The revelation that paying people to talk about your product might work better than paying algorithms to show your product has arrived, as these things do, with the force of discovery.

Ruggable, the direct-to-consumer washable rug brand that has spent years perfecting the art of appearing in your Instagram feed unbidden, is now redirecting a meaningful portion of its marketing budget away from Meta and toward human beings who will say nice things about rugs on camera. The company has shifted about 10 percent of its spending from performance channels to what it calls "brand channels" — influencers and connected television — and plans to increase that allocation by another 15 to 20 percent next year.

"We don't really need to be showing up in the bottom-of-funnel affiliate networks, when ShopMy is working so well as a conversion channel for us," said Lauren Sherman-Kaoud, the company's chief marketing and creative officer, referring to the creator commerce platform that has become central to the brand's strategy.

The numbers, as reported by the company, are not modest. Ruggable said it generated roughly $3 million in revenue during its first month working with ShopMy creators, a figure that doubled in month two and tripled in month three. Last holiday season, the brand took what Ms. Sherman-Kaoud described as "upwards of a million dollars" out of its Meta budget and redirected it to creator partnerships.

(One hesitates to call this a breakthrough, given that the underlying principle — pay someone with an audience to endorse your goods — predates the internet by several centuries.)

The company now operates what Ms. Sherman-Kaoud called a "sandwich approach," with large brand ambassador deals at one end and hundreds of affiliate creators at the other. The influencer operation that once required a small team managing spreadsheets and direct messages is now run by a single employee, with the savings redeployed elsewhere in the marketing mix.

Ruggable, which is reportedly on track to pursue an initial public offering within three years, is in the early stages of building an internal ambassador program focused on interior designers. The company appears to have concluded that the path to Wall Street runs, at least in part, through people willing to post about floor coverings.

Original story published in Digiday: "Ruggable's new ad spend strategy shifts focus to ShopMy creators"