Beekman 1802 has scaled its brand advocacy program to more than 3,000 members. They haven't run a single ad to get there.
That's not luck. It's what happens when you build a program the right way — with the right community, the right incentives, and a brand value that gives people something real to rally around.
The Kindness Crew, Beekman 1802's brand advocacy program, has won five industry awards from Glossy, BeautyMatter, and The Drum. This webinar hosted by Verity Hurd, Head of Brand Marketing at Duel, Jenny Borland, Senior Director of Social & Influencer at Beekman 1802, and Kemar Brown, Brand Success Manager at Duel, pulled back the curtain on exactly how they built it.
[Watch the full webinar on demand]
When Beekman 1802 partnered with Duel in January 2024, their advocacy program had 185 members. Two years later, it has more than 3,000, and it’s still growing.
That growth didn't come from a paid acquisition funnel. It came from a willingness to treat advocacy as a strategic priority rather than a side project.
"It really goes from a place of trust," said Kemar Brown, Brand Success Manager at Duel. "Beekman is one of those companies who's willing to share things like their marketing calendar and let us know what they have on the roadmap."
That visibility allowed Duel to help Beekman move beyond the obvious seasonal peaks and activate around smaller, more culturally resonant moments, like National Kindness Day.
One of the most useful distinctions to come out of the webinar is the two categories for creator applications.
“On brand” means a creator who looks and sounds exactly like your brand, posting to an audience that already knows you.
“Brand safe” means a creator who doesn't share your aesthetic, but genuinely loves your brand. Their audience is different. Their community is unique. And that's precisely the point; they open doors you can't reach through targeting alone.
Charlotte Tilbury's advocates, called “Magic Beauty Stars,” are a clear example: brand safe creators unlocked an entire online gaming community where the brand had no prior footprint.
The Kindness Crew is built on brand safe thinking. Beekman doesn't prescribe how advocates should post.
“We want people to be able to promote to their audience in a way that works for them,” said Jenny. “We really try to honor the individual creator’s communities because they've curated those, they've developed those, they built those and we want them to be able to speak authentically to themselves and to their audience.”
Duel's analysis of customer advocacy programs found that advocates with fewer than 1,000 followers in at least one social profile generated 33% of revenue.
"That changed the way that we look at everything," said Kemar. "You're missing out on a large pool of revenue and influence by being too exclusive."
Follower thresholds are not the best indicator of an advocate’s influence.
Today's algorithms surface content based on how audiences interact with it, not how large they are.
That's why partnering with authentic advocates, even those below the 1,000-follower nano-influencer threshold, is becoming a smart growth strategy. Their tight-knit communities often engage at rates that outperform accounts many times their size.
The engagement rate trend is consistent regardless of platform but is especially pronounced on Instagram, where nano-influencers generate nearly 8x the engagement of celebrities (Engagement Rate Benchmarks, 2025).
Authenticity and community drive engagement, and those qualities exist among a wide spectrum of creators.
Jenny walked through the advocate experience for the Kindness Crew program, built on Duel, where advocates can view available challenges, track their sales, access affiliate links, and manage their personal storefronts.
One standout: a "Kindness Quotient" questionnaire developed in partnership with kindness.org, where advocates take a quiz and receive a personalized score. It's a small detail that keeps the brand's core value embedded throughout the entire advocacy experience.
"The scores are customized; they feel more personal, and advocates really enjoy promoting these," said Jenny.
Beekman's community team started the advocacy program by a social media announcement and contacting 50–100 new creators per week.
In early 2026, they paused that outreach entirely. Applications kept coming in, driven purely by existing advocates sharing invitations.
"We always had ads in our back pocket, and we just haven't had to do it, which we're really excited about," said Jenny.
This is what a self-sustaining advocacy program looks like. Not a campaign on a loop. It’s a community with its own momentum.
Jenny's first principle on incentives is to be generous. Her second is to start conservatively because it's always easier to add than to take away.
"Yes, free product is awesome, but so is meeting your founders. So is joining an exclusive webinar or testing out a new product that hasn't launched,” shared Jenny. “There are ways to make people feel so special outside of just product."
Kemar added that the future of incentives is performance-based: rewarding advocates not only for completing tasks but also for how those tasks perform. Video views, dollars driven, storefront pushes – the advocates who go above and beyond get rewarded for it.
Two years in, the numbers are consistent.
[Read the Full Beekman 1802 Case Study]
For advocacy managers working to build internal buy-in, Jenny's advice is to lead with profitability, then bring in the human story.
"I like to emphasize the impact it's having on our community, whether it's a handwritten letter we get from an Ambassador about what it means to them, or a scrapbook," she said. "They're so creative."
Gather advocate feedback consistently, especially in the early days. Check in often enough to understand what to tweak and where to improve before the program scales beyond that window.
[Read More: 6 Proven Insights for Scaling Brand Advocacy Growth]
The next phase for the Kindness Crew focuses on customers as creators, recognizing that advocacy doesn't only happen on social feeds. It happens in Facebook groups, family text threads, and affiliate links shared with friends.
"Just because you are not an influencer doesn't mean you can't support the brand in other ways and be rewarded for it," said Jenny.
The Kindness Crew is already living proof of that. Advocacy done right isn't a campaign, it's a strategy. When people feel like they genuinely belong, they don't just post. They advocate.
Beekman 1802 went from 185 to 3,000+ advocates without a single paid ad. See how Duel helps brands build communities where advocates drive unstoppable growth.