Glossy reported on 22 September 2026 on Nette's first ever influencer collaboration. Source: https://www.glossy.co/beauty/beauty-briefing-why-nette-launched-its-first-influencer-collaboration-with-morgan-riddle/.
The brand was founded in 2021 and moved into fine fragrance in 2023. The partner is tennis creator Morgan Riddle, who has over a million followers. The development process ran roughly a year, with the creator involved throughout rather than attached at the end. The same piece notes Nette takes about one in five of the retail opportunities it is offered.
A bootstrapped brand that waited years before doing a single creator collaboration, and turns down four out of five retail approaches, is doing something unusual enough to be worth examining.
The default this is a departure from
The standard creator playbook at small scale goes like this. Build a list of creators in your category. Seed product widely. Convert the ones who post into affiliate or paid partnerships. Scale the ones that perform. Measure by reach, then by attributed sales, then usually by whatever metric still looks acceptable.
It is a sensible-looking approach and it has a specific weakness at small budgets: it spreads a limited amount of money thinly across a large number of relationships, none of which are deep enough to produce anything other than a post.
The output of that programme is impressions and a short-lived sales bump. The output of a year-long collaboration where the creator helped develop the product is a product, a story about how it was made, a partner with genuine reason to talk about it beyond the contracted period, and something the brand still owns next year.
Those are different kinds of asset, and only one of them survives the end of the campaign.
Why selectivity is cheaper, not more expensive
The instinct is that being selective costs you opportunities. For a bootstrapped brand the arithmetic runs the other way.
Every creator partnership has a cost beyond the fee: briefing, product, shipping, approvals, chasing, measurement. Every retail opportunity has a cost beyond the margin: samples, setup, stock allocation, a promotional calendar you now have to participate in, and the working capital tied up in the inventory. Those costs are mostly in founder hours, which is the scarcest input in a business this size and the one nobody prices.
Twenty shallow partnerships and five mediocre retail accounts can consume an entire year of a small team's capacity while producing less than one well-chosen version of each.
Saying no four times out of five is what makes the fifth one possible to do properly.
The retail half of the discipline
Accepting one in five retail approaches is the harder discipline, because retail approaches feel like validation and declining them feels like turning down growth.
But not all distribution is good distribution. A retailer that is wrong for your price point, or whose customer does not know what your product is, or who will demand a promotional cadence you cannot fund, does not just fail to work. It consumes stock, generates returns, produces weak sell-through data that follows you into the next buyer conversation, and occupies the attention that a better account would have had.
The brands that end up in strong retail positions are very often the ones who declined several weaker ones first, because they arrived at the good conversation with clean numbers and available capacity.
A practical filter: would you be pleased to show this account's sell-through to the next buyer you want to impress. If not, it is not a stepping stone, it is a liability with a purchase order attached.
What makes a collaboration worth a year
Not every partnership justifies that investment, and the ones that do have common features.
The creator's audience has to overlap with a customer you actually want, which is a stricter test than audience size. Riddle's tennis audience is specific, which means the overlap is checkable rather than assumed.
The creator has to be able to contribute to the product rather than only promote it. A year-long process only makes sense if the output is better for their involvement, otherwise you have paid a year of coordination cost for a post.
And the relationship has to be plausible beyond the contract. Collaborations that read as transactional convert worse and end cleanly. Ones where the partner genuinely uses the product keep producing value informally long after the paid period.
If a proposed partnership fails those three tests, it is a media buy. Media buys are fine, and they should be priced and measured as media rather than dressed up as collaboration.
The uncomfortable part for most brands
This approach requires being willing to do less, visibly, while competitors appear to be doing more.
A brand running twenty creator partnerships looks busier than one running a single collaboration. In a category where founders watch each other closely, that visibility gap is genuinely uncomfortable, and it is the main reason small brands over-extend their creator programmes.
The question worth holding onto is what you own at the end of the year. Twenty partnerships leave you with a spreadsheet of past activity. One year-long collaboration leaves you with a product, a story and a relationship.
The plain version
A bootstrapped brand with no outside capital declined most of what it was offered for several years, then did one thing properly.
That is not a constraint dressed up as a strategy. For a brand funding growth from its own margin, concentration is the only way to do anything well, and the brands that learn it early tend to arrive at the bigger opportunities with something worth showing.