It starts with a thorough assessment of what your brand goals are and how you can get the most people to buy in. “We asked them to really tell us their brand secrets, what drives their attachment to a brand,” says Tellez. “Because that’s a big part of what we’re trying to scale as we build a community of thousands of ambassadors.” From there, the Devotion team develops a strategy for the brand, uses its technology to onboard ambassadors, and implements an end-to-end experience for them, including incentives, gifts, education, invitations to events, and more.
Téllez grew Parade, a Gen Z-favorite underwear brand, in large part through a brand ambassador program built at scale, rather than the reach of its creators. Tellez has built a large network of ambassadors who have helped propel the brand to $10 million in annual revenue. However, Parade, which pursued rapid growth, ran into financial difficulties, and Telles sold the company, which went out of business in October last year, in 2023. Building the ambassador program showed Telles there was room for tools to help brands collaborate with a large number of creators at once.
After working in the creator economy space for 12 years, Mr. Kroopf recently built TikTok Shop’s creator affiliate ecosystem and celebrity partnership strategy. It was his time in China in 2022 during his tenure at TikTok that most influenced his approach to dedication. “[TikTok] The algorithm was something like [in its] “There was a perception that brands needed to spend resources on more creator partners to deliver better, fresher content, stay relevant and be more successful on the platform,” he recalls.
Devotion has quietly worked with dozens of brands, about half of them related to fashion and beauty, but its founders declined to reveal their names at this stage. They say the amount of content tagged with brands has tripled on average. Devotion made seven figures. (The company declined to disclose pricing, but said it varies depending on the size of the brand and the scope of its creator program.)
“When we were scaling Away, Instagram was just starting to reimagine modern word of mouth, and even then, our true scale was limited by manual processes,” Goodwin says. “Today’s algorithmic feeds reward speed and volume, which is why I invested in Devotion because Cami and Jon have a vision to build the infrastructure needed for modern brands to grow their share of sustainable voice.”
expand intimacy
The scale of Devotion’s efforts was only possible thanks to AI technology, the founders say. AI influencer gifting software is not new. From Spate to AMT, many companies have launched in the past two years to offer these capabilities, but marketers are often not satisfied with existing technology. (One influencer marketer described the AI gifting software he tried as “absolutely mind-blowing,” lamenting that these companies are often run by male developers who have AI expertise but don’t understand the influencer marketing landscape.) Devotion takes things a step further by establishing a creator ecosystem that includes product seeding but goes well beyond that.
