How Ridge Uses TikTok Shop and Social Commerce to Drive Ecommerce Growth With Mason Bertrand

Mason Bertrand is the Director of Social Commerce at Ridge, a premium consumer goods brand. He has built TikTok Shop programs from the ground up three times, most notably helping scale a supplement brand's social commerce revenue from a few thousand dollars to over a million dollars a month.

Here's a glimpse of what you'll learn

- Why followers don't matter in TikTok Shop affiliate marketing — and what metric actually predicts affiliate performance

- How to find and vet top-performing TikTok Shop affiliates using GMV history and platforms like Euka.

- Why social commerce is still vastly undersaturated compared to Meta advertising and why it's not too late to start

- How to structure a content workshop and daily scripting cadence to keep affiliates producing at volume

- Why aiming for a minimum of 100 affiliate videos per day is the benchmark for a healthy TikTok Shop program

- How to build an affiliate community on Discord to onboard, retain, and inspire creators at scale

- Why TikTok Shop must be treated as a full dedicated channel — not a passive product listing — to unlock its revenue potential

In this episode…

Mason Bertrand, Director of Social Commerce at Ridge, breaks down how TikTok Shop affiliate marketing works, how he scaled a supplement brand from thousands to over a million dollars a month, and what it takes to build a high-performing social commerce program — including finding the right affiliates, managing content at scale, and structuring a community-driven affiliate program.

Resources mentioned in this episode

- TikTok Shop

- Euka

- Discord

- Claude (AI)

- Splitbase

Quotable Moments

> "Followers don't matter. I think the traditional way and a lot of brands think is I need to find a big influencer with a lot of followers and that's just not the game anymore."

> "We were doing a couple thousand dollars a month in TikTok shop affiliates, and now by the time I left, we were doing it over a million dollars a month, easily $100,000 a day."

> "It's not just a clearance aisle. It's not just a, let's just put our products on there and see how it goes. It's a full on channel."

> "The myth often is you're too late. TikTok shop has been around for what, four years now. It's still super under saturated."

> "Social commerce is a compounding game. It's a really fun game to play."

> "Successful affiliate program is providing as many resources as possible, making the process seamless, and solving the biggest problems and paying them well."

Action Steps

1. Sign up on Yuka and/or Groey immediately to access TikTok Shop's affiliate marketplace and automate outreach to high-performing creators.

2. Set a minimum GMV threshold (e.g. $150K in the past 30 days) when vetting affiliates — prioritize revenue track record over follower count.

3. Build a Discord community as your affiliate hub for onboarding, content sharing, and relationship management.

4. Launch a weekly content workshop call where you provide hooks, scripts, account audits, and inspiration to keep affiliates producing.

5. Target a minimum of 100 affiliate videos per day before shifting focus from quantity to quality.

6. Treat TikTok Shop as a dedicated channel with a committed point person and real budget investment — not a passive product listing.

Episode Transcript

Intro: 00:06  

Welcome to the Minds of Ecommerce podcast, where you'll learn one key strategy that made leading ecommerce companies grow exponentially. We cut the bullshit and keep the meat in a 15-minute episode. Founders and executives take us through a deep dive of a strategy so you get to learn and grow your online sales. In the last episode, we heard from Heather Roach, director of marketing at Original Footwear Company, and we talked about how brands can leverage SMBs for growth. Now today, get ready.

I'm chatting with Latif Hamilton, creative entrepreneur, fractional CMO, and founder of The Growth Operative. And of course, of SpiritHoods, which is the brand we'll be talking about today. Now, SpiritHoods has generated over $50 million in revenue, and a lot of their success comes from a link between product development and SEO, which really helped them rise to the top of search results. And that's exactly what we'll be diving into today. Now, I'm your host, Raphael Paulin-Daigle, and I'm the founder of SplitBase.

This is Minds of Ecommerce. Now this episode is brought to you by SplitBase. And at SplitBase we help leading eight and nine-figure brands such as Dr. Squatch, Hyperice, and Amika grow through customer-focused conversion optimization programs. We find out exactly where your store is losing money most, and then we help you fix it. The result reduced acquisition cost, increased conversions, higher AOV, and of course, well, more money, which in turn allows you to scale advertising profitably.

We've been at it for over a decade and can help you manage conversion optimization from A to Z. So go to splitbase.com today to request a proposal or even to get a free diagnostic. And you'll be able to learn how we can help you get the most out of your marketing spend. All right, Mason, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here.

‍

Mason Bertrand: 1:41‍

Happy to be here.

‍
Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 1:44

Now, as you know, this podcast is all about going deep, right? And dissecting one key growth strategy so our listeners can get the most value right away. You're an expert at social commerce and TikTok shops and affiliates. And I think it's a super relevant and exciting topic. But before we actually dive in into what you feel works best or maybe what doesn't work, can you just tell us a bit more in from your perspective? What is social commerce? I mean, it's still a term that is on the newer side when it comes to digital marketing. Tell us a bit more. What does it include at least from your perspective?

Mason Bertrand: 02:19

Totally. Yeah, social commerce. I feel like that word has come up in the past couple of years. I don't remember that term before, but social commerce I would say is anything where you're buying a product in a platform in a social media platform specifically. There is a halo effect, of course, but these platforms are really developing the customer journey to keep it in the platform so that the customers and the viewers don't leave.

‍

‍Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 02:38

Now, you've been part of a couple of teams in past couple of years where you guys have achieved some pretty cool things. Can you tell us a bit more what kind of impact have you had when it comes to social commerce? What's achievable? And I think you're well positioned to tell us a bit more about what's achieved at least from your side.

‍

Mason Bertrand: 03:03

TikTok shops specifically is really like highlight of the story here for social commerce. I was a part of a team at Snap Supplements a couple of years ago when TikTok shop started. So we were one of the first brands on TikTok shop, along with brands like Golly and Mary Ruth and brands like that in the supplement space. And so that's really where things kick start. Before that, it was a lot of just link inbio affiliate type of content, but TikTok shop changed the game. Completely so I sampled mince I was part of the team that scaled it to a number one brand. It was really we're doing a couple thousand dollars a month in social commerce or TikTok shop affiliates, and now by the time I left, we were doing it over a million dollars a month, easily $100,000 a day. So there's a lot of money in this game. It's really cool to see just how marketing and performance revenue ties together is really cool.

‍

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 04:03

Totally. Now sometimes I feel like I live in a bubble, obviously, just like you, I'm a marketer. And social commerce obviously is the topic that I hear all the time and that we discuss with the brands I work with.

But I think it's still vastly underutilized and I still think that a lot of brands are really just catching up to this. So I think before we dive, I know you've got some great strategies and probably great insights to share, but I am curious. When it comes to social commerce, how is that different than say your traditional affiliate marketing that people are already used with?

‍

Mason Bertrand: 04:31

Yeah, I think when people think of affiliate marketing, they think of the link inbio or like maybe a link on a blog or something like that. I think affiliate now is where the product is tagged in the video. So the customer journey, like we said, it goes from eight clicks and the process customers will drop out, by the way, at that point. So now only being two taps, you watch a video, you click buy now and the product arrives in three days. So that's where this is going and a lot of brands are getting on that. But there's plenty more brands that are not even aware of this kind of thing.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 04:58

So how do you get started with social commerce? I think let's say I put myself in the shoes of a brand that's been, you know, running an influencer program on Instagram for a while. And now I hear about this thing about social commerce and TikTok shops and I want to get started. From a standpoint of, you know, Instagram, I would probably think, hey, you know, I know micro-influences right now is kind of the way to go. Let's recruit thousands of people, let's send them products, let's pay them per post, let's get some content. Then Lincoln Bio is potentially my main modus operandi at the moment. In your case, now, from a brand that's kind of used that cycle that probably has that figured out, how do you transition or expand, I should say into social commerce, especially TikTok shop. What is the same? What is different? Do you still go with micro influencers? What does it look like?

‍

‍Mason Bertrand: 05:41

The thing with social commerce and affiliate specifically is followers don't matter. I think the traditional way and a lot of brands think is I need to find a big influencer with a lot of followers and that's just not the game anymore because although those people can either go viral or make Pretty content? Affiliates, their main goal is to drive sales. So the game of TikTok shop is really just affiliates. And so what we're doing is, yeah, we're working with a lot of cheaper, I don't wanna say cheaper affiliates, but definitely more affordable than the common content creator or influencer for sure. And those people drive a lot of sales, and that's the name of the game. We want to incentivize those affiliates with commissions, retainers, rewards. We have a community where on Discord, so that's where we host everybody and that's like our hub. And really, that's the name of the game. I think it will be for a very long time because affiliates have this, when they make a video, they have this sense of trust that they can develop with the viewer.

‍

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 08:11‍

And in your case, so you said followers don't matter as much. In this case, how do you find what are the criteria that you look for when it comes to finding those influencers?

‍

Mason Bertrand: 08:14

Yeah, well, especially in my category, our product is not a cheap product. So I try not to send out too many or it's to me samples, I'll say. And so I'm really careful on who we work with because of that. And so the main thing that I look at when I send out samples or I work with affiliates, I really just look at their GMV or their revenue as a creator in the past, even just 30 days. Right now, our criteria is about $150,000 in the past 30 days that a creator has made, which is pretty crazy to think a creator making for a brand or multiple brands, a hundred six figures. It's pretty awesome.

‍

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 08:30

And then how do you go about finding those creators?

‍

Mason Bertrand: 08:32

Yeah, so TikTok Shop has a marketplace of all the affiliates on their platform. Met a shop and YouTube shop, which I'm sure we'll talk about in a minute. That's something that we're really exploring right now. and they're baited at testing. In fact, they don't really have anything like that. And so TikTok shop has been the best place to find those creators and those platforms like Yuka or Growy that automate that whole process of finding those creators and sending out outreach. So that's really the main way we do that for sure.

‍

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 08:43

Now let's talk about kind of the content. you find those influencers, right? And then now, well, obviously they need to create some content. How much of a script do you give them? How much creativity do you give them? How much do you control the narrative? Can you walk us through kind of your process for that? How do you brief them?

‍

Mason Bertrand: 08:53

I'll say this, too, is the affiliate management is a key part of this whole playbook. We have about five people on our team that are managing Affiliates from onboarding to like you said content strategy scripting to retain your management. So this is the human interaction is really important and so it's really important to also invest in those relationships like I get on phone calls with our top affiliates on a weekly basis at this point but on the content side the content strategies I think is one of the most important roles to scale this program we provide weekly is we call it the content workshop Call so that's an hour long call we have every single week where we give inspiration hook scripts We'll do audits on people's accounts or they're the content that they're making and get them ready for the weekend or the next week to make content So yeah, there's that call we have scripts that we send out every single day and we'll set out inspiration as well from other brands But even the people in our own community are sending their own inspiration their own videos that they make to inspire other creators. So really it's just the whole point is social commerce is a compounding, also game. It's a really fun game to play.

‍

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 09:42

So I'm also curious, are there rules for how many influencers you should work with depending on how big you are as a brand? Because I can totally imagine people listening to this and saying, hey, okay, I know for Instagram usually I want to work with X amount of influencers, micro influencers, and so on. But when it comes to TikTok shops, are there guidelines? Do you have numbers that are kind of set?

‍

Mason Bertrand: 10:05

Yeah, going back a little bit on what you said earlier about like quality and quantity. That's a yin and yang of TikTok, really, in working with affiliates. To start, while quantity was the goal. And so the answer to the question is sure, answer is no, there's no number, I would say. Our goal initially was, I think for most brands should be a minimum of 100 videos a day from affiliates. So right now we're doing about 2000 videos a week after, and we just started three months ago. So we're scaling pretty fast. And I think if you get, I have a minimum of 100 videos a day that you're in a healthy place. So I don't think it's a number of affiliates necessarily. I think we have about a thousand people in our discord community. We have about 10,000 people showcasing our products on TikTok. I think let's go back to the quality and quantity to start. It's all about quantity, but as we scale, we're focusing more on quality.

‍

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 10:54

I'm also curious. Okay. Now you've done this three companies now at least. What are some of the... mistakes and the traps to avoid when it comes to starting up a social commerce strategy.

‍

Mason Bertrand: 11:07

Yeah, like you said, I've done this now three times. Yeah. And this space is so niche already. So there's not a lot of people like me necessarily that I've built a TikTok shop from the ground up three times. The myth often is you're too late, I think. That's the myth is TikTok shop has been around for what four years now. It's still super under saturated. If you look at like meta, the whole meta space. Like, that is very saturated. But then you compare it to TikTok shop. No, there's not a lot of brands. Yeah, exactly. There's not a lot of brands in the space. And yet, the platform is growing and more people are purchasing in TikTok shop. That's the first myth. The second myth is you have to treat it like an actual channel. It's not just a clearance aisle. It's not just a, let's just put our products on there and see how it goes. It's a full on channel. And for us at Ridge, I believe this can be one of our top five channels with a website, Amazon, everything else. So there's money in it as long as you're willing to invest in it, not only with the people, but also backing it with some investment for sure.

‍

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 12:07

Do you think it's more work than traditional channels or it's just different? Because I'm thinking, you know, you're saying like you got to build a community and obviously, right? It like sounds okay. Well, I also could just build an ad. Launch, you know, a bunch of ad creatives that said the demands on creative diversity and creative volumes. are also increasing significantly, so I'm not saying that doing ads properly is very little work, but I'm just curious, right? Because the perception could be, oh wow, like you're a team of five, but a brand that just kind of starting it, doing a team of five to handle it all right away?

‍

Mason Bertrand: 12:42

No, in fact, I know CEOs. This is very common. CEOs will run their TikTok shop and scale it to millions of dollars a month, which is kind of crazy. I can imagine a CEO that has other things going on, putting all their time into this. The answer is obviously no.

But at this point, because like I said, it's a quantity game. There's a lot of people involved, a lot of affiliates, and just a lot of moving pieces that, yeah, I would say it takes a point person to be there both in the seller centers, the affiliate program, managing everything.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 13:12

Is there anything that's working really well? Something specific. Do we have any strategies or tactics that you're like, hey, this is working so well these days, but a lot of brands doing TikTok shop aren't. really paying attention to this.

‍

Mason Bertrand: 13:25

I wish there was a silver bullet. That's why I'm kind of hearing the question, right? Is there a silver bullet? And the answer is no. The way I look at TikTok and social commerce as a whole is it's a black box. You just have to do everything you can to pull every single lever and scale everything, right? It's everything out once. You could say it's GMV max is the silver bowl. You could say the affiliate program or the rewards and retainers every run. It's not just one thing. It's everything. It's full four side wants, which is why I mentioned it's worth investing into a team to scale it.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 13:57

You're talking about affiliate programs. Can you tell us maybe a bit more about that? What kind of affiliate program are we talking about? How does it work? What do you think is the best structure for something that works?

‍

Mason Bertrand: 14:08

The affiliate program has changed in the past couple of years for sure. If you look at, for example, Goli, they're one of the top brands on TikTok shop, but they're the ones that came out with the rewards and giving away Lamborghinis, houses, you name it. They're giving affiliates crazy rewards. It's changed a lot. There's no perfect answer. As long as you can treat affiliates well, solve their biggest problems, which is telling us they just want to quit their job. They just want to make so much money on the side that they can quit their main thing. These are stay-home moms and truck drivers like normal people. They're not content creators. They're just working the full-time job and maybe filming on the weekends. Successful affiliate program is providing as many resources as possible making the process seamless and solving the biggest problems and paying them well.

‍

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 14:56

Are there any tools that you're using to help manage all of that that you just love?

‍

Mason Bertrand: 15:02

Yeah, great question. So I think the essential tools for TikTok shop specifically is going to be Yuka and or Groey. When I've built all three of these TikTok shops, the first thing I do is I sign up on those platforms. Those are essential. Of course, we're looking into Claude and AI. We're definitely scaling that in different regards. I would say, and it is discord. Yeah. Those are the tools, of course, to look at analytics and data and trends, of course, but those are probably the main two or three.

‍

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 15:29

Amazing. We've been chatting with Mason Bertrand, who's director of social commerce at Ridge. Mason, it was fantastic having you here. I think anybody who's listened to this, whether they're just starting out with TikTok shops or a little bit more advanced, I think there were some pretty solid takeaways during the entire episode. So thank you so much for your time and sharing your wisdom.

‍

Mason Bertrand: 15:51

Absolutely. Thank you.

‍

Outro: 15:54

All right. Well, that's it for today's episode. And thank you so much for tuning in. Now, if you like what you've heard and you don't want to miss any of the new episodes that are about to come out, make sure you subscribe to the podcast, and well, bonus points if you also leave a review in the iTunes store or wherever you're listening to this. Now, if you're working on an ecommerce store that does over $1 million in revenue and you need help with conversion optimization or landing pages, well, I've got some good news because there's a pretty good chance we can help with that.

Go to splitbase.com. Come to learn more or even to request a proposal. If you have any guest requests, questions, or comments, tweet me @rpaulindaigle, and I'll be super happy to hear from you. And again, thanks again for listening. This is the Minds of Ecommerce.

‍