[00:00:00] Sam: Hi Rob.
[00:00:07] Rob: Hey Sam, how's it going?
[00:00:08] Sam: It's going pretty well, thanks. I, you know, the Olympics just ended not that long ago.
[00:00:13] Rob: Yes.
[00:00:14] Sam: And it had me thinking, could I be a professional athlete?
[00:00:17] Rob: No.
[00:00:18] Sam: And you were right. The answer, don't be sorry. I'm fully aware of my limitations and athleticism is, is one of them, but you're, you're a sporty guy, I would say. And if you were to play a sport [00:00:30] professionally. What kind of sport do you think you would play?
[00:00:32] Rob: Yeah, I'm definitely not a sporty guy anymore. Um, I now have a chronic back condition. I can't remember the last time I exercised. Um, so any sports that basically would work in that context? Maybe darts?
[00:00:46] Sam: !Darts, yeah. Yeah, sure. It does require like a level of, of hand eye coordination though. You don't think
[00:00:53] Rob: I've
[00:00:53] Sam: got that? I, well, sure. Okay.
[00:00:56] Rob: Welcome back to
[00:00:59] another [00:01:00] episode of Awin-Win Marketing Podcast.
[00:01:02] Sam: Today's episode is extra special for a couple of reasons. For one, it's the only interview this season that Rob and I did together.
[00:01:09] Rob: That's right. And despite Sam battling with a voice, the entire time. We actually had a blast doing this one together.
[00:01:16] Sam: Thanks, Rob. I assumed you'd say you would have enjoyed the experience more if you were the only one doing the talking. You would think. I do think, but here we are. Another highlight of this episode is that it's a live recording from one of this year's Awin ThinkTank [00:01:30] sessions in Chicago, and we had the pleasure of chatting to direct to consumer or DTC sunglass retailer Tomahawk Shades and its agency partner Today's Business.
[00:01:39] Rob: Yeah and they shared insights with us into their innovative strategy of collaborating with really quite high profile athletes and celebrities to boost brand awareness and to drive sales for them whilst also safeguarding their bottom line. It's a really brilliant approach and we're not the only ones who think so actually.
[00:01:56] Sam: Just last week Tomahawk Shades and Today's Business were honored [00:02:00] with a 2025 Global Performance Marketing Award for this campaign. It's a really brilliant approach, but don't just take our word for it. No, don't. Let's dive into this episode, so you can hear the brilliance from Tomahawk Shades and today's business themselves.
[00:02:20] Andrew: When we initially got started on trying to say where we were going to go in what industry, we were looking at the influencers, the athletes, and it was who approached us best. And almost to take like a, not a [00:02:30] drastic step back, but like this was a college project, right?
Sam: That's Andrew Shapiro, CEO and founder of Tomahawk Shades.
[00:02:36] And when we first started, we had no idea it was going to become this, but the strategy was always, hey, can we get into the hands of all these athletes? Can we get into the hands of influencers? And that was great when it started, but as it grew, then it became, hey, we want a little bit of money. We want to talk about upfront costs.
[00:02:52] We want to be investors. We want to be partners. And when that happened, that's when. We had to kind of look at the whole [00:03:00] spectrum and say, what are we going to do to make sure we can keep these people and be able to grow past that?
Sam: I think that's a perfect segue to our question for Joe. Actually, you know, what about the goals that Andrew has identified most excited you?
[00:03:11] Sam: And why did you feel affiliate marketing was the right medium for achieving those?
[00:03:15] Joe: Yeah, so I think the goals for Tomahawk were one to obviously create sales and drive growth. And that's more with some of the traditional partners we work with on the content coupon cashback. But with the influencer channel, we knew It's a little bit harder to always [00:03:30] track that one to one return from what you get there.
[00:03:33] Sam: Also with us is Joe Sanfilippo, VP of Growth and Partnerships at Today's Business.
[00:03:38] Joe: So other things we looked at were how can we grow our owned and earned channels, right? Our email lists, our SMS, our social followers, and really just position our brand favorably in the space. And another thing Andrew kind of touched on was if we're going to work with these influencers, how do we make sure we don't spend all of our money?
[00:03:56] And not drive any sales and kind of just [00:04:00] get burned essentially. So that was the beauty of affiliate spaces, right? One, it was a totally untapped channel that they hadn't had. And two was the affiliate model really protects you from getting burned on those flat fee deals where, how do I know what I'm getting back out of this?
[00:04:13] Andrew: The strategy for us was, Hey, we, I could get into anybody's hands. It's not that hard to do, but can you get something out of it? And I think that that's where we have to learn and find out. How affiliate marketing could help us do that because then allowed us to keep that strategy But not have to change so far off that we would [00:04:30] lose ourselves or like we mentioned before, you know run out of money We had to kind of adjust and pivot each way as we went from a college project to what it is now But we were able to stick with the same idea that we had the entire way
[00:04:42] Rob: That's obviously like a common dilemma, I guess, that any brand who's trying to tap into influencer through the affiliate channels face with, it's the financial aspect.
[00:04:50] You know, the legacy of the model in the industry, it's a CPA, it's performance based, et cetera. But that isn't the expectation necessarily from an influencer perspective where there is maybe more of an expectation [00:05:00] or assumption for upfront fees. You know, that's kind of how we tend to negotiate. So Joe, I wondered from the agency perspective on that, how did you approach that, particularly when you're speaking to doing outreach to maybe more famous.
[00:05:12] sports figures, people that have that profile already and would have that expectation of being paid up front.
[00:05:19] Joe: I mean, we were able to secure some pretty big partnerships with a lot of big time athletes and celebrities and some of the highest influencers on Instagram. Obviously they want to get paid a flat fee who doesn't, [00:05:30] right?
[00:05:30] Um, but what it came down to is this, they want a flat fee. We need to drive sales. We need to make money, like to pay you these fees and to keep the partnership going. And we basically broke it down. Like, found the people that came back to us and said, well, I can drive a lot of traffic. I'm very confident.
[00:05:45] I've driven these sales before. I've driven this traffic. One, we came back and said, here's a commission rate that is well above and beyond anything that's anybody's ever offered to you and two, You know, you said you can drive all of this traffic in these cells. Here's the projections, [00:06:00] right? At this conversion rate, with this AOV, with an affiliate link that has cookie tracking and those types of things, here's what you would make on this deal versus just a flat fee deal that we're willing to do.
[00:06:10] And it's substantially higher than what you would do just on the flat fee. So really showing them the numbers of what it would look like is the big thing. Uh, then on top of that for influencers and for athletes and these people, like a lot of times the worst part about a flat fee deal is there's a lot of.
[00:06:26] Obligations that are really strict and there's maybe not as much creative control. [00:06:30] We took all of that out of the equation. We said, Hey, you can promote when you want, how you want, whenever you want as much or as little. It's, it's your content, your audience. You know what works best? Like here's your commission, treat it like it's your own company, essentially.
[00:06:42] And that's kind of how we did it. I,
[00:06:44] Sam: no, I want to jump in. It's my turn. Damn it. Um, I actually want to ask a follow up question. The pitch on paper, obviously it sounds amazing. You really let these creators, these sports influencers do whatever they want. I am curious, and I don’t know the answer to this, has any, did anyone come back and say no?
[00:06:59] Like, [00:07:00] no, I don't want to do this. I just want you to pay me up front and have a nice day.
[00:07:03] Andrew: Absolutely. Really? Tons of that. Way more than you think. Yeah. Like, we probably get, what would you say, every 500 no's, we get a couple yeses. Yeah. But it's no's on people who, I think that we've talked about this a lot, where like the no's are the people who know that they can't sell stuff.
[00:07:18] And I know it's hard to say and it's very harsh, but you want that upfront fee, what if we paid that and then we get burned, right? And because, going back to what I answered before, right? We didn't have this massive funding [00:07:30] dollars to start, so how are we going to work with these people if we don't have that?
[00:07:33] But the people who said yes, they did great. They enjoy it. They're still here working with us. Some of them became investors, right? So, it becomes something where it's okay to have the no. It hurt in the beginning. I mean, for me at least. Because he would report back to me and be like, they said no. And I'd be like, it looks so great on paper.
[00:07:47] And then they would say no. We'd be like, why? We didn't understand. I think as time went on It finally made more sense. And we're like, okay, yeah, he said, no, next one, next one. Because there are a lot of athletes that are a lot of influencers. So many people out there, obviously [00:08:00] you want to work with the best of the best, but everyone's different.
[00:08:02] They have agencies, they get represented. So yeah.
[00:08:05] Joe: And at the end of the day, like as Andrew mentioned, we want to work with people that are confident that they're going to create results, but also like really believe in the brand and the product. And I think everything we do from a marketing perspective comes back to, we're big fans, obviously of the product that we believe that.
[00:08:20] If we can acquire new customers and get in front of people, they're going to come back and buy more. Like we believe in our product, we stand behind the product, and that's a big part of everything we do.
[00:08:29] Rob: There was [00:08:30] one specific example that we talked about last night, actually, at the bar, which I thought was really fascinating.
[00:08:34] There was a kind of a golfer, obviously, that you were kind of like working with. Did you tell us a bit more about how that went?
[00:08:40] Andrew: I think the expectation is like, if you're one of the biggest golfers and golfers worldwide, everybody loves it. You have agents and you want to get paid X amount of dollars.
[00:08:48] And I think we presented it where we kind of just said, Hey, here's complete freedom, do what you want, how you want it, and just enjoy it, make the content you want to make, put it out on your channels that you want to do. And we just [00:09:00] kind of let them have the. Freedom to do whatever they wanted, but we don't always look at, are we trying to convert on a sale or is it sometimes okay to just get that exposure where we were featured in a ton of different magazines, publications, got backlinks that helped our, you know, just everything kind of raised up or we're getting a lot more people to our site.
[00:09:17] That's where the funnels and the deeper stuff come into play, but you do get the, the hit or misses, but you can't always look at everything as like, it's gotta be a dollar for dollar. We get that. We understand that certain people we wish, right? But it's just the case, right? Selling [00:09:30] things are. hard. What if your fans don't care about sunglasses?
[00:09:32] Right? We thought that they did, and then they didn't. And we've gone back and forth with that a ton of times with a bunch of people, right? It's, do you wear it on the court? Do you not wear it on the court? Do you wear it on, you know, a basketball player doesn't wear it, right? When he plays, but do they have that in their lifestyle or part of what they do?
[00:09:47] So, you know, the hit or misses are there, but I think we look at every conversion very, very different. I think we kind of agree that it doesn't always have to be a sale. It could be exposure, impressions, and stuff like that.
[00:09:56] Sam: Yeah, absolutely. I actually want to ask, were you actively going [00:10:00] after these sports influencers and creators?
[00:10:01] Were they coming to you? What did that tactic look like?
[00:10:04] Andrew: Yeah, I think in the first place it was definitely 100 percent us. And I think that once it changed to, like, let's say an athlete would land on our page and they would see five or six of their teammates following us already. Then it went from they DM us, they would ask for a pair of sunglasses, and then they'd say, oh, how could I work with you?
[00:10:19] Right? We used to do it. I mean, I would probably spend hours per day just DMing people, asking them to do it. It's kind of flip flop now, where now it's coming to us. You wake up every day to a bunch of DMs from people saying, Hey, I would love to [00:10:30] do this or do this or work with you. And that's where I instantly go, okay, let's break it down.
[00:10:34] Does this person make sense? Should we offer them the affiliate? How much freedom do we want to give them? How much of a payout do we want to give them? And then I go back and forth with Joe and we determine what's, because now it's more than. We imagine, but you can't say yes to everybody.
[00:10:48] Rob: I was about to say, are there instances where you've turned these athletes down then?
[00:10:52] Because it's just not a right fit.
[00:10:54] Andrew: Yeah. I think we, we have to be a little selective, right? It's like if you say yes to everybody, then it just looks like [00:11:00] everybody has your stuff. It's not even a partnership. So we are a little bit selective, but it's weird. Sometimes the smaller guys are better than the bigger guys.
[00:11:06] Sometimes we want to get into a Oh, do you look at it as a wholesale opportunity? Do they have a way to get you a license? It's very weird. Cause you want to almost become friends with them in a way, you know, and that helps develop it, but we do have to say no a lot.
[00:11:19] Joe: Yeah. And we, and especially when we started working with some of the bigger.
[00:11:22] Athletes and influencers. They were like part of the terms of their agreement where, well, if I'm going to work with you guys and it's a year agreement, I'm the biggest [00:11:30] in my space, which we've had a couple of times. I don't want any other people in my space, like promoting it. Like I don't want any other smaller influencers doing it.
[00:11:38] Well, our partnership's still alive. Like I want to be the face of it. So we've had that happen a couple of times. So obviously. had to turn down other influencers in the space for that kind of exclusive partnership. But when you have the right person, you're gladly do that.
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[00:12:45] Sam: Knowing this campaign was meant to drive more awareness and consideration than sales, what metrics did you look at to determine success? And what were some of those results?
[00:12:54] Joe: Yeah, I think the first thing we looked at was, again, going back to customer lifetime [00:13:00] value is how many new customers do we get? So it wasn't necessarily about how much revenue and how many customers, but like what percentage of them were new customers.
[00:13:08] And with the influencers, we found like 95 percent of the time it was new customers. So that's great. Like, again, we believe in the product. We think people are going to come back. We have hundreds of different styles, right? People are going to come back and want to try different things. So that was a big part of then we looked at SMS and email growth.
[00:13:24] We looked at social follower growth. Those are probably the main. KPIs that we're [00:13:30] looking at.
[00:13:30] Rob: Joe, has your job become easier the more success you've had in creating these partnerships that then almost speaks to educating people, making them aware that this is a model that is viable for them as well?
[00:13:43] Joe: Yeah. I think anytime you have a case study, you can turn to like, it's going to make it so much easier when you could say, Hey, this is what this person did. This is how it worked out. It just gives you the proof, right, of, hey, this works.
[00:13:54] Rob: Was there one partnership that totally blew your mind in terms of what the outcomes from it were, [00:14:00] whether that was in a particular sports niche or a particular individual, whether that came to the new customer acquisition, the sales, the kind of exposure that you got?
[00:14:07] Andrew: Yeah, I think we looked at each other at the same
[00:14:09] Joe: time. There's the guy from, who's the one influencer?
[00:14:12] Andrew: Oh, yeah. So there, there was this one guy on, on TikTok, Mr. Hamilton. He was a school teacher, just had fun, really out there, and we basically approached him, we're like, hey, we don't know where this is gonna go.
[00:14:25] We're like, let's give you an affiliate code, let's see what happens. He posted one [00:14:30] video, and it was just, sale, sale, sale, sale, sale. We're like, what's going on? Who even knows about this guy? Like, we thought he was just funny, and he was having a good time with it, and then, here's more glasses, more sales, here's more glasses, more, and he just took advantage of the moment.
[00:14:42] And I think that it's unexpected, because he's not an athlete, Right. He's not what we would go after, but we had a fun conversation with him. We said, go, we couldn't believe it. I think that he texted me those days, like, have you seen these numbers? And I was like, no, I haven't checked it out. Like I didn't really think.
[00:14:56] And all of a sudden it's like, look how many codes were used. So we're like, wow, this
[00:14:59] Joe: is great. And that's why we would [00:15:00] say like throw stuff at the wall. Cause you don't know when like there's going to be some sort of anomaly like that. And another one that was interesting was. We had sent some sunglass or some blue light glasses to a writer at parade magazine.
[00:15:11] This was during COVID too. So it was wild and lots of crazy stuff was going on, but she had wrote about blue light glasses. And it was actually like in connection with a doctor from the Cleveland clinic that was like advising people, like here's 10 things to do to prevent COVID and the blue light glasses, like wearing them as apparently [00:15:30] less touching your eyes and stuff like that.
[00:15:32] So it went into parade magazine and it went online and in print. And like we woke up on Sunday morning one day, I knew the articles I was like, I didn't really see anything, but we woke up on Sunday and I just saw Shopify going off all day long. And then throughout the week, Tom's like, what is going on?
[00:15:48] And I texted the writer. I was like, Hey, why is this? Like, do you know why this is happening? And she's like, Oh yeah, parade magazine goes out on Sunday. And it was all the like exact same type of content. Demographics too. So we were like, [00:16:00] okay, this makes sense. And it was crazy. We broke like all of our sales records and daily records.
[00:16:05] And it was very exciting.
[00:16:06] Rob: So what's next then as far as the, this kind of influencer affiliate strategy is concerned.
[00:16:12] Andrew: Yeah, I think very strange because we've done such big things in a short period of time, but I think we're almost kind of taking a step back. I think we've learned that. If we could work with these big time people, why can't we work with some of the smaller micro influencers, too?
[00:16:26] What if they have 2, 000 followers, but all those people love what they [00:16:30] have? And I think we've kind of had a little bit of strategy talks about it, and we've gone back and forth and said, Could we get a bunch that just makes sense and work in industries that we want to maybe tackle, whether it's, uh, hiking or running or, you know, swimming, who knows what it is?
[00:16:43] But I think we kind of want to take a step back to the micro influencer part. And then it also kind of leads into like the NIL stuff, big transition. We had to make with that because once that went live, every single kid was DMing us saying, Hey, I want to get paid. I want to do this. And we've, we've navigated it pretty well, but I think [00:17:00] that part figuring out, how do we do it right?
[00:17:02] Do we go to the top dog? You know, going back to that conversation that was early about the NFL draft, right? Do you go to one of those big guys or do you go to fifth, sixth round guys? Do you go to guys who are undrafted? Do you work with them who, smaller following, smaller names, but have a following that love what they do?
[00:17:17] Even though we want to say that we're doing this grand scale thing, we're kind of taking a step back and saying these people could significantly help us and we're developing a strategy around it. And that's pretty much what the next step is going to be for. That in this affiliate space.
[00:17:29] Joe: Yeah, I [00:17:30] think we're testing in each like different category, especially like in sports.
[00:17:33] Like how did it work in golf? How did we do and running right and going back and forth and okay. And golf we had the biggest influencer then we didn't work with any of the micro. So now that that agreement is over. Do we go and try to do all the micro influencers, right? And it's obviously going to be a lot easier to get the micro people if they can say, Hey, the biggest person in your space just did it at the same deal, like no flat fees.
[00:17:56] Why wouldn't you want to do it as well?
[00:17:58] Sam: This is our standard closing question [00:18:00] for the podcast. Joe, I'll start with you. What is your best One piece of advice for everyone in this room who's looking to use now affiliate marketing hopefully to build their brand consideration, not just a direct sales tactic.
[00:18:13] Joe: Yeah. I would say, especially if you're working with a smaller brand, just don't put yourself in a box, right? Like be open to creative ideas, be open to doing different things that you're maybe you're not used to doing. Obviously it put parameters in place to protect yourself, especially [00:18:30] if you're going to give out really substantial.
[00:18:32] Commission rates and things like that, but there's so many people I feel like that are just so rigid in their way It's very hard, right? You're not going to be able to get everybody like man you mentioned earlier Like sometimes we have to reach out to 500 influencers to find the two that are willing to work with us And the way that we want to work with them.
[00:18:48] So be aggressive be Creative and just protect your downside.
[00:18:52] Andrew: Yeah. And I guess I feel the same way. Bouncing off of that is really just have a conversation with everybody. I think that being able to talk to so [00:19:00] many people in so many different worlds and spaces, and that's what like I wear sunglass in general allows me to do.
[00:19:05] There's no, Limitations on who we could talk to or work with. So I think having that conversation with every single person, being able to say to them, Oh, you're in this world. Let me learn more about it. Now, maybe I should dive deeper into it, or maybe I should stay away from it. And I think that it allowed us to kind of find those like niche markets that we really like, but being able to learn about it, become mentally aware of what's going on in those spaces for marketing in general.
[00:19:28] And so, yeah, it's a lot [00:19:30] of conversations to have, but it's all been worth it at the end of the day. And I think that I advise everybody to do that. Just. Have the conversations, doesn't matter, small, large, don't know about it. Just talk with them because it helps.
[00:19:44] Sam: That ends this episode of Awin-Win Marketing Podcast. In two weeks’ time, Rob chats to sustainable deodorant brand Wild and affiliate tech partner Tyviso to discuss how they've delivered enormous marketing value For Wild via gift with purchase partnerships.
[00:19:59] Rob: Until [00:20:00] then, you can listen to previous episodes of a win win marketing podcast by visiting Awin.com/Podcast or on Spotify, Apple, Pocket Casts, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:20:11] Sam: Thanks again for listening to Awin-Win Marketing Podcast, where we show you how affiliate partnerships can always offer a win-win.