By running influencer marketing and affiliate marketing in parallel, La Redoute built a system that captures attention, builds desire, and converts. During the winter sales season, this approach, managed through Kolsquare and Affilae, generated over $90K in EMV and a ROI above 274%, turning every piece of content into a measurable business driver.
La Redoute is one of France's most iconic e-commerce players, with deep roots in fashion and home decor. From its origins as a catalog brand, it has grown into an inspiring digital platform blending its own collections, partner brands, and editorial content. Today, La Redoute serves a wide audience with one clear ambition: stay desirable while staying performance-driven.
That ambition is something Marine Wauquier, Affiliate & Influencer Project Manager at La Redoute, has seen take shape from the inside. Her role sits at the intersection of affiliate and performance marketing, working closely with the brand and influencer teams on select profiles and campaigns.
During high-stakes commercial moments like sales seasons, La Redoute faces a dual challenge: standing out visually while protecting brand image, and driving qualified traffic and revenue at the same time.
"The real challenge during sales is differentiating yourself when everyone is pushing promotions at once," says Marine Wauquier. "You have to stay desirable while being very focused on business outcomes."
There's also a structural complexity to manage: two complementary approaches, brand-led and performance-driven influencer marketing, that need to work together rather than pull in opposite directions.
At La Redoute, the strategy rests on two distinct but connected pillars. On one side, a branding approach focused on creating inspiring, visually compelling content. On the other, a performance approach built around a structured affiliate program.
"We really separate the brand side from the performance side, but we're always looking for overlap between the two," says Marine. "Some influencer profiles can do both, and that's where it gets interesting."
This translates into a hybrid setup where some creators build desire, others drive conversions, and a select few become true business partners capable of doing both.
Affiliate marketing acts as the connective thread, running continuously throughout the year. Its primary role is to maintain a steady brand presence well beyond peak commercial moments and keep creators active outside of paid campaigns. That's what allows La Redoute to generate consistent results year-round, without relying solely on seasonal spikes. The winter sales are a concrete example, but the logic behind it is permanent.
For the winter sales, La Redoute runs a structured activation designed as a full influencer ecosystem, where each lever plays a specific role.
"Sales are a highly commercial moment, but that doesn't mean we should drop brand image. You have to do both at the same time," says Marine.
The activation is built on three complementary layers: brand activations to generate desire and reinforce image, paid campaigns to anchor creator messaging, and ongoing affiliate program management to drive volume and conversions. On the brand side, the team works with creators who can produce strong visual content that showcases products in inspiring, aspirational contexts.
"The challenge is showing that there are genuinely great products, even during a promotional period when inventory is running low," says Marine.
On the performance side, Stories take priority because they allow tracked links to be embedded directly and make it easy to measure their contribution to revenue.
"We tend to work more with Stories than feed posts, because that's where we can add tracked links and drive traffic," says Marine.
Each creator mobilizes their community through product selections that reflect their personal style, presented in relatable, everyday contexts. The recommendations don't feel like ads. They're woven naturally into regular content, keeping things authentic while still hitting clear conversion goals.
Running alongside the paid activations, the affiliate program plays a central role. More than 200 affiliates are active during the sales period, creating organic, continuous momentum around the brand. The team actively manages the program with regular updates on live offers, product and category spotlights, and well-timed opportunities for affiliates to post.
"We prefer affiliates to post spontaneously, because they saw a deal or a product they genuinely like. It's always more authentic," says Marine. "During sales, we're very focused on animating the program. The idea is to give affiliates the right opportunities to show up at the right moment."
This performance-driven model has an often underestimated advantage: it aligns the brand's interests with the creators'. When an affiliate earns based on the sales they generate, they have every reason to promote products they actually use and that resonate with their audience. The brand only pays for real results. Both sides move in the same direction, with the same goals, which explains why more and more creators are embracing it. Affiliate marketing gives them a steady, flexible income stream that doesn't compromise their authenticity.
In total, the paid campaign activated 9 micro and macro profiles, generating 90+ pieces of content and several blog posts. These assets become reusable across social media, newsletters, and other activations.
"Some content is so on-brand that we know from the start we'll repurpose it. Other content is purely performance-focused. Both are valuable — they complement each other," says Marine.
At La Redoute, casting isn't just about checking boxes in a dashboard. It's a balance of instinct, data, and knowledge built up over many campaigns.
"We obviously rely on Kolsquare's KPIs, especially the credibility score. It's a non-negotiable for us," says Marine Wauquier. "Having that quality guarantee matters. It's one of the first things we look at."
The team also uses more specific Kolsquare filters, like the ARPP filter, to make sure profiles follow best practices around responsible communication and transparency.
From there, the picture gets more nuanced. Beyond KPIs, roles start to emerge. Some creators are there to bring the brand's universe to life, build an aesthetic, and spark desire. Others are more performance-oriented: they activate their community differently and drive traffic, sometimes direct revenue. In between, La Redoute identifies hybrid profiles who can navigate both brand and performance, and who are in it for the long haul. This granular understanding is built through ongoing iteration.
"You can't know in advance whether a profile will perform. It's a lot of test and learn," says Marine. "Big profiles can perform like small ones. The mechanics are just different. We cross-reference Kolsquare data with Affilae insights, and it helps us make much smarter decisions."
At La Redoute, technology shapes how campaigns are planned, tracked, and optimized. Kolsquare gives a complete view of influencer performance; Affilae delivers a precise read on business results. The collaboration with Affilae started in September 2023, a pivotal year when influencer profiles began to be more broadly integrated into affiliate programs, marking the start of a genuinely hybrid approach.
"My primary KPI is always performance. But I'll always look at influencer KPIs in parallel, things like EMV and reach," says Marine.
Right from the casting stage, the teams take a cross-platform approach. Kolsquare helps decode audiences, evaluate creator credibility, and understand editorial fit. Affilae adds a more concrete layer of validation by revealing a creator's actual ability to drive traffic and revenue.
"We use both from the start. It gives us a much more complete picture," says Marine.
That dual lens carries through the entire campaign. On Kolsquare, the team tracks content reach, distribution, and earned media value. On Affilae, they monitor clicks, traffic, and sales, with weekly check-ins to course-correct if needed.
"I track performance on Affilae, usually weekly, to see how we're tracking versus the previous year."
Kolsquare also plays a key role in capturing content published by creators, including retroactively. When an affiliate posts spontaneously outside of a paid activation, that content is still captured and factored into the overall results. This gives the brand a comprehensive view of everything produced and distributed on its behalf, without relying solely on creator self-reporting. That data enriches campaign reporting with complementary KPIs: reach, EMV, and engagement, for a full picture that ties brand and performance together.
At the evaluation stage, both data sources come together to build a unified view. Because the purchase journey isn't linear anymore. Between inspiration, consideration, and conversion, there are multiple touchpoints, and creators play different roles at each one. Affilae shows who actually triggers the purchase; Kolsquare reveals what sparked interest earlier in the journey. Together, they give a clearer, more complete read on overall performance.
"Kolsquare and Affilae genuinely complement each other. They give us a holistic view, both brand and business," says Marine. "The funnel isn't linear anymore. It's a lot more complex today. That's exactly why looking at both is essential."
The winter sales campaign shows just how powerful this hybrid approach can be. More than 2 million people were reached, generating over $90K in EMV and a ROI above 274%, with revenue growing +145% year over year. But beyond the numbers, what makes this work is the ability to connect influencer marketing and performance over the long term. Each activation feeds into a larger system where motivated, loyal creators become true business partners for the brand.
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