How Buff City Soap Used Refunnel to Source 900 UGC Videos in 90 Days Across 200+ Stores

Buff City Soap is a US-based personal care brand specializing in handmade, plant-based bath and body products. Founded in 2013 by Memphis firefighter Brad Kellum, the brand was built around gentle, tattoo-safe soaps made from simple ingredients—starting in his garage and expanding via franchising to 200+ brick-and-mortar locations within five years.

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Their core customer is a family-oriented woman in her 30s–50s, though they're expanding toward younger shoppers. Engagement happens through in-store experiences, loyalty programs, and bath bomb parties. The brand generates strong organic advocacy, nearly 900 UGC videos every quarter.

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Sales are primarily brick-and-mortar, with growing e-commerce via Shopify, TikTok Shop, and limited Amazon. Instagram and Facebook are their primary social channels.

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Creator partnerships are a key growth pillar. Rather than traditional influencer campaigns, Buff City Soap seeks out "true fans" already using and sharing their products, treats UGC creators like freelancers, and builds long-term relationships by repurposing their content across campaigns, product launches, and franchise marketing.

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Before Refunnel (2023)

• Fragmented workflows: Creator data was scattered across Taggr, spreadsheets, Instagram, TikTok, internal folders, and email—with no centralized dashboard for discovery, vetting, or tracking.
  
  
• Limited organic discovery: Taggr was better suited for outbound sourcing than identifying existing fans. Finding creators already posting about the brand required manually searching hashtags and combing post histories.
  
  
• Poor content visibility: Instagram Stories disappeared, historical UGC wasn't retained, and there was no way to revisit past campaign performance or identify repeat advocates over time.
  
  
• Untracked organic advocacy: Posts from loyal customers went largely unmeasured, meaning genuine word-of-mouth moments were noticed but never leveraged.
  
  
• Slow, disconnected outreach: Briefing, contracting, and following up with creators required jumping between multiple tools and inboxes, slowing down every activation.

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The result: Missed insights, slow campaign launches, lost historical data, and an operational ceiling that made scaling the creator program difficult.

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How They Used Refunnel:

Refunnel operates as Buff City Soap’s centralized “social listening hub,” streamlining their influencer and creator workflow. It enables the team to surface UGC from their active customer base, track repeat advocates, watch historical earned media, and coordinate campaign activations, all without juggling messy spreadsheets or losing valuable content to disappearing stories.

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4 Ways Buff City Soap is Using Refunnel

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1. Social Listening: Buff City Soap leverages Refunnel’s Social Listening to identify customers and creators already posting about their products. This helps them spot genuine brand fans like repeat content posters and recruit them for new launches, rather than working with strangers or cold outreach.
   
   
2. UGC Campaign Management: For each product or scent launch, Buff City Soap organizes up to 15 creators per campaign inside Refunnel. Content is submitted, reviewed, and stored in a single dashboard, making it easy for their small team to stretch assets across TikTok, Instagram, and even internal franchisee folders.
   
   
3. Historical Content Tracking: Refunnel solves a major pain point by archiving highlight stories and posts that would normally vanish after 24 hours. This gives Buff City Soap a searchable library of past UGC and social mentions, letting them revisit insights or campaign language that shaped creative strategy.
   
   
4. Campaign Analytics & Visibility: Refunnel aggregates earned media value (EMV), UGC volume, and creator performance—allowing Buff City Soap to track which creators drive the most impact and which content can be repurposed for paid ads or franchisee promotion. Instead of manually scanning individual social platforms, everything is visualized inside one system.
   
   

Buff City Soap’s use of Refunnel is all about maximizing authentic content from superfans, maintaining historical access to golden moments, and scaling campaign execution with a lean team, unlocking operational efficiency and more genuine brand storytelling.

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The Results

Buff City Soap’s content and creator efficiency saw immediate impact with the introduction of Refunnel:

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Content Volume (Last 3 Months)

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Before Refunnel: Data not tracked or visible in detail (limited by previous tools)

After Refunnel: Nearly 900 video assets tracked, broken down as follows:

• 159 Instagram Reels
• 259 Instagram Stories
• 500 TikTok Videos

With Refunnel:

• Could pinpoint 10–15 UGC creators per product launch/campaign
• Improved tracking of high-affinity, repeat creators (“top buff fans”)
• Able to tag and monitor ongoing organic output, greatly expanding usable content for campaigns.

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What this means:

• Full visibility into all content created, including Instagram Stories (previously lost).
  
  
• Ability to spot key advocates early and build ongoing relationships, increasing organic enthusiasm and quality.
  
  
• More seamless re-use of UGC across locations, ads, and their website—resulting in stretchier content and higher ROI per creator.
  
  
• Internal campaigns inspired directly by community language and sentiments (e.g., “Addicted to Laundry”) for tighter creative-product-market fit.

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Overall:

Buff City Soap’s integration of Refunnel led to faster, richer advocacy identification, streamlined content repurposing, and a measurable jump in community-driven creative volume. That’s higher output, better engagement, and more chances to find winning ads—all driven by real fans, not just influencer outreach.