Creator Content Is Driving Retail Sales — and Brands Have the Numbers

Nearly half of brands now earn 3x or greater ROI from creator marketing, and creator budgets have grown 33% year over year, according to CreatorIQ's seventh annual global State of Creator Marketing report. Against that backdrop, U.S. brands are expected to spend $13.7 billion on influencer marketing by 2027, per eMarketer.

This year's rollout activity underscores the shift: Aerie launched a creator program for avid fans, Gap Inc. started an employee creator program, Ugg brought art students into content and product description pages, Target debuted Club Target and Target Ambassadors, and Kohl's began paying creators commission on every sale on top of free products.

At Shoptalk Fall this week in Nashville, three retail players — Favorite Daughter, SharkNinja and Bob's Discount Furniture — laid out what the creator opportunity looks like in practice, with hard numbers attached.

What happened when Favorite Daughter put a creator on staff?

Favorite Daughter, the women's clothing brand founded by sisters Erin and Sara Foster, now runs a dedicated social-media head, Laura Galvan, who stars in multiple videos a week. That wasn't the original plan. "The intent really wasn't for [Galvan] to be public-facing," said Jennifer Stender Hawkins, evp of Favorite Daughter and its partner Centric Brands. Still, she added, "I think there's not much [that's] more important" than having a creator on staff.

The brand, launched in 2020, also formalized its creator work ahead of National Daughters Day on Sept. 25, when everything on its site is discounted 25%. In August, it started fall hauls and creator pushes for new denim. On the day itself, 25 creators went live first thing in the morning — creators with smaller but engaged audiences. One mom in Dallas with 60,000 followers "tends to sell more product for the brand than an A-list celebrity," Sara Foster said.

The result: $2 million in sales on National Daughters Day, up 100% year over year.

Going forward, the brand will only work with creators who are authentic fans. "The consumer has sniffed out inauthenticity and they don't want it anymore," Foster said.

How does SharkNinja scale creator content across 25 launches a year?

SharkNinja, which makes everything from vacuums to air fryers to hair dryers, calls creators its "magic sauce," said Michelle Crossan-Matos, chief brand and experience officer. "Seventy percent of the content on SharkNinja is actually created by creators."

The content spans unboxings, setups and demonstrations. Last year, videos about the Ninja Creami appliance — including a protein ice cream trend — generated 1 billion impressions, Crossan-Matos revealed. The company also invites creators to the test kitchen at its Boston-area headquarters to sample products, give feedback and tape content.

With 25 new products a year, SharkNinja maps a creator plan for each launch. "We will literally map out, for each launch, in its own category: What is a competitive quantity of content?" Crossan-Matos said. For the HydraSense water filtration launch, "every level [had] a role to play," from nanocreators to celebrities.

The company also runs a daily writers' room producing "hook books" for creators. "You can't be just doing a writers' room once a week," Crossan-Matos said. "You've got to be [there], every day, seeing what's social, what is viral."

Why did Bob's Discount Furniture hand its brand to creators?

Bob's Discount Furniture is operating in a tough market. "Interest rates and the other macros are not our friends," CMO Stephen Nesle said Tuesday. But creator-led marketing helped drive 24% e-commerce growth.

Last year's shoppable episodic series "Til Decor Do Us Part" — featuring everyday couples with clashing design styles — racked up 200 million views and $9 million in sales from viewers buying items shown in the series.

For season two, launched in early September, Bob's pivoted to creators with built-in audiences. "Influencers peddle their opinions. Creators create something to shape their POV," Nesle said. The move was risky: "It scared the hell out of me to hand over the keys of the brand to creators," he admitted. "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 in season two have a combined reach of roughly 12 million people. Organic reach and engagement are running 50% higher than season one at the same point last year, and creator audiences are commenting more than the influencers' audiences did.

Nesle hasn't abandoned influencers entirely. "Influencers are still a very important lever for us," he said. "But what's interesting is, working together, creators and influencers actually make [for] even more powerful strategies."

As retailer creator programs multiply and budgets climb toward that $13.7 billion marker, the Shoptalk playbook suggests the next competitive edge lies less in signing big names and more in daily creative operations, authenticity screening and segmented creator rosters mapped to each product launch.