How Cruva Helped Half Time Club Save 20+ Hours Every Week and Scale TikTok Shop

As you grow on TikTok Shop, you come across a particular set of challenges. As more affiliates start promoting your products, it becomes difficult to manage outreach, follow-ups, and creator relationships.

That's exactly what happened with Half Time Club. While the brand's TikTok Shop was growing, their founder Matthew Stafford was still managing every part of the affiliate program on his own. To keep growth sustainable, he needed a way to scale creator operations without putting in more hours or adding another team member.

Cruva helped the brand automate the repetitive work behind affiliate management. As a result, Half Time Club was able to:

• Save 20+ hours every week on creator outreach and management
• Sell 44,000+ units on TikTok Shop within six months
• Become a Top 20 product on TikTok Shop UK

"Cruva has helped me build an affiliate operation that normally would have required a team. It's turned creator outreach from a daily headache into one of the easiest parts of growing our TikTok Shop. Without Cruva, scaling Half Time Club at the speed we have simply wouldn't have been possible."

Matthew Stafford, Founder, Half Time Club

About the brand

Half Time Club is a UK-based ecommerce brand that creates football-themed beer mats for fans of more than 25 clubs. What started on its own website has grown into a multi-channel business spanning Amazon, Etsy, and TikTok Shop.

As TikTok Shop became a major growth channel, the brand doubled down on affiliate marketing to reach more customers.

Challenge: Scaling TikTok Shop with a one-person team

TikTok Shop quickly became one of Half Time Club's biggest growth opportunities. The brand had already built a strong presence on multiple channels, and founder Matthew Stafford knew the platform could help them reach customers faster through creator-led commerce.

But there were a few problems.

Every creator had to be managed manually

Before Cruva, Stafford relied entirely on TikTok Shop's Affiliate Center to find creators and send outreach messages. He spent hours searching for affiliates, using his daily DM limits, replying to messages, and tracking conversations himself.

"I was there doing it. But my time could have been spent elsewhere growing the business."

Managing affiliates left less time to grow the business

Affiliate marketing was working, but keeping it running was becoming increasingly difficult. Stafford was spending 2 to 3 hours every day on creator outreach and management, time that could have been used to launch products or grow other parts of the business.

"Everything was manual. I was searching for creators, sending DMs, replying to messages, and keeping track of everything myself. It could easily have been a full-time job."

Solution: Building a scalable affiliate program

As a one-person TikTok Shop operation, Half Time Club needed to find an effective way to automate their work.

After comparing several creator management platforms, Stafford chose Cruva. The platform was easy to set up, and the onboarding team helped him connect TikTok Shop, configure automations, and launch outreach workflows within a few hours.

Automating the day-to-day work

Instead of manually searching for creators and tracking every conversation, Stafford used Cruva to automate creator outreach and follow-ups.

The customer relationship management (CRM) workflows automatically reminded creators when content was pending and celebrated their milestones at key stages, like after their first sale, encouraging them to keep posting.

"It didn't feel like I was just another customer. It felt like they genuinely wanted to help grow the business."

Automated outreach made it possible to contact dozens of creators every day without adding more work to his schedule.

"We were getting 30, 40, 50 requests a day with very little effort."

Finding better creators with AI

Cruva also changed how Half Time Club approached creator discovery.

Using AI Creator Search, Stafford could quickly identify creators that matched his ideal audience.

Stafford estimates that Cruva gave him back 70-80% of the time he previously spent on TikTok Shop by removing manual DMs, follow-ups, and spreadsheets. That time is now invested in growing the business.

More importantly, the platform helped him find an unexpected buying pattern. While he initially expected football fans to be the primary audience, many purchases were coming from women buying gifts for their partners.

That insight helped Half Time Club broaden its creator strategy and explore new marketing angles that aligned with how customers were actually buying the product.

"We thought our affiliates would mostly be men who liked football. But a lot of our sales came from women buying for their partners. It's helped us find different marketing angles."

Results: More growth, less manual work

With creator outreach and follow-ups running through Cruva, Stafford could spend less time on repetitive tasks and more time growing the business. The affiliate program continued to expand without requiring an additional team member to manage it.

Since implementing Cruva, Half Time Club has:

• Saved 20+ hours every week on creator outreach and management
• Sold 44,000+ units on TikTok Shop within six months
• Generated nearly £160,000 in GMV in a single month
• Reached the Top 20 products on TikTok Shop UK

"I went from spending two to three hours every day on affiliate outreach to about an hour a week. That's around 20 hours every week that I can now spend growing the business."

While Stafford continues to run Half Time Club's TikTok Shop as a one-person operation, he now uses the time he gained back to focus on new products, new opportunities, and growing the business.

Ready to build a creator program that scales with your business?

Growing on TikTok Shop doesn't have to mean spending more time managing creators. The right systems can help you grow your affiliate program without adding more manual work or expanding your team.

By automating creator discovery, outreach, and follow-ups, Cruva helped turn affiliate management into a repeatable process that supported long-term growth.

This gives you more time to focus on the work that moves your business forward.

If you're looking to scale your TikTok Shop affiliate program, book a demo to see how Cruva can help you automate creator management and grow with less effort.