A gifting brand with a programme that had been live for years but stuck — ticking along quietly without ever pulling its weight. The brief was direct: affiliate was meant to bring in people who'd never heard of the brand, and it wasn't. I took on full management from January 2025.
Vertical
Gifting
Focus
Programme management
14x
Monthly new customers
13.6x
Monthly revenue
4 to 15
Partners above £10k
The approach
I treated the first six months as a rebuild, not an optimisation:
Re-segmented every partner by the job they actually do — who brings brand-new audiences in, who converts people already considering the brand, and who just intercepts existing customers at checkout.
Built a community and affinity channel from near zero: employee-benefit platforms and NHS, teacher, forces, carer and student discount sites. That channel went from £3.6k to £152k in 16 months — a 42x lift.
Reactivated the partners that were switched on but ignored: rebriefs, fresh creative, better placement, and a real point of contact. The existing partner base alone delivered £408k of incremental lift.
Diversified the mix from two dominant channels to six — none dominant, all growing. Cashback's share dropped from 30% to 10%, even as cashback revenue itself grew 3.4x.
Locked in monthly reporting and quarterly planning with the brand, so the channel stops being a black box.
The findings
Monthly revenue went from £7,243 to £98,219, and new customers from 94 to 1,328 a month — same brand, same products, completely rebuilt programme. AOV held flat, so the new customers are real customers, not discount-chasers. The programme got deeper, not just bigger: partners contributing over £10k went from 4 to 15, which means no single partner carries the programme on their back. And £408k of the lift came from partners that already existed before I arrived — most stuck programmes don't have a recruitment problem, they have an activation problem.
