The method behind done-for-you creator gifting

Who this is for

This page is the method, not the pitch. It is what actually happens between the day you hand this over and the day a parcel lands on a creator's doorstep. Read it if you want to know what you are buying before you buy it.

Step 1. Sourcing: six surfaces, then deduplication

Most brands treat sourcing as one action: search a hashtag, save some profiles. At volume it is six separate surfaces, each of which finds a creator the others miss.

• Meta creator marketplace — filters do the first cut: category, so the feed matches the product rather than the follower count, and audience located where you actually ship.
• Instagram itself — search, geography, and the follow graph around creators who already fit.
• Competitor comment and review walls — people who already care about the category and have already proved it in public.
• YouTube — slower to post, but a channel is a stable, contactable identity in a way an Instagram account often is not.
• TikTok, recovered through YouTube — a TikTok creator with no contact route is matched to their own YouTube channel, which usually has one.
• Your own customers — people already buying who already post. The cheapest list in the building, and the one nearly everyone forgets.

Every name is checked against everyone you have already gifted before it enters the list, so nobody gets asked twice.

Step 2. Vetting: the 100-point score, published in full

This is the question every brand asks and almost no agency answers. Here is the whole thing. Each creator is scored out of 100 before anyone is contacted.

65 and above is an accept. 40 to 64 is a backup, used when a list runs thin. Below 40 is a reject. No contact route is an automatic reject whatever the rest of the score says, because a creator who cannot be reached is not a creator, it is a screenshot.

Three of those weightings are worth defending, because they are where brands go wrong.

• Engagement outranks reach. A 6,000-follower account at 6% engagement beats a 40,000-follower account at 0.4%, and the parcel costs the same either way.
• Over a million followers scores lower, not higher. Those creators expect a cash fee, convert far worse on a gift alone, and consume the same operational time as five micro creators who will actually post.
• Cadence is worth 20 points on its own. A dormant account never posts the gift. It is the single most common way a gifting budget disappears with nothing to show for it.

Then the part no score catches, done by eye, one profile at a time:

• Has this creator posted for a brand before, and did that post look forced?
• Did they take a gift once and go quiet? That history disqualifies them.
• Do the last ten posts read like someone who still enjoys this?
• Is the comment section people, or a pod trading the same four emojis?
• Would you want your product sitting next to this feed at all?

Every verdict is stored with its inputs, the score parts, follower count, engagement, cadence, contact status, the sample posts it was read from, and a timestamp. Months later it is still possible to answer “why did we skip her?” with a record instead of a memory.

Step 3. Contact details, cheapest route first

Finding a creator is free. Reaching one is not, and this is where seeding programmes quietly get expensive. Fifty to seventy percent of any creator list has no usable contact route at all, and that half has to die for nothing.

So the rule is absolute: every free method is exhausted on everyone before a single paid lookup runs on anyone, and paid lookups only ever run on creators who already passed the score.

• Bio parsing — free
• Cross-platform sibling accounts, where the other profile lists what this one hides — free
• The creator's own website, crawled — free, and it lands about 28% of the time
• Link-in-bio pages, which are usually server-rendered and readable — free
• TikTok to YouTube cross-linking, which routes a dead end into a live one — free
• Only then, paid lookups, at roughly 1 to 12 cents per address actually found, and only on creators already accepted by the score

This ordering is why a programme can double its outreach volume without doubling its data bill, and why the price is one flat monthly number instead of a per-seat data fee that grows every time the list does.

Step 4. The message, and the replies nobody counts

Messages go out from your own Instagram account, never from an agency handle. A DM from a brand gets read. A DM from a stranger gets archived. They go at a human pace, in daily batches, because the account is an asset and volume spikes are how accounts get restricted.

The opener has one job: not to read like a collab pitch. Instagram crops the preview, so whatever earns the open sits in the first line, and the ask is specific to that creator rather than a template with a name swapped in. Non-repliers get one follow-up several days later, then they are left alone.

Then the replies come back all day. Which one is the good one. Does it work on curly hair. Is this actually free. Can I have two. Can my sister have one. Do I have to post. Every one of those gets an answer, one at a time, in your voice. That volume of small questions, not the sourcing and not the strategy, is the specific reason most in-house gifting programmes quietly stop after six weeks.

Step 5. From yes to order, in one link

Every yes goes to one branded link. The creator picks their own product and variant from your live stock and types their own address. A $0 draft order lands in your Shopify admin, tagged to the campaign it came from.

Four things about that link do more work than they look like they do.

• Live stock, mirrored from your storefront. Shopify's admin will happily report a variant as available when it is only available in a warehouse the storefront cannot sell from. Reading the storefront instead is the difference between promising a colour and having to un-promise it three days later.
• The creator types their own address. No address copied out of a DM thread, no transposed house number, no reship.
• The Instagram handle is captured on the form. That is what makes it possible later to match a post to a parcel without a spreadsheet.
• It is a real order, not a code. Codes leak, get shared, and make a gift feel like a discount. A native $0 order flows through your existing fulfilment, tracking and delivery stack with nothing to reconfigure.

Step 6. The approval gate

Nothing ships on our judgement. Every request waits in a queue until you approve it. Decline it and nothing happens: no parcel, no follow-up, nothing.

The reasons brands decline are consistent: wrong fit however good the numbers looked, stock being held back for a launch, or a feed you do not want your product sitting next to. All three are valid, and all three are your call, not ours.

Speed matters as much as the decision. A gate that takes three days is not a gate, it is a queue, and creators go cold in it.

Step 7. Ship, track, and the follow-up clock

Approved orders get shipped and tracked, and shipping and delivery statuses come back into the system on their own. That matters for one reason: the follow-up clock starts when the parcel is delivered, not when it is shipped. Asking a creator about content before the box has landed is how a programme burns goodwill it spent three weeks earning.

What you do, what we do

Your part is short.

• Give us access to your store and your Instagram once. Pull it any time.
• Tell us the products, sizes and the kind of creator you want next to your brand.
• Approve or decline every order that reaches your admin.
• Ship what you approve.

Everything else is ours.

• Creator sourcing across six surfaces, deduplicated against everyone you have already gifted.
• Vetting against the 100-point score, plus a human read of the last ten posts.
• Contact details, cheapest route first, paid lookups only on creators who already passed the score.
• Outreach written and sent from your own Instagram account.
• Every reply handled, including the awkward ones.
• Follow-ups on everyone who received product, with the clock starting on delivery, not on shipment.
• A report at the end of what went out, who posted, and what each creator cost you.

What we will not promise you

We will not promise you sales. Nobody honestly can.

You send free product to a creator. They might post. They might love it and post twice. They might go quiet. That is how gifting works, and any agency telling you they can guarantee posts or guaranteed revenue from gifted product is guessing at best.

Post capture is also the weakest number in any seeding programme, and it would be easy to dress up. We do not. A post is only recorded when a creator sends the link or we find it ourselves, and at volume that lags badly behind reality. When a number cannot be counted honestly, it does not go on the wall.

What is committed is the part that can be controlled: creators found, scored, contacted, followed up, approved by you, and product in hand, every month, whether or not the week went badly.

What this produced for one brand

The price

We take 3 to 5 brands at a time, because real people do this work and we would rather do it properly for a few than badly for thirty. When those slots are full, they are full.

Full pricing detail and the lead form live on the done-for-you page.

Questions people ask