"Brand mentions are a huge one. You can tell when somebody really loves a brand, based on what they're saying and how frequently they're posting about them. Another indicator is how much they're talking to us; if they're emailing us or Slacking back, that helps us know they're engaged. Seeing people posting unique content is also really cool—that helps me know they're really thinking about our brand and being creative with it!"
"It’s important to think about your influencer program as its own brand within your brand, where you're building a community of creators and thought leaders. We have a newsletter called the Epic Gardening Times that we send out monthly. This has company announcements, ambassador spotlights, and articles that we find helpful for the creator economy. You need to be that destination for them to connect with other people that are like them, and to provide them with information that makes them better creators.”
"Dynamic and easy. It's easy for my team to use. It's easy for our creators to use. And it's so multifunctional!"
How Epic Gardening is growing to new heights with Superfiliate:
Creator analytics dashboards help Epic’s creators understand their performance data, providing more transparency and insight into what drives sales and awareness.
Milestone-based gifting gamifies the creator experience, automatically rewarding influencers when they hit specific sales targets, keeping them engaged and motivated.
Creator multi-links allow creators to generate secondary referral links for specific products in addition to their cobranded landing page, reducing friction in the shopping journey and driving higher conversions.
Epic Gardening is a leading gardening supply and education company that has achieved a powerful product-creator fit on social media, cultivating a thriving community of creators passionate about growing their own food.
However, as a DTC brand in a highly seasonal industry, Epic Gardening and their Influencer Marketing Manager Molly Cole face a unique challenge in creator marketing: Maintaining year-round creator engagement.
"We lean into gifting during the holiday season and garden planning during the rest of the off-season," says Molly. "I also use the less busy garden months to reach out to creators. It's a really good time for me to lean into my outsourcing and it becomes a priority to nurture those relationships.”
But managing all of these relationship-based workflows—discovery, outreach, gifting, and community management—requires the right toolkit to scale seamlessly. Before Superfiliate, Epic Gardening was using a platform with two critical issues: deteriorating customer service and an interface that failed to engage creators:
"The customer service team that helped us was eliminated. Plus, our creators didn't really care about the platform; the interface for creators wasn't so great—I really wanted to offer a better experience to our creators."
Molly Cole
Influencer Marketing Manager at Epic Gardening
By migrating to Superfiliate, Epic Gardening has the relationship-first architecture to engage and motivate creators throughout the gardening calendar.
The ability to increase creator engagement with cobranded landing pages was a huge draw for Molly, while the creator-facing analytics dashboard and multi-links feature have been instrumental in helping creators to own their success:
“I think it's very key for creators to understand their data...and it's very clean on the creator side. How the dashboards are laid out feels intentional and luxurious,” says Molly. “It's not just an ugly landing page where they go to just crank out a link. It's branded, it's welcoming, and it has all the information they need right there.”
Milestone-based gifting is another core creator engagement strategy for Epic Gardening, giving creators something tangible to strive for within their programs. Additionally, they can track progress toward these incentives right inside their Superfiliate dashboard:
"We always have milestone gifts with a low barrier to entry. Maybe it's your first 5, 10 or 15 sales, and you'll get this product as a thank you,” explains Molly. "It's great for creator engagement; it's fun and it's gamified. Having the gifting process be fully automated in Superfiliate is also very helpful. I cannot imagine if I was running that in a spreadsheet!”
Molly gets even more mileage out of these powerful features because she can enroll an unlimited number of creators across all of Epic Gardening’s programs, instead of creator numbers being capped like they were at her previous platform. Leveraging the full halo effect of a large creator roster has driven impressive revenue gains for the brand:
"With Superfiliate we have our ambassador program, but we also now have our affiliate program. I did not expect to see high revenue through the affiliate program; it was more to connect with smaller creators and be the first brand they work with in this space. But they're very excited to share their code and link and drive sales!"
Molly Cole
Influencer Marketing Manager at Epic Gardening
Epic Gardening has doubled down on their relationship with Superfiliate by adding a second brand, Botanical Interests, to the platform.
Having both brands on Superfiliate enables Molly's team to work seamlessly across programs, with those same features that are driving success for Epic Gardening—creator dashboards, multi-links, and milestone gifting—now also building momentum for Botanical Interests:
"Something we've seen work in the early days is having those easy-to-grab links and codes, and having that creator dashboard be so clean and easy to understand…Our influencer AOV across Epic Gardening and Botanical Interests is much higher than other channels.”
Molly Cole
Influencer Marketing Manager at Epic Gardening
Superfiliate's flexibility and creator-first ethos is enabling Molly to customize programs to Epic Gardening’s precise needs as they move toward an omnichannel creator marketing strategy.
Their customer success team is now also using Superfiliate to launch professional creator programs with gardening consultants, while Molly plans to launch new content formats and channels to take advantage of Superfiliate’s unlimited caps:
"There’s a lot of opportunity in Substack, podcasts, newsletters, all these different forms of media beyond strictly social channels. Superfiliate comes into play here because I can run unlimited amounts of programs and have an unlimited cap on who I can test things out with." says Molly.
For Molly, what sets Superfiliate apart isn’t just the strength of these relationship-building features, but the sense of partnership and support the platform provides. The Superfiliate team works closely with Epic Gardening to implement product feedback and build requested features, giving her confidence that Superfiliate’s capabilities will continue to grow alongside the brand:
"I would always have ideas and bring them to our previous platform, but they never came to fruition. Whereas at Superfiliate, so many of the features I've requested have been built. I love that so much as an influencer marketer!”
Molly Cole
Influencer Marketing Manager at Epic Gardening
