How your club
gets product
from a brand

Seeding isn't a gift, it's a trial

This is the misunderstanding that wastes half of all seedings. From the club's side, a brand is sending free product. From the brand's side, it's buying something specific: knowing how its product behaves in the hands of people who know the category, and what they say about it when nobody's watching.

That changes how you pitch it. You're not asking a favour, you're offering a testing ground the brand can't buy elsewhere. A consumer panel costs it real money and returns answers from people paid to answer. Your club gives it twenty people who will actually run in the shoes.

What a brand actually wants in return

None of this costs your club money, which is what makes seeding so accessible.

• Real use : the product used in normal conditions, for long enough that the opinion means something. Two weeks minimum, a month is better.
• An honest reaction : what works and what doesn't. Uniformly positive feedback is worthless to a brand, and it knows it.
• A few photos : taken during a session, not in a studio. It's exactly what the brand can't produce itself.
• Word of mouth : what gets said afterwards, between members. That's the part no brand can buy or control.

Note what isn't on that list: an obligation to post. We come back to it below, it's the most important point in this guide.

How much product to ask for

Start from how many people actually turn up, not how many are in the group. A club with 60 signed up and 25 who come asks for 25 units, not 60. Asking for too much is the fastest way to lose a brand: it signals you're thinking in volume, when everything interesting about you is somewhere else.

The right volume also makes the feedback usable. Twenty-five people genuinely testing produce something a brand can act on. Sixty parcels, half of which sit in a cupboard, produce an invoice and nothing else, and the brand will notice.

The rules to set before you say yes

Five minutes of framing up front prevents the situation where your members feel they owe something they never agreed to.

• Nobody is obliged to post : this is the non-negotiable one. The moment receiving product creates a duty to publish, your club becomes an agency and your members feel it immediately.
• Members opt in : you offer, they decide. A seeding imposed on the whole list starts badly.
• Sizes and preferences first : nothing wastes a seeding faster than twenty unusable items. Ask before, not after.
• Honest feedback is promised, positive feedback isn't : say it to the brand explicitly. The ones that flinch at that aren't the right ones.
• What happens afterwards is written down : who sends what, when, and what you send back. Two lines is enough.

These five belong in your sponsorship proposal, and raising them yourself makes you look like someone who has done this before.

Finding the brands that do seeding

Seeding is the most common form of partnership and yet the hardest to trigger cold: you have to reach a brand exactly when it's preparing a launch. Kithe exists to remove that timing problem. You add your club once, free, and the brands looking for your kind of audience come to you. 18 clubs have already received seeding through Kithe without approaching a single brand themselves.

• Free for organisers.
• Brands arrive with a concrete offer, not a vague enquiry.
• Every approach goes through you: you say yes, no, or not now.

Frequently asked questions