The Tamesis
Start by fully evaluating what your brand’s goals are and how to get the most people to buy. “We asked them to really take us through the secrets of branding; what drives your brand loyalty,” Téllez said. “Because that’s a big part of how we’re trying to scale as we build a community of thousands of ambassadors.” From there, the Devotion team strategizes for brands, leverages its technology to recruit ambassadors, and then implements an end-to-end experience for them that includes incentives or gifts, education, event invitations, and more.
Téllez grew Parade, Gen Z’s favorite lingerie brand, largely through a scaled brand ambassador program rather than the influence of its creators. Téllez has built a vast network of ambassadors, helping the brand reach $10 million in annual revenue. However, Parade’s pursuit of rapid growth led to financial difficulties, and Téllez sold the company in 2023, which closed last October. Building an ambassador program gave Téllez a tool gap that could help brands work with a large number of creators at the same time.
Kroopf recently established TikTok Shop’s creator alliance ecosystem and celebrity partnership strategy after 12 years working in the creator economy. During his tenure at TikTok in China in 2022, this period of time had the greatest impact on his attitude towards Devotion. “[TikTok] Like, the algorithm is [in its] “What you need to understand and help brands prepare for very early on is that there’s going to be a proliferation of creators,” he recalls. “Our view is that brands really need to invest resources in a large number of creator partners to provide them with better, fresh content, stay relevant, and make them more successful on the platform.”
Devotion has secretly partnered with dozens of brands, about half of which are fashion and beauty-related, but the founders declined to be named at this stage. They said brands tripled the amount of tagged content on average. Devotion’s revenue reached seven figures. (The company declined to disclose the fees, but said they vary based on the size of the brand and the scope of its creator program.)
“As we scale, Instagram is just beginning to reinvent modern word-of-mouth — and even then, true scale is limited by manual processes,” Goodwin said. “Today’s algorithmic feeds reward speed and volume, so I invested in Devotion because Cami and Jon’s vision is to build the infrastructure modern brands need to sustainably grow voice.”
expand intimacy
The founders say Devotion’s scale is only possible because of artificial intelligence technology. AI influencer gifting software is nothing new; a number of companies from Spate to AMT have launched over the past two years offering these capabilities, but marketers are often unsatisfied with the existing technology. (One influencer marketer described an AI gifting software she tried as “absolutely shocking” and lamented that these companies are often run by male developers with AI expertise but a lack of understanding of the influencer marketing environment.) Devotion goes a step further, building an ecosystem of creators that includes but goes well beyond product seeding.
