About Half Time Club
Half Time Club is a UK-based ecommerce brand that creates football-themed beer mats for fans across more than 25 clubs. After building a successful business across its own website, Amazon, and Etsy, founder Matthew Stafford turned his attention to TikTok Shop.
As the affiliate program grew, managing creator discovery, outreach, and follow-ups manually became a major barrier to scaling efficiently as a one-person team.
The Challenge
Manual Creator Management Was Limiting Growth
TikTok Shop quickly became a major growth opportunity for Half Time Club. The platform's creator-led commerce model aligned perfectly with the brand's highly visual products, but scaling its affiliate program required far more manual work than founder Matthew Strafford expected.
As a one-person team, Strafford spent hours every day searching for creators, sending outreach messages, responding to affiliates, and manually tracking follow-ups. Managing creator relationships had become one of the biggest barriers to scaling 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."
While the business continued to grow, Strafford realized his time was better spent on high-impact work than repetitive creator outreach. To keep scaling, he needed a way to spend less time managing creators and more time growing the business.
"I was there doing it. But my time could have been spent elsewhere growing the business."
The Solution
Automating Creator Outreach Without Losing Control
Strafford wasn't looking to replace his affiliate strategy. He wanted a more efficient way to execute it.
After evaluating several creator management platforms, Cruva stood out not only for its automation capabilities but also for the hands-on support from the team. From onboarding to weekly strategy calls, Cruva became an extension of the business rather than just another software subscription.
"It didn't feel like I was just another customer. It felt like they genuinely wanted to help grow the business."
Within hours of onboarding, the team had connected TikTok Shop, configured CRM automations, and launched workflows for creator outreach.
One of the biggest breakthroughs came from AI Creator Search.
Rather than simply surfacing more sports creators, it revealed new creator profiles and buying behaviors that reshaped how the brand approached creator partnerships.
"We thought our affiliates would mostly be men who liked football. But we discovered a lot of purchases came from women buying gifts for their partners. That completely changed how we thought about finding creators and marketing the product."
This gave the brand a deeper understanding of who was buying its products and which creators were most likely to influence those customers.
The Results
Scaling Growth While Reducing Manual Work
What started as a way to simplify creator outreach quickly evolved into a more scalable affiliate operation. By automating repetitive tasks and centralizing creator management, Half Time Club reclaimed valuable time while continuing to grow one of the UK's fastest-rising TikTok Shop businesses.
With Cruva, Strafford was able to:
- Automate creator outreach and follow-ups.
- Build CRM workflows that encouraged creators to post more content.
- Discover relevant creators using AI-powered search instead of manual browsing.
- Uncover new creator personas and marketing opportunities through creator insights.
Those efficiencies translated into measurable business results:
- 44,000+ units sold on TikTok Shop
- Nearly £160,000 GMV in a single month
- A Top 20 product ranking on TikTok Shop UK
- Over 20 hours saved every week on creator outreach and management
"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."
Instead of hiring additional team members to manage affiliates, Strafford now runs Half Time Club's entire TikTok Shop operation himself.
The time saved is now invested in launching new products, growing the business, and identifying new opportunities without sacrificing the momentum of the affiliate program.
