Grizzly Industrial — The Maker Program

Grizzly Industrial is a national supplier of woodworking, metalworking, and machining equipment, headquartered in Bellingham, Washington. The machines were never the problem. Reach was: how does a decades-old catalog brand earn the trust of a generation of makers who live on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok?

I built the program that answered that, from nothing. Creator strategy, direct relationships with talent and their agents, the logistics of getting freight-class machines into creators' shops, the scripts, the design and imagery support, and the dashboards that proved it moved the number.

The gap. Grizzly had a loyal base and a serious catalog, but no voice inside the maker community, the place where a decision on a $2,000 machine actually gets made now: in the comments under a build video, not in a print spread.

The brief I wrote for myself was simple to say and hard to do. Put Grizzly machines in the hands of creators makers already trust, support those creators so well that the content is genuinely good, and prove the whole thing worked with real attribution.

The right voices, not just new ones. I built the roster around fit, not follower count. Handy Dandy Brandy (138K Instagram) pulled Grizzly into a younger, design-forward, and more diverse maker audience than the brand had ever reached. Bourbon Moth Woodworking (1.2M+ YouTube subscribers, 135M+ lifetime views) put Grizzly machines in front of serious, high-intent builders for thirty minutes at a time. Combined, the roster activated more than 1.4M in earned creator reach.

"Dresdon completely transformed how we approach influencer marketing. His strategy didn't just bring in new voices, it brought in the right voices. We saw immediate lift in engagement, reach, and brand trust." — Brian Jensen, Marketing Director, Grizzly Industrial

I built the attribution layer in Looker Studio: creator performance per campaign, conversion paths from content through to purchase, and ROAS across concurrent programs. Leadership got a number they could defend in a quarterly review, and I got a feedback loop to double down on what converted and quietly retire what didn't.

Machines are not swag. Sending a creator a t-shirt is easy. Sending a creator a jointer is a logistics project. I owned physical fulfillment alongside the marketing, coordinating directly with the product and sales departments to spec the right machine for each shop, confirm inventory, and manage delivery of freight-class equipment across the country. A creator standing in an empty shop on launch day never partners with you again. The machines showed up, set up, ready to film.

Making the creators look great. A solo creator does not have a studio behind them, so I became it. I wrote scripts and talking points that carried the product truth without ever sounding like an ad read, and provided branded graphics, thumbnails, and product assets so a one-person channel could ship content that looked like it had a brand team behind it. The discipline was restraint: keep the creator's voice, hand them everything, then get out of the way.

The color was the strategy. Every commercially available Grizzly product ships in the standard green and black. I built the entire influencer kit on the brand's original 1983 heritage colors instead, the red, black, and gold of the founding mark. That set official-partner merch visibly apart from anything a customer could buy off the shelf, kept the program distinct from the separate 40th-anniversary line, and made a creator wearing the red-and-gold cap instantly recognizable as one of ours.