Starting an affiliate or influencer program is easy. Building one that sustainably scales and drives true business value is another story.
Our CEO Ryan Hilliard sat down with Alexis Warchalowski, now the Founder and CEO of Meche Wellness, to discuss her approach to building programs at Condé Nast, E.L.F. Cosmetics, L’Oreal, Too Faced, and Liquid I.V. We’ve pulled that conversation transcript into this blog. We hope you enjoy.
The Challenge
Whether you are a bootstrapped startup or an established brand looking to optimize your returns, here are the key takeaways from their conversation on how to transition from transactional campaigns to an unstoppable community.
1. Breaking into the Market: The “0 to 1” Playbook for New Brands
For an established brand, locking in partnerships feels seamless. For newbies, this is usually the hardest part. How do you break through the noise when nobody has heard of you? Alexis’ mantra: “Slow to plan, fast to execute.”
- Categorize Your Buckets: Don’t treat all creators the same way. Divide your program into distinct tiers—such as a pure product gifting bucket, a structured affiliate network, and macro-influencer relationships [07:51].
- Define Formulaic KPIs: Back into your goals. If you run a gifting program, recognize that only 10% to 15% of small-brand recipients may organically post. Calculate exactly how much weekly outreach your team needs to make to hit your target product placement numbers [08:25].
- Lead with Your Mission: When Alexis launched Mesh Wellness, she faced the same hurdle of zero brand awareness [10:05]. The solution? Lead with your “why.” Creators respond to authenticity.
- The Founder Touch: Personalized email sequences coming directly from the founder drastically increase response rates. Mentioning a life milestone—like a creator’s recent wedding or upcoming travel—and tying it naturally to a product benefit makes the outreach feel human rather than transactional [10:13]. This approach also helps you bypass talent managers, keeping conversations direct and commission-focused [11:59].
2. The Power of the Snowball Effect
When asked what part of the journey is the trickiest—starting from scratch, scaling up, or optimizing for efficiency—Alexis didn’t hesitate: Starting from zero is always the hardest.
Building an affiliate program is a classic snowball effect [13:21]. Outreach done in week one might not yield a response until week two, a shipped box in week three, and content in week four. It requires immense corporate patience to let that snowball roll down the hill and gain momentum [15:08].
Play the Long Game with Commission Structures
A common pitfall for desperate new brands is offering unsustainably high commission rates just to get creators through the door. Alexis warns against devaluing your brand early on [16:16]:
- Leave Room to Move Up: If you start your baseline commission too high, you leave no margin to incentivize creators during crucial commercial periods like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or major product launches [17:34].
- Avoid Creator Resentment: Creators talk to one another behind the scenes. If you launch with aggressive rates and are later forced to scale them back as your business grows, it creates resentment and can permanently damage your reputation in the community [18:26].
3. Navigating Algorithmic Shifts: Moving Past the “Commercial”
The playbooks of three to five years ago no longer work. Social media platforms are actively suppressing content that looks and feels like a traditional commercial advertisement [20:03].
Furthermore, consumer behavior has evolved. Users on TikTok or Instagram Reels rarely want to disrupt their browsing experience to copy a discount code and leave the app to shop [20:52].
The Strategy: Permanent Integration
Instead of relying on a massive, one-off campaign “drop,” focus on continuous, evergreen placement. Alexis suggests securing permanent real estate on a creator’s Linktree. An ongoing, frictionless button offering an exclusive discount allows them to organically mention your brand over time, leading to sustainable revenue where both the creator and the brand win [21:20].
To achieve this, brands must become the followers [24:15]. Step back, ditch the strict scripts, and observe the creators’ lives. By allowing the influencer to lead the narrative and understanding the consumer’s changing behaviors in the parallel lane, your brand can move quickly and capture authentic cultural trends before your competitors even finish reading their data reports [25:15].
4. Foundational Networks vs. “Brand Pops”
Should you go wide with micro-affiliates or deep with a few celebrity partnerships? The answer lies in balancing your marketing mix [28:22].
- The Foundational Network: Always-on, small-to-mid-tier affiliates build deep consumer trust [29:08]. Because their content feels natural, they provide a steady volume of views over time, giving the market the perception that your brand is everywhere and universally loved [30:11].
- Brand Pops: Large-scale celebrity or macro-influencer partnerships act as “brand pops” [31:02]. These are great for quarterly buzz, but in an attention economy, the hype from a million-dollar spend typically lasts only 48 hours [30:38]. If you only rely on the big names, you become known as the brand that simply buys relevance [31:08].
5. Where Marketers Underinvest: Rigor and Empathy
Many companies jump into affiliate marketing only to abandon it a month later because they “aren’t seeing immediate sales volume”. Alexis attributes these failures to underinvesting in two core pillars: rigor and empathy [33:37].
- Underinvesting in Rigor: True scale requires obsessive tracking, structured planning, and setting weekly operational metrics for your team so the snowball stays in motion [34:07].
- Underinvesting in Empathy: Many brands make the mistake of hiring a single intern and expecting them to transactional-blast thousands of creators [34:44]. Building relationships takes time. You need to know what is happening in a creator’s life to make outreach meaningful [35:33].
“The payback on emotional connection is completely invaluable… You’re not building an affiliate network; you’re actually building a community.” — Alexis Warchalowski [36:24]
During her time at Liquid I.V., Alexis’s team sent out thousands of highly customized, premium influencer PR boxes. Because of the deep emotional connection established with those creators, the brand regularly saw a four-fold return on that investment within just three days of a campaign launch [36:55].
Scaling Your Team Responsibly
Don’t bite off more than you can chew. Start with one full-time employee or a dedicated contractor [40:16]. Track their capacity—for instance, once a manager approaches their maximum capacity of handling roughly 2,500 active relationships, the revenue driven by that network should directly fund your next affiliate team hire [40:09].
6. Audience Q&A: Breaking Through the Noise
To wrap up the session, Ryan posed an audience question: How can brands boost their visibility and break through crowded creator inboxes? [40:51]
- The Instagram DM Bump: Direct messaging on Instagram remains highly effective. Because creator inboxes are flooded, your message will often get buried in the “hidden” folder. Alexis’s tactical trick? Unsend and resend the DM as many times as needed to keep bumping your thread back to the top of their inbox [41:24].
- Culturally Relevant Commenting: Engaging in the comment section of a creator’s viral post is incredibly valuable—but never use it as a place to pitch your product [41:54]. Instead, leave a culturally relevant, witty comment that contributes to the conversation [42:08]. Once the creator interacts with your comment, follow up with a quick “We’d love to work with you, shooting you a DM now!” to guide them to your main pitch [42:21].
The Golden Rule: If you wouldn’t do it in a room full of humans IRL (in real life), don’t do it on a digital platform [42:43].
Final Thoughts
Scale doesn’t happen overnight, and it certainly doesn’t happen through automated spam. By combining data-driven planning with genuine human empathy, brands can build affiliate networks that turn into passionate, revenue-generating communities.
To watch the full live recording and catch more expert strategies, check out the complete video on YouTube: Live Expert Q&A: How to Build an Affiliate Program That Scales.
You can watch the entire interview between myself and Alexis on YouTube below:
