Wooly (Roster)

Overview

Wooly (now rebranded as Roster) is an ambassador marketing platform that helps e-commerce brands turn their everyday customers into micro-influencers. It tracks user-generated content, manages reward tiers, and integrates natively with Shopify to prove exactly how much revenue word-of-mouth marketing generates.

Founder story

As e-commerce entrepreneurs and marketing veterans, Scott Paul, James Davis, and Kyle Fraughton realized that paying massive fees to macro-influencers was becoming unsustainable and inauthentic. They noticed that their most powerful advocates were simply their everyday, happy customers—but there was no software to manage them at scale. In 2015, they launched Wooly (later Roster) to put digital rails around word-of-mouth marketing, turning passionate buyers into a trackable, scalable sales force.

What it does

• Invites top e-commerce customers to join a brand ambassador program
• Tracks social media mentions and user-generated content automatically
• Generates unique, trackable discount codes for affiliates to share
• Rewards ambassadors dynamically with store credit or free products
• Measures the exact dollar amount generated by word-of-mouth campaigns.

Who it's for

• E-commerce brands
• Influencer marketing managers
• Community managers
• DTC founders.

Why it works

• Authenticity: People trust recommendations from friends more than ads; tapping into actual paying customers ensures genuine, high-converting promotions
• Shopify Sync: It seamlessly connects with your store to map social influence directly to hard sales data and ROI
• Automated Rewards: Eliminates the headache of manual cash payouts by automatically issuing tiered store credit based on ambassador performance
• Scalability: Replaces messy spreadsheets with a CRM built specifically for scaling from 10 to 10,000 brand ambassadors without hiring more staff
• Content Harvesting: Acts as an automated engine for collecting high-quality User-Generated Content (UGC) that brands can repurpose for Facebook and Instagram ads.

Growth strategies

• Pivoted and rebranded from Wooly to Roster to better communicate their mission of helping brands build an active 'roster' of ambassadors.
• Capitalized heavily on the rising costs of traditional Facebook ads, pitching customer- driven word-of-mouth as a cheaper, more stable acquisition channel.
• Focused specifically on 'nano' and 'micro' influencers (everyday customers) rather than highly expensive celebrity accounts.
• Targeted high- passion, lifestyle verticals like outdoor gear and fitness, landing massive DTC darlings like Cotopaxi and On Running.

Alternatives

• Grin
• Upfluence
• Aspire
• Refersion

Comparison overview

• Grin: A massive, premium creator management platform built primarily for managing professional e-commerce influencers and product seeding.
• Upfluence: A heavy, data-driven influencer search engine that helps brands find and contact new creators across social networks.
• Aspire: A popular influencer marketing platform that operates almost like a marketplace connecting brands with active creators.
• Refersion: A heavily affiliate-focused tool designed specifically to track coupon codes and commission payouts.
• While tools like Grin and Upfluence are designed to help you discover and pay professional influencers, Roster operates on a completely different philosophy. It turns your *existing* customers into advocates. By integrating deeply with Shopify, it builds automated, scalable loyalty and ambassador programs rather than just managing paid sponsorships.