How Portland Leather Goods Turned TikTok Shop Videos Into $4.09M in Meta Revenue
Campaign Results
Project Overview
Portland Leather Goods faced rising CAC and shrinking margins, pushing them toward creator content, which consistently outperformed traditional ads.
But sourcing it was fully manual, hours spent scrolling tagged posts, then tracking outreach and rights in spreadsheets.
This broken process led to missed approvals and delayed launches.
As the brand scaled, so did content volume: 500 creators posted 3,800 videos in 7 days on TikTok Shop alone, far too much to manage by hand before it lost relevance.
Portland Leather Goods is a direct-to-consumer leather accessories brand with over 550,000 five-star reviews, $500M in lifetime revenue, and is one of the most recognized names in the DTC space with 720K+ combined followers across TikTok & Instagram.
Like most DTC brands leveraging paid media, Portland Leather Goods struggled with rising customer acquisition costs and compressing margins.
One thing that was a big priority for us was leveraging creator content in our paid media ads," says Marissa Fewel, Influencer Marketing Manager at Portland Leather Goods. "We do a ton of paid media work on Meta."
They found that running ads using content customers had posted organically on social media consistently drove down CAC. These videos became their top performing ads.
However, this meant their social media manager would spend hours scrolling through tagged posts and mentions on TikTok and Instagram, looking for high performing videos worth running as ads.
When they found one, they would send a DM to the creator requesting usage rights. If the creator agreed, the team would negotiate terms, and run that video as an ad.
They tracked everything in spreadsheets: who they had contacted, who had responded, what was approved, and when those rights would expire.
This process led to missed approvals, poor team visibility, and delayed ad launches.
As the brand grew, so did the number of people posting about them. High performing videos would go unnoticed for weeks, and by the time they found them, the product was sold out, customers wouldn’t reply, or the trend surrounding it had died.
This process completely broke when they launched on TikTok Shop.
In 7 days, 500 creators posted 3800 videos about Portland Leather Goods.
They needed a way to surface the best content quickly, secure rights without chasing people, and get ads live while those videos were still relevant.
That's when they came to Refunnel.
Using Refunnel’s Social Listening, PLG could see every video mentioning Portland Leather Goods in one dashboard, whether they were tagged or not. (Including expired Instagram stories). They filtered by views, engagement, TTS Product, and GMV to find high performing content.
When they found a video they wanted to run, they sent the creator a quick message using Refunnel’s One-Click Usage Rights Request feature.
The creator got a link, tapped approve, and the video was cleared to run as an ad.
Because these were customers who already loved the brand and TikTok Shop affiliates who were already getting paid for content, most said yes right away.
Portland Leather Goods was sourcing high-performing ad creative at essentially zero cost.
Over the following months, they launched 147 new ads and generated $4.09 million in revenue from $1.12 million in ad spend directly from videos sourced in Refunnel.
The Results
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