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How Reformed Built a 500+ Affiliate Program From Scratch With SARAL
What it takes to build a successful affiliate program from scratch in a highly competitive market
Contents
Reformed is a premium UK wellness brand built around one idea: your morning ritual should actually do something. Their collagen coffee and ceremonial matcha blends combine functional mushrooms, adaptogens, and 21 vitamins - all without changing the taste of your morning drink.
It's the kind of brand where the packaging matters, the sourcing matters, and the community around it matters just as much as the product itself.
When Mirren Alfred joined as Reformed's first full-time influencer and partnerships manager, there was no program to inherit. No playbook, or creator relationships, and definitely no data. Just a brief and a blank slate.
That turned out to be an advantage.
The instinct they course-corrected early
Reformed's first move was to go straight into affiliate outreach: find creators, pitch the program, get them posting with links. It made sense on paper.
But before they sent a single email, SARAL's founder, Yash stepped in with advice that changed their direction.
Don't ask creators to promote a product they've never tried. Start with gifting, build genuine touch-points first, and only invite people into the affiliate program once they've chosen to post about it on their own.
For a premium drinks brand, this was essential. Reformed's product had to earn its place in someone's morning routine before they could talk about it honestly. So they got into the habit of sending gifts every month, without expectation.
"We were happy to have that (seeding) as just a thank you to the creators. And then once they started posting about Reformed, that's when we jumped on the idea of onboarding them as an affiliate."
From 50 to 500 influencer gifts in 8 months
They started by gifting around 50 creators a month. Eight months later, that number sits between 300 - 500 every month.
Getting there required getting specific early.
Reformed settled on six niches that consistently worked: gym, running, mums, male lifestyle, Pilates and yoga, and health and nutrition.
Once those pillars were locked in, they built lists inside SARAL and enabled auto-add, so any new creator added to a list automatically entered a personalised email drip sequence.
The outreach itself was deliberately personal, shaped directly by SARAL's guidance on what gets replies.
"If you're speaking to the health and nutrition girls, you want to mention something about their nutrition-angled content, so it seems like you're not just another brand reaching out. Something as simple as 'I've been scrolling through your content and saving all of your reels because I'm also health and nutrition focused.' You'll have people that reply rather than just not getting back at all."
Once a creator replied, products went out directly through SARAL's shipping integration, no switching tools, or manual tracking across spreadsheets.
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The commission rate that made them impossible to ignore
When creators posted organically, Reformed used SARAL's Pulse social listening tab to catch it in real time. From there, the affiliate invite was kept deliberately low-pressure.
"We make it super casual. We just say, can we give you an affiliate link? You can earn this amount if you choose to share."
But what made the program hard to say no to was the commission structure. Most brands offer 10%. Reformed started at 20%.
"It allows us to stand out from the crowd in terms of affiliate programs."
They've since moved away from discount codes entirely, running the program purely on affiliate links.
The program now has over 500 affiliates!
Why 100 active affiliates beats 500 passive ones
Getting creators into the program was one thing. Keeping them engaged was a different problem entirely.
Reformed's answer was to move communication off email completely. Once a creator joined, they were added to a private group chat where they share weekly leaderboards, competitions, product updates, and direct messages to top performers.
"Having those close touch points with them — them being able to message you and FaceTime you and ask questions and get an immediate answer — there's something about that that allows people to be so much more connected to your brand."
Of their 500+ affiliates, around 100 are actively posting. That group gets treated more like friends than brand partners.
What they measure
Reformed tracks the program weekly: affiliate signups, total sales through links, commission paid, gross revenue, CAC, impressions, EMV, cost of goods, packages sent, and total posts across Instagram and TikTok — which they've recently added to the mix.
SARAL's dashboard surfaces most of this in one place, cutting the time spent stitching together data from multiple sources each week.
Their aim is to almost double this every single month, especially as the team's growing.
What Mirren would tell any brand starting out
Eight months in, the advice is simple: it takes longer than you think, and then it compounds faster than you expect.
One thing she'd tell any brand starting out: trust the small creators.
"You'd actually be incredibly surprised to see how well those smaller creators do — especially because they have such niche, concentrated audiences."
Reformed built their program on that bet and it paid off.
If you're starting from zero or trying to turn a scattered gifting effort into something that actually scales, this is what SARAL is built for.
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