As you probably know, Instagram is THE favorite social network of the Scrunchie Team (we hadn't noticed at all haha). Many of you ask us if it's possible to collaborate with us, to want more details about how we work with influencers... Because we love being unfiltered with you and sharing everything we can, we thought it would be interesting to tell you a little more about how we collaborate with influencers.
Why do we work with influencers?
When we launched the Scrunchie is back Instagram at the very beginning of the adventure, we had a hard time getting ourselves known, building a community. When a brand has a few hundred followers, how can it grow? We tried several levers: posting beautiful content, using hashtags, posting at specific times, leaving comments on other accounts, following accounts... These techniques were more or less successful but not enough. We told ourselves that Scrunchie accessories needed to be showcased by girls who could be spokespersons! We then started sending accessories to a few influencers.
How does it work?
We started working with influencers "manually" by contacting influencers in the Scrunchie universe directly on Instagram. We simply sent them a message offering them an accessory. Those who agreed sent us their address and the accessory they wanted to receive. We sent it to them, and they posted a photo tagging the brand.
We were lucky to have a lot of positive feedback, despite being a very young brand with little development on Instagram.
The results allowed us to understand that this was going to be an interesting development lever for the brand: it allowed us to make Scrunchie known to a targeted audience, to increase the number of followers and to create an active, engaged community, in the values of the brand and with which it is super interesting to exchange! In addition to that, the photos taken by the influencers were great and allowed us to have content to repost.
Bank! We then started working with Hicency. It's a startup that created a platform that connects brands and influencers. This allowed us to communicate more easily with influencers and to more simply track the impact. How does it work in practice? Hivency's platform brings together thousands of influencers who receive "collaboration offers" from different brands and can select the products they would like to receive. For our part, we sort the profiles that are interested (based on the Scrunchie universe... we'll tell you more about our selection criteria later). Then, we send them the accessory, they talk about it to their community (photo, stories), can organize a contest...
Today we collaborate in 3 different ways: either we contact girls directly on Insta, or we receive collaboration requests, or we go through Hivency.
What type of influencers do we collaborate with?
Choosing the right influencers is essential for us. We don't want to flood Instagram with Scrunchie accessories. We want the brand to be promoted by girls who are in the same universe. What we're looking for above all are girls who have fallen in love with the brand. Not girls who want to receive yet another product from yet another brand. We're looking for influencers who understand the brand, its values, and who will know how to highlight the accessory. An influencer who loves Scrunchie will more easily reach her followers thanks to the sincerity of her post.
As an anecdote, one day Nabila wrote to us asking for some accessories. We were quite generous, thinking that given her number of followers, it would definitely have an impact on sales... not at all! This confirmed the fact that if the influencer isn't in our universe, it's of no interest.
The number of followers isn't a deciding factor for us. If we fall in love with an influencer's style, we don't hesitate to send her an accessory. This was the case with Jodie, the little Frenchie, at the very beginning. She had 6,000 followers when we gave her the first bow; she fell in love with our style, and we fell in love with hers!
We prioritize collaborations with micro-influencers or niche influencers who have fewer than 100,000 followers. These women are more likely to respond to us easily and quickly and are still close to their communities.
We've never paid an influencer to talk about Scrunchie . It goes against our principles of honesty. We believe the influencer should love our accessories and be willing to talk about them naturally, without financial compensation.
Regarding the location, we receive a lot of requests from abroad but we are prioritizing collaborations in France for the moment.
We hope this article has helped you learn more. Feel free to write to us if you have any questions or want to chat! ☺
