How a sleep brand runs UGC at volume without the admin

Mellow Sleep's ad creative is UGC, filmed by contracted creators and produced at volume. That makes the whole operation move at the speed of how fast a good brief reaches the right creator. Almost none of that speed was limited by creative ability. A tool generated ad ideas daily, most of them throwaway, so someone sifted, copied the keepers out, and pasted them into a doc.

Then the brief has to find a creator. Names were matched from memory against a roster, messages went out one at a time, and replies came back across email and DMs. Rates got compared in someone's head, and nothing sat in one place. The person paid to judge whether an ad would work was spending the week on logistics.

The challenge

Mellow did not arrive with a pain point. Revenue was strong, the brand was working, and the ask was to improve the process without naming which part of it. The first two weeks went on watching how work actually moved, and four things surfaced.

Nothing named as broken
That is harder to start from than a broken system, because nothing puts its hand up as the thing to fix. A business growing fast enough absorbs its own friction without noticing it.

Idea generation producing mostly waste
The generator ran daily and produced around thirty concepts a week, most of them not worth using. Someone had to read all of them to find the few that were.

A manual handoff at every join
Take the output, judge it, copy the keeper, paste it into Notion, then message a creator and wait. Every one of those steps existed because two tools did not talk to each other.

Numbers scattered across four channels
Sales ran across four platforms, each reporting on its own, so anyone who wanted a single view of the business assembled it by hand.

What we built

The pipeline runs the coordination half of the job. It is wired in n8n, with Notion as the surface the manager already worked in. Concepts come out of the generator already shaped, land in Notion without anyone copying them across, and get assigned to a creator who is notified without a message being written. Three decisions stay with the manager: approve the brief, pick the creator, sign the deal.

Two stages run today and three are designs. Brief generation and routing are live, alongside a separate rollup of the sales numbers. Scoring the roster, sourcing new names, and pricing the offers were specified but not built, because the engagement stopped before that stage.

Conclusion

The coordination half of the job comes off the manager's week. Briefs get written from what performed, they reach a creator without anyone carrying data between tools, and the numbers arrive in one place on their own. The three decisions that need judgment stay with a person.

What returns is about eighteen hours a week, and fifteen briefs worth approving in place of thirty worth sifting. The interesting part is that none of it was on the brief at the start. It came out of two weeks of watching a business that was doing well enough not to notice what it was spending time on.

Want this pipeline running on your creative? Get in touch.