Influence and affiliation: two tech solutions supporting an iconic brand

About La Redoute: an iconic brand continuously reinventing itself

A historical leader in French e-commerce, La Redoute has established itself as a benchmark in the fashion and home decor industries. Drawing on its rich catalog heritage, the brand has evolved into an inspiring digital platform blending proprietary collections, partner brands, and editorial content. Today, La Redoute targets a broad audience with a clear ambition: remaining desirable while driving high performance.

This ambition is exactly what Marine Wauquier, Affiliate & Influence Project Manager at La Redoute, oversees from the inside. Her role focuses heavily on affiliate performance, working in close collaboration with the brand and influence teams on specific profiles and retail operations.

The challenge: balancing brand equity and performance in a saturated market

In a context where commercial peaks like seasonal sales generate intense competitive pressure, La Redoute must meet a dual requirement: standing out visually to protect its premium brand image, while simultaneously driving qualified traffic and revenue.

“The real challenge during sales is differentiation when everyone is promoting discounts at the same time,” explains Marine Wauquier. “You have to manage to stay desirable while remaining highly business-oriented.”

Added to this is a structural complexity: managing two complementary approaches—brand influence and performance-driven influence—without opposing them, but rather making them work together.

The strategy: two pillars, one shared logic

At La Redoute, the strategy relies on two distinct yet interconnected pillars. On one side is a branding approach, centered on creating inspiring and visual content. On the other side is a performance approach, managed through a structured affiliate program.

“We strictly differentiate the brand part from the performance part, but we always look for synergies between the two,” notes Marine. “Some influencer profiles can check both boxes, and that is where it gets interesting.”

This logic translates into a hybrid setup where some creators inspire, others convert, and a few key profiles become true business partners capable of activating both levers.

Affiliation operates primarily as an always-on baseline, activated continuously throughout the year. Its main role is to maintain an ongoing brand presence far beyond commercial highlights, and to re-engage creators outside of paid campaigns. This allows La Redoute to generate steady performance year-round without depending solely on seasonal spikes, even if the winter sales serve as a concrete example of this permanent logic.

The campaign: winter sales as a real-world testing ground

For the winter sales, La Redoute deploys a structured ecosystem where each lever plays a specific role.

“During sales, we are in a very business-driven mindset, but that does not mean we should abandon brand image. We need to succeed at doing both at the same time,” says Marine.

A 360-degree ecosystem built to cover the full funnel

The setup relies on three complementary layers: brand activations to build desire, paid campaigns to structure creator messaging, and continuous affiliate program management to drive volume and conversions. On the brand side, teams activate creators capable of producing high-end visual content that highlights products within inspiring settings.

“The challenge is to show that we have beautiful products, even though we are in a promotional period with clearance stock”, Marine points out.

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An editorial approach tailored to audience behaviors

On the performance side, stories are highly favored because they allow the integration of tracked links to measure exact revenue contributions.

“We focus more on stories than feed posts, because that is where we can integrate tracked links and generate traffic”, Marine explains.

Creators engage their communities through personal product curations integrated naturally into their daily content routines, ensuring authentic recommendations rather than aggressive commercial ads.

In parallel, the affiliate program plays a central role. Over 200 active affiliates participate during the sales period, creating organic momentum. Teams actively manage this program by communicating regular offers, showcasing top product categories, and giving affiliates the flexibility to publish spontaneously when they spot a product they genuinely like.

“We prefer affiliates to speak out spontaneously because they spotted a promo or a product they genuinely like. It is always more authentic,” Marine emphasizes. “During the sales, we focus heavily on program animation. The idea is to give affiliates opportunities to express themselves whenever it makes sense.”

This performance-based influence model aligns the interests of both the brand and the creators. When an affiliate is compensated based on the sales they generate, they are incentivized to feature products they actually use and love. Meanwhile, the brand only pays for concrete results. This mutual growth explains the rising adoption of the affiliate model among creators, offering them a flexible, reliable income stream that respects their authenticity

In total, the paid campaign activated 9 micro and macro profiles, generating over 90 content assets and several blog posts that remain reusable across social media and newsletters.

“Some content assets are highly on-brand, so we know right from the start that we are going to repurpose them. Others are mostly going to drive performance. The two are complementary”, Marine concludes.

Creator selection: the art of identifying who inspires and who converts

At La Redoute, casting is a subtle balance between instinct, data, and past campaign experience.

“We obviously rely on Kolsquare kpis, particularly the credibility score. It is an indispensable criterion for us,” Marine Wauquier explains. “It is important for us to have this quality guarantee. It is part of the criteria we look at right from the start.”

Teams also use specific compliance filters, such as the arpp filter, to ensure creators respect responsible communication and transparency guidelines.

Quickly, profile analysis evolves beyond standard kpis. Some creators install an aesthetic and build desire, while others excel at driving traffic and revenue. Between the two, La Redoute identifies hybrid profiles capable of bridging image and performance over the long term through ongoing test and learn iterations.

“We cannot know in advance if a profile will perform. It is very much a test and learn process,” Marine explains. “Large profiles can perform just as well as small ones. They are just different mechanics. We cross-reference Kolsquare data with Affilae insights. That allows us to make much more enlightened decisions.”

Technology backing strategy: managing the gap between image and performance

At La Redoute, technology is not just used to execute campaigns. It structures the way they are designed, tracked, and optimized. Kolsquare brings a complete view of influencer performance; Affilae provides a precise breakdown of the business generated. The collaboration with Affilae started in September 2023, a pivotal year during which influencer profiles began to be more broadly integrated into affiliate programs, marking the beginning of a truly hybrid approach.

“For me, my primary KPI remains performance. But I always look at influencer KPIs like EMVor reach in parallel,” Marine explains.

Right from the casting phase, the teams adopt a cross-referenced approach: Kolsquare decrypts audiences, evaluates profile credibility, and grasps their editorial universe, while Affilae brings a more concrete validation by revealing their actual capacity to generate traffic and revenue.

“We use both platforms right from the start. It allows us to have a much more complete vision“, Marine Wauquier explains.

This dual analysis accompanies the entire campaign. On Kolsquare, the teams analyze content reach, distribution, and the earned media value generated. On Affilae, they monitor clicks, traffic, and sales, with a weekly follow-up to adjust if necessary.

“I track performance mostly on Affilae, usually on a weekly basis, to see if we are matching the previous year’s level.”

Kolsquare also plays a key role in retrieving content published by creators, including retroactively. When an affiliate posts spontaneously outside of a paid activation, the content is still captured and integrated into the campaign report. The brand thus has an exhaustive view of what has been produced and shared in its name, without relying solely on creator declarations. This data enriches campaign reports with complementary kpis alongside Affilae’s metrics (reach, emv, engagement) for a complete reading that links image and performance.

When it is time for the final report, these two readings come together to build a global vision that no longer separates image and performance, but connects them. Because the purchasing funnel is no longer linear: between inspiration, consideration, and conversion, touchpoints multiply and creator roles fragment. Affilae helps understand who actually triggers the purchase; Kolsquare highlights what sparked interest upstream. Together, they allow for a more accurate reconstruction of global performance.

“The Kolsquare and Affilae platforms are truly complementary. It allows us to have a comprehensive vision, combining both image and business,” Marine concludes. “The funnel is no longer linear. It is much more complex today. And that is why looking at both is essential.”

Results: a strategy that transforms influence into an ROI-driven lever

The sales campaign illustrates the power of this hybrid approach. Over 2.3 million people were reached, generating over €90k in emv and an roi exceeding 274%, with a +145% growth in revenue compared to the previous year. But beyond the numbers, it is the capacity to coordinate influence and performance over the long term that makes the difference: each activation fits into a broader engine where creators, loyal and motivated, become true business partners for the brand.

Want to learn more about this strategy? The webinar replay from Kolsquare x Affilae x La Redoute is available here.