Dr Water is a Shopify brand doing about $2M a year, and gifting is core to how it grows. Send product to creators, get real content back, repeat. The strategy worked. The operations did not scale, so the founders built the tool they needed and ran it on their own store first.
The starting point: a manual grind
Every gift order went through DMs and a spreadsheet. Someone copied an address by hand, picked the right variant, and built a draft order in the Shopify admin. Doing that once is fine. Doing it forty times a week is a part-time job that caps the whole program.
40 minutes back per influencer
The founders measured the old process against Seed and found the difference was about 40 minutes saved per influencer, once the address entry, variant pick, and order build moved onto one branded link. Across a growing roster that adds up to roughly 20 hours a week that used to disappear into admin.
We built Seed because we needed it ourselves. Every feature runs on our own store before it ships to anyone else's.
From under 10 gifts a month to 50
With the per-creator workload close to zero, the program scaled. Outreach went up to around 40 creators a week, and the gifts that actually shipped went from fewer than 10 a month to 50 a month. Nothing changed about the budget. The operational ceiling did.
30 videos, and CPM down 62%
Over the first two months the program brought back 30 creator videos. Dr Water put those into its ad account as creative, and CPM fell by 62% against the studio shots it had been running. That is the part most brands underrate about gifting. The content is the asset.
