RightBlogger Customer Spotlight: How Shark Tank Alum Teddy Giard Used Influencer Marketing to Drive $2.1M in Pre-Sales

👋 Welcome to our first conversation in the RightBlogger Customer Spotlight series, where I dig deep into the ways successful entrepreneurs are making it work, today. Share your story with me at [email protected].

Today, I’m sharing my hugely insightful conversation with Teddy Giard, a Shark Tank alum, genuine marketing pro, and the CEO of Giard & Co, where they run marketing strategy (and a whole lot more) for outdoor brands.

We talk about what it was really like on Shark Tank, and go deep into Teddy’s most successful marketing strategies, including influencer marketing. The story he shares about how he landed a product review by famous YouTuber Casey Neistat that got 3.7 million views and pre-sold $2.1 million in revenue for a product before it even launched, is nuts. You’re gonna wanna hear about that.

Watch

If you’re looking to grow a business with a healthy dose of creativity (and on a tight budget), I know our conversation will spark some perspective shifts for you. We also talk about some of the ways Teddy’s using RightBlogger to scale up his content creation & promotion game for his clients. I hope you enjoy!

P.S. I used RightBlogger to turn this video into a blog post, in less than 1 minute. This saved me literally hours. After spending ~1 hour editing the first draft RightBlogger created, and injecting more of my personality into the content, I have this beauty right here. Repurposing content like this gives me the opportunity to drive more traffic from multiple different sources (like Google search). Try our YouTube to Blog Post Generator today, I know you’ll dig it.

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If you haven’t watched our conversation yet, I highly recommend checking it out! And if you’re here for the key takeaways, I got you. Let’s dig in.

Meet Teddy Giard

Teddy is a low key product marketing master, and today he specializes in working with outdoor & lifestyle brands to strategize and action on genuinely creative marketing campaigns that get some pretty phenomenal results.

At just 26 today (!!!), Teddy’s already built and scaled multiple consumer product brands, and carved out a name for himself in the outdoor industry.

His mission in life? To bring more brands into the market that support people, products, and philosophies with a moral compass. Teddy’s most interested in empowering founders to share important messages that can positively impact the lives of others, and leave our world a better place.

Shark Tank: The Launchpad

A few years back, Teddy went on Shark Tank with Kanga Coolers, a business he co-founded in college, that launched with a line of cleverly designed, budget-friendly coolers.

This appearance on Shark Tank (backflip and all) was a life-changing experience, propelling the business forward with massive exposure and sales.

🔎 Teddy’s advice: Focus on your story. It’s not easy to get the attention of Shark Tank producers, but if you’re an entrepreneur with few resources and a compelling story to tell, partnering with a Shark and making it to major network television with your business can be a total breakthrough.

Ahead of their film date, Teddy and his co-founders decided to strategically plan how they could make their Shark Tank appearance TV-worthy (so the producers would want to air their episode). They went all out—dressed as kangaroos, did backflips, showed up with the right energy, and shared their inspirational story.

This strategic preparation & planning is the secret sauce that, in addition to having an interesting product, led to their episode airing—and the subsequent success with their business.

That episode airing was a real turning point. They were flooded with web traffic and sold out of all the product they had in stock. They even arranged a viewing party that packed out a bar with 350+ people.

Funny enough, this exposure changed Teddy’s life on campus at college, and set the stage for just about every future opportunity he’s created for himself, since.

Turning the Page to New Chapters

Kanga Coolers is still thriving today, but Teddy has since moved on to a lot of exciting new projects and endeavors—including sometimes holding a microphone, and doing a damn good job with it.

Teddy’s been a brand director, he’s helped one client raise $5 million in crowdfunding, overseen hugely successful influencer marketing campaigns with the likes of Casey Neistat that generated $2.1 million in pre-sales (more on that later), and become an SEO pro along the way.

Learning how to effectively blend storytelling, high quality video production, and SEO has become Teddy’s new focus. And take it from me, he’s pretty great at it.

One of Teddy’s favorite use-cases for RightBlogger both within his own business and for client projects, is our stack of powerful SEO tools, ranging from Keyword Research to Keyword Clusters, People Also Ask insights, and more.

Teddy uses these tools to better understand where his target customers are really coming from—and doing this at scale for multiple different clients.

Getting inside the heads of what real people are feeling when it comes to the challenges they face (as they relate to a product), is one of the best ways to create marketing assets that truly empathize with the reality your audience is experiencing.

Guerrilla Influencer Marketing: The Casey Neistat Story

My favorite story from our conversation was how Teddy scored a Casey Neistat product review for Shift Robotics’ AI-powered shoes that got 3.7 MILLION views and generated $2.1 Million in pre-order revenue within 48 hours. Crazy. Here’s that video, it’s awesome:

Watch

Breaking down what made this influencer marketing case study such a success, here’s the timeline of events that Teddy shares during our conversation:

1. Initial Contact: Casey saw one of the early Shift Robotics teaser videos (that Teddy’s team produced and already strategically amplified with some mini-influencers online). He retweeted it, saying he really wanted to review the shoes. Teddy’s team replied, but got no response.
2. Content Blitz: They launched a content blitz, generating as much engagement as possible on the social channels where tech lovers spend their time (Twitter, especially). Teddy then responded to a comment someone left, requesting a review from Casey… with a screenshot of Casey’s original tweet, saying, “Casey left the world’s fastest shoes on read.” That did the trick.
3. Creating an Experience: That day, Casey placed a pre-order for the shoes. Teddy and his team then prepared a highly customized unboxing experience for Casey, complete with the CEO’s phone number and a QR code to a personalized video that could be watched only once before “self-destructing.”
4. FaceTime Follow-Up: Shortly after, while Casey and his team were filming the review, he had some technical issues with the shoes, so he FaceTime’d the Shift Robotics CEO. They had a tight window to get this solved, so they drove from Pittsburgh to New York overnight to fix the shoes in-person.
5. Result: Casey made a video that got 3.7 million views & contributed to the more than 179 million organic impressions Teddy’s marketing campaign generated for the brand. Not to mention the $2.1 million in pre-order sales that came through within 48 hours of the review video going live.

If you wanna learn from Teddy’s success with influencer marketing, be sure to watch our interview (above)—it’s a masterclass in creativity, persistence & going the extra mile.

Bringing it Home: Teddy’s Top Marketing Takeaways

Teddy’s journey is a fantastic case study in the effects of what creative, hands-on marketing can do for a brand. And he’s been able to repeat this success, over and over again.

From scoring big on Shark Tank, to executing an unforgettable influencer campaign, Teddy’s strategies are real examples of what works today. Whether you’re a new entrepreneur or a seasoned marketer, there’s a lot to learn from his experiences.

• Cultivating an effective storytelling ability (and the hard skills to visually bring it to life) is one of the most important skills you can build in a video-first world.
• Great marketing isn’t just about flashy campaigns—it’s about creating real connections and solutions that connect with your audience.
• Not every marketing campaign is immediately successful, it almost always requires clever problem-solving, a very hands-on approach, and tons of persistence.

So, go out there, be creative, lean into your weird, build something that positively impacts the lives of others, and strategically spread the word about it. Sounds easy, right? 😉

Don’t sleep on the power of having the right tools on your side. We built RightBlogger to help with all the aspects of marketing, that’ve made our own businesses successful over the past decade. Come try our tools for free.