Ruggable Pulled $1M From Meta for ShopMy Creators (Now Price Them Like Ads)

Ruggable moved upwards of $1 million out of its Meta performance budget and into ShopMy creators, starting last holiday season, and says the program drove roughly $3 million in revenue in its first month. The number that matters is the cost per incremental order. Commission, ShopMy's platform fee and sales that would have happened anyway all go into it, and that total should be priced against your marginal Meta CPA.

The details come from a Digiday interview with Ruggable chief marketing and creative officer Lauren Sherman-Kaoud. Since last August, the rug brand has shifted about 10% of its overall spend from performance channels like Meta into brand channels like influencers and connected TV. It plans to grow brand spend another 15% to 20% next year. Revenue from ShopMy reportedly doubled in month two and tripled by month three (the article doesn't make clear whether "tripled" is measured against month one, so I'd hold that one loosely).

"What got us here is not going to get us there," Sherman-Kaoud told Digiday. Fair enough. Every CMO says some version of that eventually. What makes this one worth reading closely is where the money actually went.

Ruggable called it brand spend, but the money moved into performance

The headline framing is brand versus performance. The mechanics are messier than that, and more interesting.

Ruggable works with hundreds of creators, mostly as affiliates, and Sherman-Kaoud describes affiliates as the channel for "scale and conversion." Brand ambassadors (people like food personality Dan Pelosi) handle the halo work. And her line about affiliate networks is the tell: "We don't really need to be showing up in the bottom-of-funnel affiliate networks," because ShopMy now does that conversion job.

So a chunk of the "brand" reallocation is really a performance-to-performance swap. Meta dollars went to creators who get paid when a rug sells. That's a smart move, honestly. It just isn't the move the headline implies, and if you copy it thinking you're buying awareness, you'll measure it wrong.

It's a bit like switching from salaried sales reps to commission-only reps. Your fixed cost drops. Your cost per sale doesn't necessarily drop, and suddenly the reps have strong opinions about which sales count as theirs.

The real cost of a ShopMy sale is higher than the commission rate

Commission is only the visible piece. According to Influencer Hero's breakdown of ShopMy pricing (written by a competitor, so worth confirming with ShopMy directly), the entry affiliate package runs $399 a month plus a 3.9% fee on gross merchandise value, with creator commissions billed separately. Custom network plans drop the GMV fee to 2.9%. Sacra's estimates line up with that range and put ShopMy at about $80 million in 2025 revenue across roughly 200,000 creators, so this is not a niche tool anymore.

Here's an illustrative order (my numbers, not Ruggable's). A $200 order with a 20% creator commission costs you $40 in commission plus $7.80 in GMV fee. That's $47.80 per order before the subscription, which is a rounding error at Ruggable's scale and less so at yours.

Now the part most teams skip. If half of those creator-attributed orders would have happened anyway (a customer who was already going to buy, clicked a creator link on the way), your cost per incremental order is roughly double: $95.60. That's the figure you compare against Meta.

A commission you pay on a sale you would have gotten anyway is still a media cost. It just hides better.

We've written before about how influencer promo codes miss most sales and credit some they never earned. Affiliate links have a similar problem from the other side. They're good at catching the last click and less good at telling you whether the creator caused it.

Pricing creator commissions against your marginal Meta CPA

Don't compare against your average Meta CPA. Compare against the marginal one: what the last $10,000 of Meta spend actually buys you. That's the money you'd be moving, and from what I've seen it usually costs noticeably more per order than the account average, because the cheap conversions get bought first.

A rough version of the test, which most teams can set up this week:

1. Pull your marginal Meta CPA. Compare CPA in your highest-spend weeks with your lowest-spend weeks over the last 90 days. The gap is a decent proxy for what incremental dollars cost.
2. Calculate fully loaded creator cost per order. Commission rate plus the platform GMV fee, plus the monthly subscription divided by monthly creator orders.
3. Apply an incrementality haircut. If you've never measured it, assume 50% of creator-attributed orders are incremental until a holdout test tells you otherwise, and divide your cost per order by that rate.
4. Set the switch threshold. If the adjusted creator cost per order lands at least 20% below your marginal Meta CPA, move budget. Within 20%, keep it as a test line and don't scale yet.

One wrinkle for rugs, furniture, anything with real return rates: per Built by Foundry's review of ShopMy's help docs, commissions sit pending for 30 to 120 days depending on the retailer, until return windows close. That's good for you as a brand (you're not paying out on returned rugs, at least in theory), but it also means your month-one revenue number and your month-one cost number won't line up cleanly. Check return-adjusted numbers at day 90 before celebrating.

Where Ruggable's sandwich actually makes sense

In fairness to Ruggable, Sherman-Kaoud isn't pitching ShopMy as a Meta replacement. She describes a "sandwich approach": big brand investment on top, ShopMy replacing the worst-performing affiliate channels underneath. Digiday's Kimeko McCoy points out this looks a lot like traditional media buying, where you negotiate the big deals directly and buy long-tail inventory programmatically.

That's the part I find genuinely useful. Coupon and cashback affiliate networks have a reputation for claiming credit on orders already in the cart. Swapping them for creators who actually show the product in a living room is probably a better trade on incrementality almost by default. Ruggable also cut overhead: influencer marketing used to be a small team working through DMs and spreadsheets, and now one person runs it on ShopMy. Labor savings are real savings, even if nobody put a number on them.

There's context worth naming, too. Ruggable is reportedly on track to IPO within three years, and a brand heading toward an IPO wants awareness on the record, not just ROAS. On Mekanism's Soul & Science podcast, Sherman-Kaoud talks about leading marketing and product design together, which fits a company rebuilding its brand rather than just tuning its funnel. Your incentives might be different. If you're a $15 million DTC brand that needs this quarter's CAC to work, the IPO halo logic doesn't really apply to you.

Honestly, I keep going back and forth on how much of the $3 million month is the channel and how much is timing. It launched into holiday season, which is when everything converts. That doesn't make the number fake. It does make month one a bad baseline.

Creators get paid like ads now, so audit them like ads

VML's Noah Eisemann told Digiday that brands are "just waking up" to layering performance affiliate creators on top of earned influencer work. I think that's right, and I think the next phase is a little uncomfortable: once creators sit in the performance budget, they get the same scrutiny as any ad set. Holdouts, marginal CPA, cohort LTV. Creator programs that ran on vibes and screenshots will get questions they've never had to answer.

My prediction: by the end of 2027, at least one in three DTC brands spending seven figures on Meta will run commission-based creator programs out of the performance budget instead of brand, and most of them will report creator CAC next to Meta CAC in the same weekly dashboard. The ones who don't will probably be the ones who never ran a holdout.

If you're managing creator spend through an agency, check what they're actually keeping. We covered how creator agencies keep up to 30% of influencer budgets, and that fee stacks on top of everything above. And if you're picking which creators to commission, micro-influencers tend to win on sales while macros win on views, which matters a lot more when you're paying per sale.

So the useful lesson from Ruggable probably isn't "move money to creators." It's closer to: move the money, then make it prove itself the same way your Meta dollars had to. If the numbers hold up at day 90, great. If they don't, you've spent a quarter learning something most brands still haven't bothered to check.