How High Camp Flask Grew Creator Partnerships 4X and 7.5 Million Impressions Using Refunnel

High Camp Flasks makes premium insulated flasks designed for transporting and serving craft spirits and fine wine outdoors. The company was founded in 2015 by Nic Barisone and Whit Gautreaux, two California natives who wanted a way to bring a nice bottle of scotch or mezcal on a hike and enjoy it properly. Not out of a plastic cup.

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The company spent seven years getting to 7 figures in revenue. In the last two years it went from 7 figures to 8 figures. Throughout that growth, their top performing ads have all been creator content.

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High Camp's creator strategy revolved around product seeding.

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The idea was to send free flasks to creators and see who posted about them. Creators who did post became candidates for paid partnerships, and any content that performed well was repurposed for ads.

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It was a solid and straightforward strategy on paper. Making it work was another story.

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Before Refunnel, their social media manager had to manually scroll Instagram and Twitter looking for creators, send cold DMs and ship product to anyone who seemed promising. The goal was fifty seedings a month. They ended up doing fewer than ten in 6 months.

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There was no record of what had been sent and no way to know who had posted. When a video went viral, the team had no way to trace it back to the original seeding campaign or figure out what made it work.

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Kevin Luby, Head of Ecommerce and Digital, described it simply: "We just vibed it."

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The company was sitting on a growth channel that had already driven their best performing ads. But the operation behind it was a tangle of scattered DMs and guesswork. They could not track what was working or why. They could not replicate their wins. And they could not scale the relationships that were already proving valuable.

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Once they adopted Refunnel, the pieces finally came together, and the team could see everything in one place.

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The platform tracked every product seeding campaign from shipment to post, giving the team visibility into volume and status.

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From their dashboard, they are able to see what creators are posting in real time and send whitelisting requests using the one-click whitelisting feature.

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The team now tracks the full pipeline from initial seed to organic post to whitelisted ad. That is how they identify which creators are worth building long term relationships with.

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One creator they discovered through a product seed posted an organic video that caught their attention. The team reached out, developed a relationship and eventually put her on retainer. Her content became their top performing ads across the entire account for the better part of the year.

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High Camp Flasks believes creators represent the last line of defense against generic AI content.

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"Creators are the last line of defense from AI slop," Kevin said. "We work with them on a human level because they're going to make human content that humans who buy stuff are going to be really stoked about."

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Today High Camp Flasks has the infrastructure to support that belief at scale.

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