The turning point was creators wanting to be tied to the coolest, fastest growing brand on TikTok, and the snowball started rolling faster. From Open Residency, June 2025, 8:45.
- Neuro Gum: That programme flew creators to Coachella to mingle with the Kardashians and to Florida, which is what made them loyal. From Open Residency, June 2025, 10:11.
- Neuro Gum: The fan base is stronger with individuals you spend more time with, like Kai who can be watched for 8 hours a day unedited. From The Anatomy of a Dream, March 2026, 20:07.
In depth 2 · LMNT
- LMNT: The prototype sold at $100 to $120 a pouch to his own clients even though it set into a salt rock, purely on trust already built with the community. From Ryan Daniel Moran, May 2026, 10:51.
- LMNT: The friends and family round was designed as a marketing instrument, taken to make supporters feel they own a little bit of Element rather than because the company needed money. From Ryan Daniel Moran, May 2026, 20:55.
- LMNT: One of the first rounds was roughly 500 of his own coaching clients buying a piece of the company, alongside influencers and strategic advisors, and they bought simply because they wanted to own a piece. From Ryan Daniel Moran, May 2026, 21:24.
- LMNT: The seeded first responders became unpaid ambassadors who shared it, then customers, and he says customers for life because the product reached them when they were in need. From Ryan Daniel Moran, May 2026, 27:46.
- LMNT: The community rule is a no-questions-asked refund where the customer does not even have to send the product back, on the belief that it pays for itself, which he says it has. From Ryan Daniel Moran, May 2026, 30:09.
In depth 3 · Organifi
- Organifi: Community building was key to premium branding, making customers feel like they were joining a movement and bringing the brand into their lives. From Ryan Daniel Moran, July 2026, 25:07.
- Organifi: The brand had three communities: an open Facebook page ('juicing vegetables') with a million followers, and a paid membership site ('juicing animals') built from FitLife TV. From Ryan Daniel Moran, July 2026, 26:03.
- Organifi: The paid community ('juicing animals') was for highest-end customers, coaching clients, membership clients, and long-term community members, accessed via a monthly subscription. From Ryan Daniel Moran, July 2026, 26:48.
- Organifi: The entire ecosystem of Organifi customers, including social media pages, paid communities, and email, contributes to the brand's inherent connection and raving following. From Ryan Daniel Moran, July 2026, 27:36.
In depth 4 · Liquid Death
- Liquid Death: The Super Bowl ad idea came out of user generated content: hundreds of parents were already posting photos of their kids with Liquid Death cans. From 20VC with Harry Stebbings, January 2023, 46:14.
- Liquid Death: The consumers are handing them the material, and Liquid Death simply tags it back without touching or editing it and without paying for it. From JUST Creative, April 2023, 23:11.
- Liquid Death: The reason extensions and collabs work at all, in his framing, is that customers want to broadcast the brand to other people, which is the mechanism a creator placement is trying to rent. From Mike Cessario, 55:23.
In depth 5 · Ghost Energy
- Ghost Energy: Fans design and post fake Ghost cans, which he treats as free brand energy that other companies pay agencies to manufacture. From Bevlab, November 2025, 29:57.
- Ghost Energy: The endorsement he values most: from the Warp Tour stage, the band shouted out Ghost Energy by name and called out Dan, the owner, saying it meant a lot and was not corporate. From Bevlab, November 2025, 63:09.
- Ghost Energy: The brief to a creator is to take the product and share it however it fits their own community, and Ghost accepts whatever that turns out to be. From Josiah Novak, March 2026, 7:25.
In depth 6 · Bucked Up
- Bucked Up: The founding logic was volume: an army of small voices beats one big one. From Finally Ready To Grow, July 2025, 18:15.
- Bucked Up: He says they ran the influencer playbook backwards compared with everyone else, who signs one big name first. From Finally Ready To Grow, July 2025, 18:44.
- Bucked Up: Once brand ambassadors show influence, they can become sponsored athletes, receiving in-store credit or money. From Luxe Life Discovered Podcast, May 2024, 12:54.
- Bucked Up: The company filters through brand ambassador applications to find the best, with specific requirements. From Luxe Life Discovered Podcast, May 2024, 13:21.
Worked examples: Nutrafol and IM8
| Academy-certified partners | Nutrafol Academy is a creator/influencer accreditation programme led by Chief Medical Advisor Dr. Heather Woolery-Lloyd. Nutrafol says participants earn an accreditation badge and all partners are required to complete the courses. [1] |
How IM8 runs its creator community, from the Community page:
- The founding 12 affiliates and the 30-day challenge: 12 affiliates IM8 picked by hand. One of them says she did a 30-day social media challenge and went to her first few IM8 events in NYC. Another creator finished 30 days and kept the vlogs going, and others tag #IM8Challenge.
- The ambassador welcome box: A PR box of product, and in one case an IM8 sweater. They post the unboxing with their own code and tags like #IM8Ambassador and #IM8Community.
- The IM8 Strava club: 4,155 members on 12 September 2026. Almost 200,000 people joined the IM8 x Inter Miami CF challenge. The club posts its athletes, like Lucy Charles-Barclay, Kanoa Igarashi, and Marta Ortega and Miguel Yanguas at the London Premier Padel P1.
- Rooms that already have members: Gyms, clubs and summits: PURE Group in Hong Kong, Lore Bathing Club, Flyfish Club, NÔMADE Temple, the ELEVATE Wellness Summit and Wellness Rave. An IM8 smoothie after class, a drinks station, gift bags, a sponsored panel, or a place on the partner list.
27 community partnerships from other brands, like Celsius at SoulCycle and Nuun at Orangetheory:
Analyzing culinary council - hexclad influencer program
2. With a playbook he can size up a new partner in five to 10 minutes.
““That's not even including all the events they're doing and the organic social stuff they're doing and having HexClad in their restaurants. It's just so easy for us to go and rationalize these deals and now we have a playbook for it that I feel confident I can, when I see someone, it's like hey, this person came across so-and-so's desk. it takes me five to 10 minutes to be like yeah, I think we can replicate the playbook with this person and it just gives me a lot of confidence now in spending some of these larger chunks of money up front because we have that playbook dialed.””
3. Hexclad's ambassador programme is called the culinary council and lives on a partners page with the New York Yankees and Still Gin.
““We call it our culinary council. So, if you go to our website, we have this page that's like our HexClad partners page, and one of the drop So, it's like the New York Yankees, uh Still Gin, and then the culinary council is the one in the middle here, and it and it outlines um like Yeah, there's basically I think we have five chefs that are on the culinary council. It's Clare Smyth, Nancy Dominique, Gordon, and Paul Ainsworth. And again, not I would say the only Even Gordon, like he's not a true He's not a creator in the sense of like a social a social media chef. Like anytime Gordon's creating content, right, it's on a pretty big production.””
4. The fact that none of them are true creators is what makes the roster an advantage.
““It's Clare Smyth, Nancy Dominique, Gordon, and Paul Ainsworth. And again, not I would say the only, even Gordon, he's not a true, he's not a creator in the sense of a social media chef. Anytime Gordon's creating content, it's on a pretty big production. When he's creating content on his own, it's very much this style, like Gordon reacts. But none of these people are true creators, which I think again gives us some alpha because we can bring them in and shoot content with them, and it's pretty crazy what our content team can do in an 8-hour shoot day.””
Up next: step by step, how these brands built theirs.
Part 8 · Step by step, how they built it
Step 1 · Warm creators up before you ask for anything
1.1 · Start with the creators and customers you have
- Your first ambassadors can be the customers, fans and staff you already have.
- Organifi: its first ambassadors were its own customers, avid fans who wanted to promote it at launch. From Mind Pump Show, December 2022.
- Sol de Janeiro: a handwritten note to people who talked about the brand on their own, before it was at Sephora. From Sol de Janeiro Official, April 2018.
- Ulta Beauty: its Ulta Beauties are store associates, many of them creators with their own following. From The CMO Podcast, August 2026.
- Ulta Beauty has since doubled the Ulta Beauties creator program.
- From The CMO Podcast, August 2026.
1.2 · Send a PR box with a community invite
- If you've done a good job with the PR boxes and you have good brand association, you will get a lot of influencers who want to join the community.
- SugarBearHair: it sent the nicest box, took creators in the group on trips like Coachella, and they stayed loyal. From Kent Yoshimura, on Open Residency, June 2025, 9:36.
1.3 · Gift every week, at a set number
- Automated gifting lets a small team reach hundreds of creators every week.
- Grüns: about 2 hours a week reaching 500 TikTok and Instagram creators and 150 YouTube creators, through automated gifting. From Archive's page on Grüns.
- Spacegoods: a lookalike search off its best paid creators finds 100+ similar creators in minutes (vendor's own numbers). From the vendor's own write-up on Spacegoods.
1.4 · Put your best early creators on a retainer
- One creator on a monthly fee can carry most of your sales.
- NeuroGum: it hired 15, 20, 30 creators to make content every single day, and took five or six months to go viral on TikTok. From Helium 10's podcast with NeuroGum.
- Peach Slices: one $600-a-month creator brought $150,000 of its $226,000 GMV (vendor's own numbers). From Brands Meet Creators' own page on Peach Slices.
1.5 · Once you have a base, stop cold outreach
- NeuroGum: it pulls from TikTok Affiliate Partner groups and other creator groups instead of cold outreach. From Open Residency, June 2025.
- How Nutrafol plans it, in a job post: the hire keeps relationships with creators, talent agencies and platform partners like GRIN, LTK and ShopMy to grow the network.
- From Nutrafol's job post on Built In.
- How Bloom staffs it: a scouting intern finds creators on Instagram and TikTok, an influencer relationship manager takes each one over, and a director runs the team, 15 to 25 people in-house.
- From Greg LaVecchia on Open Residency, June 2026.
Step 1 · Where it goes wrong
- Don't hire a vetted TikTok agency partner, because you're not building a relationship with the influencer.
- Bloom has never used an agency for its influencer team.
- From Greg LaVecchia on Open Residency, June 2026.
- Before Spacegoods built its community, an external agency shipped 200-300 free products a month.
- Posts trickled in, then nothing: no relationships and no way to measure it.
- From the vendor's own write-up on Spacegoods.
- NeuroGum budgeted 300 creators to get free product with a one-page brief, and January, February, March and April brought nothing.
- From Ryan Chen on Sweat Equity, June 2026.
Step 2 · Set the deal structure
- Set a minimum in sales or followers before a creator gets a sample.
- NeuroGum: a sample goes only to a creator with at least $500 of GMV across TikTok Shop in the last 30 days. From Helium 10's podcast with NeuroGum.
- OLIPOP: at least 10,000 followers on one platform, with room for health advocates, nutritionists and dietitians (vendor's own numbers). From the vendor's own write-up on OLIPOP.
- Bloom: creators with 5,000 to 50,000 followers on a small budget. From Greg LaVecchia on Open Residency, June 2026.
- Once in, a recorded 3-hour orientation with a Notion doc, and NeuroGum tracks who went through it.
- From Open Residency, June 2025.
Pick for fit, not size: Gymshark has no fixed checklist for its athletes, and picks them on content quality, brand fit and how their audience responds. Gymshark
- Pick creators the season belongs to: American Eagle is working with five sorority chapters and more than 25 RushTok creators for back to school, which CMO Craig Brommers called a proper business partnership. Glossy, July 2026
Seed made creators pass a course and an exam before they could promote it
- Seed launched Seed University, a 59-minute Instagram Stories curriculum covering six subjects that prospective ambassadors had to complete and pass a 10-question final exam on before joining its influencer network. glossy.co
- Once vetted, Seed ambassadors received a 15% base commission for being part of the Seed network, plus 100% of the profits from product sales if they were not part of any other larger influencer network. glossy.co
- Nearly 1,700 people had registered for Seed University against Seed's more than 36,000 brand Instagram followers, and the brand planned to accept 100 to 200 influencers on a rolling basis. glossy.co
2.1 · Set an open commission, more for your own
- Pay an open commission to everyone, and more to creators you work with directly.
- NeuroGum: 15% on its open TikTok Shop plan, 20 to 25% for creators who work with it directly, set by GMV and partnership level. From Helium 10's podcast with NeuroGum.
- Nutrafol: $40 to $200 per new customer by default, with VIP rates case by case. From Katalys, Nutrafol's affiliate network partner, February 2026.
- OLIPOP: a $36 variety pack and at least 10% commission, then a premium commission once the creator posts (vendor's own numbers). From the vendor's own write-up on OLIPOP.
2.2 · Write down the monthly quota and who stays
- Write down how many videos a month keep a creator in the room.
- Goli: 20 new videos in April before past months' GMV counts. From Goli's reward campaign terms, April 2026.
- How Goli prices a sample: at least 1 video or live for every sample, and samples are never guaranteed.
- From Brands Meet Creators newsletter, July 2025.
2.3 · Add a reward ladder, top tier earned
- Pay bigger rewards as a creator's sales climb, and make the top tier earned.
- Force Factor: a $120 bonus at $1,000 of GMV, up to $15,350 at $100,000, paid on only the highest tier reached. From Force Factor's January 2026 challenge page.
- IM8: tiers at 1, 20, 75 and 300 orders, so the orders a creator's link brings in move them up. From IM8's ambassador page.
- ADVANCED: every Partner started as an Ambassador and moved up only after showing results. From ADVANCED's Partner page, read September 2026.
- Goli: $10,000 extra to creators making $10,000 every month of Q4 from Q4 videos. From Goli's reward campaign terms, April 2026.
- K2O: $1,000 to any creator who posted 1 video a day for 60 days, with no sales or view minimum. From K2O's CEO, August 2026.
- Nello: 3 month retainer opportunities and a MacBook for $3k of GMV, per a creator newsletter. From Brands Meet Creators newsletter.
- Influencers are not limited to financial incentives only.
- IM8: invites to its events, masterclasses and workshops, on top of free product, merch and 10% on every new customer order. From IM8's ambassador page.
- Ghost: a different fan every week as its legend of the week, instead of its biggest named creators. From PricePlow, June 2020.
- What the Zoom is: IM8 says people on its 90-day subscription get exclusive access to its scientific advisors and performance coaches, like a quarterly group Zoom with Dr.
- From Foundr, April 2026.
- Nutrafol: passing its Academy earns a creator an accreditation badge to show their audience. From Nutrafol's own Academy page, April 2026.
- Ketone-IQ: its own Team page names Mitchell Hooper, Truett Hanes and Ryan Collins as partner athletes. From Ketone-IQ's Team page.
2.5 · Keep the biggest rewards scarce, let trips grow
- Keep the top prizes for a few, and let trips grow as the group does.
- NeuroGum: only 10 top creators go on a trip, prizes like a Rolex, and only 3 were on billboards in Miami or Times Square. From Open Residency, June 2025.
- Revolve: its trips ran from five or six people to a month in the Hamptons with about 70 influencers, 12 a weekend. From Lewis Howes, 2018.
- Its Coachella trip started in 2010 with two influencer friends renting a house together, and grew to close to 500 influencers.
- From Lewis Howes, 2018, 25:09.
What they pay and the terms
- Amazon pays influencers a commission on every sale their pick brings in, with Amazon Games titles earning the most at 20%. CNBC, June 2022
- Give them reasons to stay: In 2023 Lululemon's Creator Network asked for at least 3,000 followers on one channel, and gave creators commission, early access to new products and events. WWD, June 2023
- Glossier started paying its most engaged customers a sales commission, and brought them into special events. Quartz, November 2016
Step 2 · Where it goes wrong
- Creators stay only if they make money: Kent says so on Mina Elias, and so does NeuroGum's chief commercial officer on the DTC Podcast.
- Cineshree Media: free samples without rewards attract freebie seekers and can sink a TikTok business. From Cineshree Media, April 2026.
Step 3 · Keep the community active
3.1 · Have dedicated community managers
- Put named people from your own team inside the creator room.
- 1st Phorm: roughly 10,000 reps alongside almost 400 headquarters employees. From Joshua Schall, June 2022.
- Spacegoods: 1,000+ active partnerships run by a part-time team of two, every code tracked through Shopify (vendor's own numbers). From the vendor's own write-up on Spacegoods.
- Bloom splits its TikTok Shop team 3 ways: acquisition, retention and operations. Retention gets a team of its own. From Joel Contartese on LinkedIn, September 2026.
- Nutrafol: in a job post, one hire owns sourcing, negotiation, contracts, creative approval and reporting, and tracks results daily, weekly and monthly. From Nutrafol's job post on Built In.
- Bloom's Joel Contartese: retention, meaning creator experience and relationships, is the pillar most brands treat as an afterthought, and usually why creators leave.
- From Joel Contartese on LinkedIn, September 2026.
3.2 · Make sure the brief is very simple, because the longer it is, the higher the chance they won't pay attention to the parts that you want.
- Give creators one page of product facts, then let them make it their own.
- Bloom: one page of product information, key differentiators, highlights and benefits. From Joel Contartese on LinkedIn, July 2026.
- NeuroGum: brand guidelines, hook ideas and product benefits, then creators run wild and free with it. From Helium 10's podcast with NeuroGum.
The brief and the content
In the early days, the focus was on what hooks worked, being in the trenches together, and making content daily as a New Year's resolution.
“
Without a personal relationship, creators may say whatever they want because they are not being guided.
“ And seeing what works and what doesn't. Like even the orientation, I would show up on Zoom calls with them once a quarter and, you know, talk to our top creators. If there's no personal relationship that you're building or or even like a personal brand relationship you're building, these creators are just going to say whatever they want, right? Of course, because you're not guiding them. And in the same way, if you're not having that open dialogue, they're not going to come back to you and communicate with you on what's working, what's not, I'm getting this violation for this, I'm getting. And I think the key word here is relationship. ”
3.3 · Ensure that not only the community managers but also high-level C-suite founders get access to meet the creators, and meet them often.
- Meet your creators on a fixed day, whether weekly or quarterly.
- Bloom: 2 calls a week with its creator community to go over top videos, give feedback and run FAQs. From Joel Contartese on LinkedIn, July 2026.
- NeuroGum: the CEO meets creators on Zoom about once a quarter to pass on the company's culture. From Open Residency, June 2025.
- Ghost: fans spend 10 minutes a week with the brand on its YouTube channel, plus Warzone Wednesdays. From PricePlow, December 2020.
- How Bloom keeps it personal: the team knew creators' birthdays and sent gifts on Mother's Day.
- From Greg LaVecchia on Open Residency, June 2026.
- Move your most promising creators into a smaller group that is harder to join.
3.5 · A lot of the time, once you start building intimacy, and if the community actually has the right channels and it's actually interesting, then you'll be in a position where you can start collaborating with creators on product launches and events.
- Your creators can tell you what to make next, before it launches.
- Ulta Beauty: creators in the Ulta Beauty Collective feed insight back, "almost like a kind of a mini advisory panel". From CreatorIQ, March 2021.
- Califia Farms: it works with its ambassadors every month, gets their feedback on all its products, and sends products before they hit the market. From 33voices, August 2016.
- Hexclad: its Cooking with Hexclad Facebook group gets early access, so its best customers' reviews are on the product page at launch. From Marketing Operators, May 2024.
- Mutant Nation: at the Olympia, Mutant asked Mutant Nation what formulas it wanted, and a couple of formulas came from its asks. From Bodybuilding Today, May 2016.
city by city domination
- Invite creators who can come: Beyond Yoga opened a pop-up in New York's Flatiron District and had movement classes led by local favorites Ali Brunson, Jada Covington and DanceBody founder Katia Pryce. WWD, September 2026
- Build the room so it films: Tatcha built its first pop-up's meditation room, wishing tree and on-site haikus, invited influencers to create content there, and saw over 9 million social media impressions. Glossy, March 2023
- Test the city with a pop-up: In October 2024 Rhode opened its first London pop-up for just four days, and TikTok videos posted from it that day reached millions of views. Refinery29, October 2024
- Skims opened its first European pop-up at Selfridges London, while planning its own UK and EU stores within 3 years. Retail Bulletin, June 2023
- Get sign ups before opening: A year later, before its Sephora UK opening, Rhode said it had the most customer sign ups of any brand launch at Sephora UK. WWD, October 2025
- Host local creators on launch day: On launch day Hailey Bieber hosted British influencers and beauty editors at a London dinner, with guests like Jessica Diner and Rochelle Humes. Desiree Design, November 2025
Step 4 · Now, from there, this is the most important part, and it's to actually take all that goodwill and now turn it into posts, deals and ad rights
4.1 · Sample big at launch, then 20 to 30%
- Sample big once at launch, then keep it to 20 to 30%.
- Bloom: one big push at launch, then 20 to 30% of launch volume, with the community and retention tools in place. From Joel Contartese on LinkedIn, May 2026.
- Bloom: it scales back up only when baseline video volume drops and every re-engagement effort has failed. From Joel Contartese on LinkedIn, May 2026.
4.2 · Pay more once they post, reward posting too
- The standard way of influencer marketing is I pay $10,000 per video.
- NeuroGum: Joe Rogan's unpaid mentions did far more than a paid IShowSpeed post, which brought 86 million impressions and very low sales.
- From Cineshree Media, April 2026.
- Reward the posting itself, with a climbing commission, points or more product.
- Clean Skin Club: ambassadors earn points for posting about the brand or making a product video, not only for sharing a code. From Tam Talk's, May 2020.
- SOS: another bottle of SOS for a before-and-after photo it can share with its community. From Behind Her Empire with Yasmin Nouri, August 2023.
- Boxed Water: tag a photo of the box and it plants two trees in a national forest. From Unconquered, January 2021.
4.3 · Great little tip, by the way, especially for UGC for Meta ads: get loads of it inside your affiliate program from very small creators who are purely getting commission. You can have a clause which just allows you to post and use it if they in fact make anything with the seeded content.
- Goli: taking a campaign reward lets Goli use the creator's videos on Meta, unless the creator asks to opt out. From Goli's reward campaign terms, April 2026.
4.4 · Count every video and every sale
- How Grüns counts it: 1,500 tracked UGC assets 4 months after launch.
- From Archive's page on Grüns.
- Goli: a tracking link, so the same video reposted to YouTube, Instagram or Flip earns reward credit too. From Brands Meet Creators newsletter, February 2025.
4.5 · Use the community posts to now acquire larger deals. This creates the flywheel.
- Show the posts to retail buyers, and grow your best creators into bigger roles.
- NeuroGum: celebrity partners like Andrew Schulz and Yuki Tsunoda post it is coming to Costco and Walmart, and it sends those clips to buyers. From Ryan Chen on Sweat Equity, June 2026.
Step 4 · Where it goes wrong
- Plan for the videos to become ads, or the work stops at the post.
- Grüns: its pipeline stopped when creators published, and turning the videos into edited ads stayed slow and manual. From Archive's page on Grüns.
- Roughly, brands would actually spend 10% of the budget on organic creator marketing, which includes the community's expenses, and then 90% towards amplifying it through paid ads.
Up next: one level deeper, the creator dinner from start to finish.
Part 9 · One level deeper, the creator dinner
Influencer, creator dinner, full strategy and tutorial.
What the brand gets
- Pitch your product to the whole room. You get the floor. Your team presents the product to every creator at the table at once, in person, with the product in their hands, and takes the questions that come back.
Ways to run the night
Nobody moves for three hours, so the talking does the work.
“One long table at Abrielle. Everyone sits down, everyone eats, and the room talks for three hours.”
Dennis, on the Toronto creator dinner page
Give the room something to make with their hands, so there is something to film.
“Everyone makes their own scent at Orris Labs, which gives the room something to do with their hands and something to film.”
Dennis, on the Toronto creator dinner page
One host skipped the sit-down meal on purpose, and the room still filmed.
“we said get room service cuz we know you don't want to have a sit down dinner meet in the bar for pre-drinks and they all came down they were all capturing content”
Lauren Stretch on Girls in Marketing, on an influencer trip she ran
The room itself does some of the work, so pick it to match what you sell.
“Hosting the event at LYLA Toronto allowed the brand to create a warm, elevated setting aligned with Love Luster's premium positioning.”
Sundae Creative, the agency that ran the Pureology dinner
The dinner could not happen, so it became a mailer instead.
“Okay, the dinner is not going to manifest, sadly. How can we pivot and do something else?”
“Let's pivot this into a mailer. We'll deliver it in like February or March.”
Brianna Wright of SheaMoisture on Aisha Beau, on a dinner she could not get everyone to
One order that works, not the only one
- 6:00 to 6:30, Reception. The half hour where the room actually meets each other. Creators get to chitchat. You get to make content, and ask them questions. You get to talk with the creators themselves. They see the co-host, and they get PR boxes.
- 6:30, Dinner. Dinner while everyone talks and connects.
- 7:30 to 8:00, Round two. Plates clear, people get up, and the room reshuffles. Everyone meets the half of the table they were sitting too far away from, the photographer works the room, and your team gets real face time with the creators worth following up with.
And by the end, your team gets a mention. We do a thank you note to your team before and after the presentation, mentioning how you helped organize this. And you could even talk a little bit about what you guys are doing, your mission, or have a spokesperson do the presentation. And yeah, from there you can even have them join a group, and get their direct contact. They'll have your PR box, and make posts.
What a full night is aimed at
- ~100 pieces of branded creator content across Instagram, TikTok, and brand channels
- 20 creators selected specifically around your target customer
- Warm introductions for future gifting, affiliate, ambassador, and paid partnerships
- Professional event photography for social, PR, email, website, and other brand content, all handled and edited for you.
Hold the dinner before the campaign starts, not after it.
“If you're a brand thinking about creator marketing, consider hosting a dinner before launching a campaign.”
Vin Matano, who founded Creatorbuzz, on LinkedIn
Invite people who already show up in each other's feed.
“Creatorbuzz brought 30 of the program's creators together for a dinner. The people who had been showing up in each other's feeds for months finally met in person.”
Creatorbuzz, on the Apollo program
Creatorbuzz attached no obligation to the gift boxes, and creators posted anyway.
“Creatorbuzz sent gift boxes to sales creators with no posting obligation, and they posted anyway.”
Creatorbuzz, on the Apollo program
Dinners brands have run
Pureology, LYLA Toronto
“Attendance reached 27 influencers (90% of target)”
“The activation has generated 158 pieces of content across Instagram Stories, in-feed posts, and TikTok, with an estimated 20.2 million impressions according to Traackr. This dramatically exceeded the original impression goal of 374,000.”
Sundae Creative, the agency that ran it
Apollo.io and CreatorBuzz, New York
Kérastase
“Would this be an event you’d want an invite to? @Kérastase Elixir Ultime relaunch”
Huda Beauty
“A night w/ @Huda Beauty”
Farmacy Beauty, New York
“The most gorgeous night @Farmacy Beauty”
Soleaa, Chicago
“Here’s to many more brand dinners for the girls thank you @Soleaa once again so much fun tonight!”
Team Spirits, Toronto
“Brand dinner event coverage, Team Spirits, Toronto, ON”
Persona Cosmetics, New York
“@Persona Cosmetics invited me to a brand dinner and it was so much fun”
Glossier
“A recent dinner hosted by Into the Gloss was both a perfume-themed dinner party and a stealth activation for Glossier's new fragrance, You Soie.”
Kept for reference, not in the video
Skool and the paid communities
Skool became the default paid-community platform after Alex Hormozi invested and pushed it hard, which brought scale and also brought a lot of hustle-culture noise. Read the free ones before paying for anything.
| Community | Members | Note |
| InstaLab | 54,000 | Free. Instagram for business |
| SWC 2.0 The Level Up | 33,000 | Free. General content creation |
| YT Profit School | 20,000 | Free. YouTube |
| Social Creator Club Lite | 17,000 | Free |
| Ads For Coaches | 10,000 | Free |
| UGC Community | 125 | Paid. Women scaling UGC to ten thousand a month |
Part 3 · Your end to end notes on communities
| Academy-certified partners | Nutrafol Academy is a creator/influencer accreditation programme led by Chief Medical Advisor Dr. Heather Woolery-Lloyd. Nutrafol says participants earn an accreditation badge and all partners are required to complete the courses. [1] |
utrafol’s own Academy says all brand partners must complete its courses, while a hiring brief describes an always-on programme designed to scale sales-driving Instagram, TikTok and YouTube creators against acquisition, ROAS and CPA. [1] [3] This is an uncommon pairing in wellness: compliance and scientific fluency on one side; performance optimisation and creator-volume management on the other.
- The IM8 UGC Creator program: Free IM8 product and merch. They make 2 videos from a content brief within 14 days of getting the product, and confirm IM8 may use them. A 30-day test decides who is invited into the IM8 Creator Directory for future paid work.
Skool and the paid communities
| Community | Members | Note |
| InstaLab | 54,000 | Free. Instagram for business |
| SWC 2.0 The Level Up | 33,000 | Free. General content creation |
| YT Profit School | 20,000 | Free. YouTube |
| Social Creator Club Lite | 17,000 | Free |
| Ads For Coaches | 10,000 | Free |
| UGC Community | 125 | Paid. Women scaling UGC to ten thousand a month |
Seed made creators pass a course and an exam before they could promote it
city by city domination
ick for fit, not size: Gymshark has no fixed checklist for its athletes, and picks them on content quality, brand fit and how their audience responds. Gymshark
- Pay them on every sale: In 2019 Seed offered its vetted ambassadors a 15% base commission, and all of the profit on their sales if they belonged to no bigger network. Glossy, July 2019
- Amazon pays influencers a commission on every sale their pick brings in, with Amazon Games titles earning the most at 20%. CNBC, June 2022
He keeps Super Room because they are influencer experts he does not have, even though he could build the function himself.
“ There's a difference between who's producing and who's who's strategizing. And I think yeah, more of the strategy in-house the the agency is temporarily. I think the one that will definitely be, you know, Super Room just cuz they're like influencer experts and like I think they they give us a ton that we don't, you know, have and we could build it, but you know, it's currently working very well. ”
They are building a TikTok and IG trend dashboard with an agency so retained creators can see what is popping and go make five videos.
““ I would rather give them strategy up front, give them like like let's do the research, give them strategy, and they're coached, they know what makes a good ad, they know what makes a good post, like they know about the brand, and then they just create, and then it's just like every week they're just boom, here's five assets, here's whatever it is. Um that's the goal. So we're working with an agency right now to build out like an organic TikTok and IG real like trend dashboard, so we can just see what's trending in you know, our space relative to other stuff, and they can literally just see that, and they're on retainer, and they can just be like, all right, cool, redness is popping off, here are the top five organic videos in redness. I'm going to go make five, and we'll just get them uploaded that week. ””
What they pay and the terms 4
A system must be created where people are truly incentivized to create good content, otherwise they will just hover around.
“ And what we realize that a lot of these companies start to do is like because they're so desperate to try to get these creators, they would be doing sampling like here and there and then realize that most people are just there to get free stuff. You know, you could very easily run a very unprofitable Tik Tok business by just giving samples away to a million creators. So, unless you create a system where people are truly incentivized to create good content for you, most people are just going to be hovering around. And and that's like with anything in life, right? Like, if you're not incentivized to do great things in life, why would you even do it? ”
The lead gen product on TikTok can be used to drive communication through creators to the rest of the portfolio.
“ What are the products that we want to push forward because we know that we're going to get incremental profitability on it versus the ones that we know aren't going to ever make profitability on Tik Tok. We just completely killed them. I think all these brands are trying to push everything they can on Tik Tok. Use Tik Tok as like an Amazon style marketplace. And that's not the case anymore. You need to be very specific about what products are going to work, what products are going to be the rotisserie chicken at Costco, you know, the lead gen product. So you could then drive communication through your creators, through everything else to uh the rest of your portfolio. ”
Clicking into a live on TikTok places you within that company's retargeting algorithm, increasing your visibility on their feed.
“ We decided not to cut out lives at all and instead we like doubled down on it and we even built a studio here in Las Vegas to do all of our lives and we're trying to go longer. Lives are the most authentic way that you could interact with a consumer because it's not cutting, it's not editing, it is you in the moment. People are chatting with you and it's you being able to talk to them directly. And also on Tik Tok, if you click into a live, this is more of a technical thing, but if you are doing a live and someone clicks into it, you are now part of that company's retargeting algorithm. So you will start showing up way more on that person's feed if they decide to click into your live. So concurrent viewers become really, really okay. Important. ”
The brief and the content 3
- Sharing hooks with content creators and seeing what works and what doesn't is crucial.
“ Oh, yeah. Absolutely. And seeing what works and what doesn't. Like even the orientation, I would show up on Zoom calls with them once a quarter and, you know, talk to our top creators. If there's no personal relationship that you're building or or even like a personal brand relationship you're building, these creators are just going to say whatever they want, right? Of course, because you're not guiding them. And in the same way, if you're not having that open dialogue, they're not going to come back to you and communicate with you on what's working, what's not, I'm getting this violation for this, I'm getting. ”
Finding your 'tribe' or nano-influencers leads to closer customer relationships and community feedback.
““ But then as we became a larger energy and focus brand that could go up against the Red Bulls and the monsters and rock stars of the world, we realized like I'm not trying to be a rock star, you know, or I don't want to be locked into 5 hours of energy when I'm stepping into like a meeting or just trying to do something. I'm just trying to get mentally sharp. And that's what we realize is the path that we could really play in because a lot of people want that. So if you find your nano influencers, your tribe, how people interact, you're closer with your customer because that's the community you're building and your community is giving you feedback, man. Especially if you're just starting your company, like don't worry about the revenue, you know, worry about like this is how my consumer interacts and that's how you can get really deep. There's a great tool in my life like name drop tools and stuff. ””
Every community we have found, and the IM8 tables
Analyzing culinary council - hexclad influencer program
1. HexClad's heavy seeding produced 1.3 billion impressions in tagged social content in a year.
“And you have brands that you're more Hexcloud where we were just looking at our we've been pulling our year-over-year, we're doing our recap right now. We're 1.3 billion impressions in tag social content alone because we seed a ton.
Influencer, creator dinner, full strategy and tutorial.
For you if:
- You want to build real relationships with wellness influencers and later run campaigns with them, or have them connect you to other influencers who run campaigns that have better value.
- You are starting an influencer program, or doubling down on one you already run.
- You want one of the most efficient ways there is to generate influencer content.
What the dinner is really for
- Building a connection with the creators.
- So you can get them to post later.
- Then they tell their friends, because most creators know each other in the community.
Why it works
We run an influencer agency, and we see the same pattern constantly, that influencer marketing is disconnected.
Brands cold message creators, pay per post, and the relationship ends there. That typically leads to really high CPMs, and most brands overpay, where creators don't have any relationship, and don't care about the company.
So we asked a different question, what if there were a better way to introduce brands to creators?
It turns out, if you actually meet them, get to know them, and they know your people, then you can actually build real relationships, which will let you run campaigns with them on good terms or discounted rates, sometimes at no cost, not on an affiliate basis, and everyone walks away with a night of content, and builds actual relationships. But you get tons of UGC content, and now the creators really know about your brand.
All throughout, you bring your team, and your team actually gets to talk with the influencers directly.
What the brand gets
- Build real connections. Three hours at one table, a reception before it and a reshuffle after, so your team leaves knowing the creators rather than knowing their rate cards.
- Get posts from them later. They know you, so the next ask is a conversation and not a cold pitch. That is where the discounted posts, the no-cost posts and the ambassadors come from.
Ways to run the night
Other shapes the night can take: pick whichever fits your brand and steal freely.
The brand does not have to show itself at all: this one ran as a dinner party.
- Millions of targeted impressions across their combined audiences
- Your product directly in the hands of trusted creators in your category
- Authentic UGC at scale
- Real creator feedback on your product, messaging, and positioning
What to take from Vin Matano's dinner
Vin Matano co-hosted the dinner shown further down this page; these ideas come from that night and the program built around it.
Pick who is in the room around who the brand actually sells to.
“We host intimate dinners that put your brand in the room with the creators and decision makers your buyers already trust.”
Tell the room what the brand cares about, not the campaign brief.
“Creators learn what brands actually care about beyond the campaign brief.”