How to scale a brand with influencer marketing: Blank Label Team's founders on what turns one win into a system
What turns a successful influencer campaign into repeatable growth? Blank Label Team founders Ignas Gee and Ante Cetinic share lessons from scaling FOREO, from building long-term creator relationships to measuring sales and expanding across markets.
Most brands land an influencer win at some point. An influencer posts, orders spike, and a few weeks later the numbers drift back to where they were. Ignas Gee and Ante Cetinic, who started the global influencer marketing agency Blank Label Team in 2021, say the distance between a win and growth that repeats is a systems problem. They spent years working on it from inside FOREO.
Both helped build the marketing behind FOREO, the Swedish beauty-tech company, which began with a worldwide budget of roughly US$2,000 monthly and reached about US$500M in yearly revenue at its peak. At that point it had customers in 74 countries and content in 25 languages. Over the three brands they have worked on since 2010, the two have helped bring in roughly US$1B of net revenue. Here is how they approach the problem now, and what marketing teams can borrow.
Where one-off wins stall
A one post gets one moment of an audience's attention. Without repeat exposure and a way to read the results, a brand cannot tell why it worked, so the next campaign starts from zero.
"A one-off post is a lottery ticket. A year with the same creator is a relationship, and you can learn from a relationship." - Gee says.
At FOREO, Gee ran media and growth, and the framework he calls Social Proof Marketing grew out of that work. His trust ranking puts friends, specialists and customer reviews first, independent creators and press next, and ads on Meta and Google at the bottom. In that model, influencer marketing is a way to borrow trust a brand has not yet built.
Start small and earn attention
The FOREO team had little money to buy reach, so it looked for creators whose audiences already trusted them and gave those creators a motive to keep mentioning the product.
That habit carried into Blank Label Team. The agency signs creators directly and keeps the relationship in its own hands. Deals typically cover a year or more and several pieces of content. A longer arrangement does two things: audiences hear a familiar creator repeatedly, and the brand collects enough history to see which formats suit that creator.
Put sales and search interest on the scoreboard
Cetinic, who was Head of BI at FOREO, created the attribution model the agency now relies on. It links what creators do to sales and to results in each country, following brand search interest and when sales moved after content ran. FOREO's top-funnel content reached 4 billion actual reach units, counted without the estimated "media value" numbers some in the industry use.
"If you cannot say what happened to sales the week after a post, you have counted it without measuring it." - Cetinic says.
Scale one market at a time
When the first markets worked, the team added more. Creators and content were local in each one, and one shared framework measured every market, so a new country could be compared with the ones before it. Altogether, FOREO put more than US$70 million of influencer and content into 70 countries.
What marketing teams can do this month
You do not need FOREO's budget to apply the method. Pick your three strongest creators and ask them back for a longer run. Log the date every post goes live and pull sales and branded search for the days that follow. Use one set of measures across creators and markets. And name one person who owns each part of the program, from creator relationships to reporting.
Read the numbers carefully
The figures above measure different things, and they should not be added together. About US$2,000 monthly was a starting marketing budget. About US$500M a year was FOREO's revenue at its peak. US$70 million was influencer and content spend, and 4 billion was actual reach. When any agency quotes a number, ask which brand it belongs to, what it measures and what period it covers.
Who to trust with the work
If you bring in an outside team, ask who ran the work, in which countries and over what period. Blank Label Team has about 40 specialists and works with few brands at once. Marketers shortlisting a global influencer marketing agency can apply the founders' test to any record: judge it by scope and dates, and not just by totals.