Talent agencies are training creators to act like retailers

Creator Playbooks // June 23, 2026 Talent agencies are training creators to act like retailers By Allison Smith Ivy Liu Lexi Rosenstein, a New Jersey-based beauty creator, has around 150,000 followers on TikTok, a fraction of the audience commanded by many of social media’s biggest stars.

Yet she has sold more than 500,000 products through TikTok Shop, achieving an average monthly gross merchandise value of $300,000-$600,000, making her one of the platform’s top sellers. She works with dozens of brands, maintains storefronts across multiple platforms and spends much of her time thinking about what products will resonate with shoppers.

That kind of business was once unusual in the creator world. Influencers were primarily judged by audience size, engagement rates and the sponsorship deals they could attract. Today, a growing number of creators are building businesses around affiliate commissions, storefronts and social commerce.

As a result, talent agencies are increasingly helping clients set up online storefronts, prepare for major sales events and show brands hard evidence that their audiences spend money. The change reflects how much money creators are now making from selling things.

Affiliate marketing, creator storefronts and social commerce platforms have given creators more ways to earn revenue directly from product sales. Passive income streams from product and merchandise sales combined with affiliate marketing account for 21. 2% of total creator income, according to a January survey of 1,000 U. S.

-based creators conducted by The Influencer Marketing Factory, an influencer marketing and talent agency. Amanda Marzolf, a partner and co-head of the beauty, fashion and lifestyle department at Underscore Talent, a talent management company, said affiliate marketing felt like “small potatoes” inside her agency until about a year and a half ago.

Now, it is a core piece of the strategy she gives her clients. Her agency hired someone from creator commerce company LTK specifically to manage the affiliate side of creators’ businesses, and about 80% of its roster — which spans between 100 and 200 creators — now has an Amazon storefront.

If someone does not have one, Marzolf said, she advises them to get one. Not having one, she said, “unqualifies them for certain brand deals.” Tentpole shopping events like Amazon Prime Day, which kicked off on Tuesday and runs for four days through Friday, have become “the Super Bowl” for many creators, Marzolf said.

The playbook her team runs ahead of Prime Day illustrates how detailed Underscore’s retail coaching has become. Starting one to two months before the event, Marzolf’s team uses regular one-on-ones to help clients think through which products to spotlight, which brands to tag organically on social media and how to match their content to seasonal trends.

Before Prime Day, she pulls together a list of brands that spent with Underscore during the last Prime Day period, sends it to creators, and encourages them to start making themed content featuring the brands they genuinely use and like well ahead of the sale window.

For many of her beauty, fashion and lifestyle creators, Prime Day has become one of the biggest revenue opportunities of the year. During a typical Prime Day window, Marzolf said, her agency handles more than 50 brand deals, generating six‑ and even seven‑figure offers in total for clients.

Strong Prime Day performance can translate into longer, more lucrative brand partnerships. For example, a dermatologist on Underscore’s roster converted so well during past Prime Day events that the agency secured a 12‑month deal with a K‑beauty brand, with monthly deliverables concentrated around Prime Day and other key tentpole moments.

A year-long contract is unusually long in a space where many influencer deals last only a few weeks or a couple of months, Marzolf said. “We were able to get that longer deal because we were able to show analytics from his previous Amazon days,” she said.

At the same time, Underscore is careful to keep the emphasis on commerce from overwhelming creators’ identities. “We don’t want them to just become these robotic numbers people,” Marzolf said.

Damian Skoczylas, co-founder and president of talent management company Reign Maker, said his team coaches creators specifically on frequency — how often to post affiliate content — because of the risk of posting too much retail-focused content. “You can’t pummel your audience with products,” he said. “There’s some sort of mix that they need to find.”

When a creator on his roster launched a pajama line, Reign Maker advised on pricing and supplier quality and then used sales data from the launch to pitch the creator to brands. “We pull that data back when we’re out actively pitching her to brands to show she does convert, and she does move product,” he