From €0 to €80M+ in three years. Not with ads, with trustworthy influencers and celebrities.

I'm Santiago, founder of HappyFlops. This is the true story of how one slipper became a €80M+ brand, and it starts with a sales spike I couldn't explain.

The €5k day that suddenly became €10k

Back in our dropshipping days we were running a slipper almost everyone knows, on a general store. Nothing special. Then one day our sales doubled out of the blue, from €5k days to €10k days, with nothing changed on our end.

So I did something most people never do: I called our customers and asked why they bought. The answer kept coming back the same. An influencer had recommended the slippers on her story, after her followers kept asking where she got them. The moment I heard it, I knew exactly what had happened.

15,000 followers. €60,000 in a day.

I flew to the city where she lived and paid her €1,000 for a paid collaboration. She had just 15,000 followers. On the first day, she sold €60,000 of our slippers.

I thought we were about to become billionaires.

Then we lost €30,000

So we bet almost everything we had on the obvious next step: a much bigger name. We put €30,000 into an influencer with 2,000,000 followers. Same product. Same offer. More than a hundred times the audience.

We made about €10,000 back. A huge loss.

And it made no sense. How could 15,000 followers sell €60,000, while 2,000,000 followers sold only €10,000? That question became an obsession.

So we tested 200+ of them

We decided to stop guessing and invest in a lot more influencers and celebrities. Over the next three years we backed 200+ profiles, and found 20 real winners that drove €80M+ in revenue across 8 markets.

Then we laid all the data from the winning profiles side by side. And finally the pattern appeared: exactly which influencers convert, and which never will, no matter how big they are.

We reverse-engineered the winners

From that pattern we built a strategy to identify converting influencers before paying them a cent. To be sure it wasn't luck, we tested it in 3 new markets with 3 different brands. Every single one did €10M in its first year.