Ruggable's chief marketing and creative officer, Lauren Sherman-Kaoud, told Digiday the washable rug brand has moved about 10% of its spend from performance channels like Meta into brand channels like influencers and connected TV, and plans to grow that by another 15% to 20% next year. Last holiday season it took upwards of a million dollars out of Meta and put it into ShopMy creators. She said the brand made roughly $3 million in the first month of the ShopMy partnership, a figure that doubled the next month and tripled in month three. It now works with hundreds of mostly affiliate creators, run by one person, with set rules on post format, content volume and which product to promote.
Those revenue figures are the CMO's own and unaudited, so treat them as her account. The structure is the interesting part. She calls it a 'sandwich approach': hundreds of affiliate creators for scale and conversion, plus a few brand ambassadors for the halo. She also says ShopMy replaced some of Ruggable's worst-performing affiliate channels.
For a DTC brand that leans hard on Meta, it shows a different way to spend. Creators who show the product in a real home do something a polished ad struggles with: they make it feel normal to own. And one person running hundreds of creators shows that a programme doesn't need a big team. It needs a system.
This is our creators rule almost word for word: a creator army behind the brand beats one big name. Ruggable still keeps a few big names. The army does the selling.