Building a national industrial brand's first influencer program from zero: ten creator partners, freight-class machine logistics, and the attribution behind it.
8.4M+
Earned creator reach
6.7x
Blended ROAS
$603K
Attributed revenue
+38%
Engagement lift
Grizzly Industrial is a national supplier of woodworking, metalworking, and machining equipment, headquartered in Bellingham, Washington. The machines were never the problem. Reach was: how does a decades-old catalog brand earn the trust of a generation of makers who live on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok?
I built the program that answered that, from nothing: creator strategy, direct relationships with talent and their agents, the logistics of getting freight-class machines into creators' shops, the scripts, the design and imagery support, and the dashboards that proved it moved the number.
The gap. Grizzly had a loyal base and a serious catalog, but no voice inside the maker community, the place where a decision on a $2,000 machine actually gets made now: in the comments under a build video, not in a print spread.
The brief I wrote for myself was simple to say and hard to do. Put Grizzly machines in the hands of creators makers already trust, support those creators so well that the content is genuinely good, and prove the whole thing worked with real attribution.
Fit over follower count. I had roughly $5,000 a month in a category where a single sponsored video quoted at $10,000. Buying the obvious names was never on the table, which turned out to be the advantage. I cast for creators whose audience already believed them on tools, and whose build style would put a Grizzly machine into real work instead of a product shot.
The partners I onboarded: April Wilkerson (Wilker Do's), John Malecki, Bourbon Moth Woodworking, Voices of Jake, Barousse Works, Woodbrew, Nick's Custom Woodworks, Six Eight Woodworks, Handy Dandy Brandy, and Ashwood and Hawke.
Roughly 8.7 million combined following across the roster: about 4.85M on YouTube, 2.3M on TikTok, and 1.52M on Instagram. Three of them sit above a million subscribers on their own. John Malecki's rate card alone would have taken a year of my budget in two videos.
Daniel Barousse is the argument in miniature. He builds art and furniture out of recycled skateboards, which is not a line item on any tool brand's media plan, and he was one of the best partnerships in the program. Voices of Jake builds original axes in character, as much comedian as craftsman. A follower-count spreadsheet picks neither of them.
The attribution layer. I built per-creator discount codes with Grizzly's IT and product teams, then partnered with third-party agencies to build the reporting in Looker Studio: creator performance per campaign, conversion paths from creator content through to purchase, and return on spend across concurrent programs. Upfluence handled creator authentication, onboarding, and organic performance data.
Reach figures are public subscriber and follower counts verified August 2026. They describe audience size, not impressions delivered during the campaign window, and are not de-duplicated across platforms.
Machines are not swag. Sending a creator a t-shirt is easy. Sending a creator a jointer is a logistics project. I owned physical fulfillment alongside the marketing, coordinating directly with the product and sales departments to spec the right machine for each shop, confirm inventory, and manage delivery of freight-class equipment across the country. A creator standing in an empty shop on launch day never partners with you again. The machines showed up, set up, ready to film.
A solo creator has no studio behind them, so I became the studio. I wrote scripts and talking points that carried the product truth without ever sounding like an ad read, and provided branded graphics, thumbnails, and product assets so a one-person channel could ship content that looked like it had a brand team behind it. The discipline was restraint: keep the creator's voice, hand them everything they needed, then get out of the way.
"Dresdon completely transformed how we approach influencer marketing. His strategy didn't just bring in new voices, it brought in the right voices. We saw immediate lift in engagement, reach, and brand trust."
Brian Jensen
Marketing Director, Grizzly Industrial
Ten partners across YouTube, TikTok and Instagram, cast on fit rather than follower count. Handy Dandy Brandy, Bourbon Moth Woodworking and Summer Brave Design are three of them: makers their audiences already trust, supported like a brand team stood behind them. Swipe to meet them.
A full creator welcome-kit system: branded packaging, apparel, embroidered caps, laser-engraved maker badges, and social templates so every partner carried a consistent, premium Grizzly identity.
Every commercial Grizzly product ships in green and black. I built the influencer kit in the brand's original 1983 red, black, and gold, so official partners' merch stood out from anything on the shelf and stayed distinct from the 40th-anniversary line.
This is the work I'm proudest of, because none of it existed before I built it. Grizzly had the machines and the catalog. What it didn't have was a voice in the room where a $2,000 buying decision actually gets made now: under a build video, in a comment section, in the shop of someone makers already trust. I built that bridge end to end. The roster, the relationships with talent and their agents, the freight logistics, the creative support, and the attribution to prove it moved.
What I learned building it:
Fit beats reach, every time. The partnerships that converted weren't the biggest accounts, they were the ones whose audience already believed them on tools. The day I stopped casting for follower counts and started casting for trust, the numbers followed.
The logistics are the marketing. Getting a freight-class machine into a creator's shop on the day it was promised is invisible when it works and fatal when it doesn't. The content only ever existed because the operation behind it never missed. Owning both halves, the campaign and the fulfillment, is what made the program real instead of a pitch.
Restraint is the whole job. The instinct is to over-brand and script every line. This worked because I did the opposite: hand each creator everything they needed to make a Grizzly machine the hero of their own story, then get out of the frame. The best brand moment is the one the audience never clocks as an ad.
A small design decision can be the strategy. Building the kit on the 1983 heritage red, black, and gold instead of the standard green turned merch into membership. It was instantly recognizable, impossible to buy off the shelf, and clean of the anniversary line. Identity did work a discount code never could.
Make it defensible or it dies. "The influencer stuff feels like it's working" is a hope; a Looker Studio dashboard is a strategy. The attribution layer gave leadership a number they could stand behind in a quarterly review, and gave me a feedback loop to double down on what converted and quietly retire what didn't. That loop is the muscle I carry into every program now.
I built a national industrial brand's first real bridge into the maker community, and made it measurable enough to keep. Given the same brief, I'd run it exactly this way again.
