New Blog: How to Nail Your Father’s Day Marketing with Influencers
Buddle Skincare develops clinically proven products designed to support infant skin health. The brand collaborates with pediatric dermatologists and formulation experts to create science-backed cleansers, creams, and more.
Buddle started its creator program in January 2024. The initial strategy focused exclusively on brand awareness through product gifting with a small group of about 20 creators.
Since then, the program has expanded to cover the full marketing funnel, evolving from gifting into a tiered partnership model that drives both awareness and sales. High-performing creators from the gifting program can advance to commission-based affiliate partnerships, while top affiliates can earn paid partnerships.
Alexis Finnigan leads Buddle’s small but mighty creator team. They work with hundreds of active nano and micro creators across Instagram and TikTok.
Hustling hard only gets you so far
In the beginning, Alexis personally crafted, packed, and shipped PR packages to creators. The packages were cute and effective, but the process was cumbersome and difficult to scale. Buddle needed a more efficient way to get products into more creators’ hands—without losing the personal touch.
Plus, brand awareness from gifting was just the starting point. As sales became more of a priority, they needed a structured system to build and nurture a full-funnel creator program.
GRIN gave us the structure to actually scale. We went from manually managing gifting to running a full-funnel creator program that drives real sales.
Alexis Finnigan
Influencer and Social Media Manager at Buddle
An all-in-one platform built to accelerate growth
Buddle’s creator program struggled to gain the traction Alexis hoped for during its first six months. But everything changed once she and her team tapped into the full capabilities of GRIN’s Creator Management platform.
With GRIN, Alexis and her team could:
GRIN’s Activations workflow helps Alexis organize partnerships by gifting, affiliate, and paid tiers—creating a seamless system where each stage feeds into the next. This always-on strategy keeps Buddle’s creator program running like a well-oiled machine.
GRIN’s Curated Lists team delivers handpicked, brand-aligned creators straight to Alexis’ inbox. She also uses GRIN’s Web Extension to instantly add potential partners to her gifting program while browsing IG and TikTok natively.
Creator gifting is a numbers game. With customizable email templates and automated follow-ups, Alexis’ team reaches out to hundreds of creators weekly—ensuring a steady pipeline of potential brand partners.
Alexis can fulfill and track hundreds of product orders with just a few clicks. GRIN notifies her from the moment a product ships to when it appears in a creator’s content. And if creators who haven’t posted need a little nudge, a built-in email template makes follow-up effortless.
Alexis uses GRIN’s real-time analytics to pinpoint top-performing creators to nurture through her program. She can also tell which strategies are most effective, so she can double down on what’s working and tweak what isn’t.
From brand awareness to a full-funnel revenue driver
Buddle’s data-driven strategy helped the team get the most out of every creator partnership. With over $79K in Influencer Media Value (IMV) and a $0.05 CPC from gifting and affiliates alone, influencer marketing quickly became one of the brand’s most efficient growth channels. Alexis and her team proved that influencer marketing isn’t just for awareness—it’s a full-funnel revenue driver.
In less than six months, Buddle’s creator program generated:
$79K+
in IMV
1.85M+
impressions on creator content
570K+
creator video views
$0.05
CPC
