‘It scared the hell out of me to hand over the keys’: What brands have learned from creator partnerships
Brands and retailers say they’re seeing strong returns from creator content, whether that’s from mini-series or unboxing videos.
While creator programs aren’t new, more retail players are jumping into the space to court consumers, drive engagement and spur sales. This year, Aerie launched a creator program for its most avid fans, while Gap Inc. began an employee creator program. Ugg started working with art students on creative content and product description pages, and Target debuted two new creator programs, Club Target and Target Ambassadors. Meanwhile, Kohl’s began giving its creators a chance to earn a commission on every sale, in addition to getting free products.
Data indicates this trend — and broader interest in the creator space — isn’t slowing down. CreatorIQ’s seventh annual global State of Creator Marketing report shows that nearly half of brands now earn 3x or greater ROI from creators. What’s more, brands’ creator budgets have increased 33% year over year, the report found. U.S. brands are expected to spend $13.7 billion on influencer marketing by 2027, according to eMarketer.
Here’s how three different retail players — Favorite Daughter, SharkNinja and Bob’s Discount Furniture — are thinking about the creator opportunity, as described on stage at Shoptalk Fall this week in Nashville.
Favorite Daughter
Favorite Daughter, a women’s clothing brand founded by sisters Erin and Sara Foster, is finding that creator-led content is powering its growth. For one, the brand now has a dedicated social-media head, Laura Galvan, who’s agreed to be a public face of the brand and stars in multiple videos a week. In one Instagram post, she shows off “five work shirts you can wear to the office that are 1,000,000% worth the money.”
Having a creator on staff wasn’t the plan originally, said Jennifer Stender Hawkins, evp of Favorite Daughter and its partner Centric Brands. “The intent really wasn’t for [Galvan] to be public-facing,” she explained. But the brand is seeing this strategy pay off, with Galvan’s videos spurring high engagement. “I think there’s not much [that’s] more important” than having a creator on staff, Hawkins said.
Favorite Daughter, which launched in 2020, also began working with creators in the months ahead of its National Daughters Day campaign on Sept. 25. That day, Favorite Daughter discounts everything on its site by 25%. In the past, Hawkins said, “We had a lot of organic support, but we didn’t really engage creators in an official way.” This time around, Favorite Daughter wanted to “fuel the funnel in advance,” Hawkins said. So, in August, it started doing fall hauls and working with creators to push new denim.
On National Daughters Day, the brand had 25 creators go live first thing in the morning. These creators had smaller but engaged audiences, Sara Foster explained. One mom in Dallas, for instance, has 60,000 followers but tends to sell more product for the brand than an “A-list celebrity,” Foster said. Thanks, in part, to its creators, Favorite Daughter ended up doing $2 million in sales on National Daughters Day, up 100% from last year.
Going forward, Favorite Daughter is invested in building up its creator content, but only when it’s a good culture fit and people are authentic fans of the brand. “The consumer has sniffed out inauthenticity and they don’t want it anymore,” Foster said.
SharkNinja
SharkNinja, an appliances company that makes everything from vacuums to air fryers to hair dryers, considers creators its “magic sauce,” said Michelle Crossan-Matos, the company’s chief brand and experience officer. “Seventy percent of the content on SharkNinja is actually created by creators. They are telling the story to their friends. They’re creating this community. ‘Oh my goodness, have you seen the latest slushie?’ ‘I want to tell you my margarita recipe.'”
This content focuses on all types of topics, including unboxings, setups and demonstrations. Sometimes, the creator is in the video; other times, the video is a close-up of the product. What’s consistent is the high view count. Recently, creators made videos about using their Ninja Creami to make protein ice cream; last year, content about the appliance generated 1 billion impressions, Crossan-Matos revealed. As Modern Retail has reported, the company also invites creators to the test kitchen of its Boston-area headquarters to sample products, provide feedback and tape content.
SharkNinja makes 25 new products a year and comes up with a creator plan for each. “We will literally map out, for each launch, in its own category: What is a competitive quantity of content?” Crossan-Matos said. “Then, you have to understand, based on your very unique position of that product: Which type of creators are going to tell that story better than others?” Working with a nanocreator will be different from working with a macrocreator or even a big celebrity, she explained. For SharkNinja’s HydraSense water filtration launch, for instance, “every level [had] a role to play,” Crossan-Matos said.
SharkNinja also runs a writers’ room to come up with “hook books” to give the creators. Every day, these writers are “helping us come up with the best creative we can do,” Crossan-Matos said. “When you’re in a social world, you can’t be just doing a writers’ room once a week. You’ve got to be [there], every day, seeing what’s social, what is viral. You’ve got to jump on it, and you’ve got to maximize it.”
Bob’s Discount Furniture
Bob’s Discount Furniture knows it’s a “challenging time to be in the furniture business,” Chief Marketing Officer Stephen Nesle admitted during a panel on Tuesday. “Interest rates and the other macros are not our friends,” he said. But what’s helped Bob’s break through — and see, for instance, 24% e-commerce growth — are marketing initiatives like working with creators, he shared.
Last year, Bob’s worked with influencers on a shoppable episodic content series called “Til Decor Do Us Part.” The series, watchable via social media, shows couples with opposite design styles squabbling over how to decorate a room. Season one racked up 200 million views and generated $9 million in sales from viewers buying items in the show. But Bob’s decided to go a different route for season two, which launched earlier in September. It pivoted to work with creators who already had built-in audiences to drive organic reach. As Nesle sees it, “Influencers peddle their opinions. Creators create something to shape their POV.”
Switching from one group to another made Nesle uneasy, he admitted. “It scared the hell out of me to hand over the keys of the brand to creators. Of course, there are some guardrails baked in, but these creators … have their own audiences, and they have their own relationships with those audiences. And so, our job in this case, this season, was to be a guest at their table, and not to set the table ourselves.”
The four couples featured in season two, per a graphic shown at Shoptalk, have a combined reach of some 12 million people. So far, organic reach and engagement for season two is 50% higher than season one at this time last year, Nesle said. He also shared that creators’ audiences in season two seem more invested in commenting on videos than influencers’ audiences in season one.
Still, this doesn’t mean that Bob’s is doing away with traditional influencers. “Bob’s is fast-growing but is still largely misunderstood or not known, and so influencers are still a very important lever for us,” Nesle said. “But what’s interesting is, working together, creators and influencers actually make [for] even more powerful strategies.”