How Calori improved CPA and saved 10 hours a month with Vaiku

01, Background

What Calori is

Calori is a Finnish healthy-food home-delivery service that builds its growth direct-to-consumer through TikTok and Instagram. The audience scrolls fast and the content has to hold up against everything else in the feed. A single ad isn't enough — a consumer sees hundreds in a day. You have to ship a lot, and a lot of it has to work.

Marketing is led by CMO Shaker Halabeya. The team is small, and its job is to produce a constant flow of content that converts. Influencer collaborations were a key channel from the start, but running them by hand ate more time than the team had to give.

02, Challenge

The manual process was a bottleneck

Calori's marketing team is small, and they couldn't turn every influencer into a multi-day project. The manual way — find profile, send DM, negotiate, agree terms, brief, follow up — ate the time that should have gone into making better videos.

TikTok's reachability problem

TikTok made outreach especially hard. A large share of creators have DMs disabled entirely, and response rates weren't high enough for traditional outbound to work. Calori went manually, got replies rarely, and every reply required its own round of negotiation.

Agencies were a bad fit

Agencies were an option, but they required an upfront fee and brought rosters where a large share of the influencers didn't match Calori's audience. Big names were on the list, but their audiences didn't necessarily convert on Calori's product.

The mega-influencer trap

Later in the campaign, a structural problem surfaced. A mega-influencer's video can rack up millions of views, but if the audience follows dozens of similar accounts, intent is low. They watch, they don't buy.

• TikTok DMs don't respond. A large share of creators have outreach disabled entirely.
• Manual influencer scouting is slow. Profile browsing and fit assessment by hand eats weekly hours.
• Agencies are expensive. Upfront fees before results, and poorly-targeted rosters.
• Mega-influencers don't convert. Passive audiences watch but don't buy.

03, Solution

Flip the direction: influencers apply themselves

Calori published a campaign on Vaiku that stated clearly what they were looking for and on what terms. Instead of the team chasing influencers one by one, 54 high-intent influencers applied themselves. The ones who were actually interested in Calori and ready to collaborate.

That changed the quality dynamic entirely. Replies came fast, applicants were motivated, and the team could focus on selection — not chasing. Pulling in the same volume of leads manually would have taken weeks of DM work. And the whole process — messages, contracts, payouts — stayed in one place.

What Calori did on Vaiku

• Published a campaign brief with clear terms and an audience description.
• Received 54 applications from influencers whose audience matched Calori's target.
• Selected the best applicants. The team spent its time on review, not on chasing.
• Scaled with whitelist ads. The best videos were promoted as paid ads from the influencers' own profiles.

06, Results

Cheaper CPA, better content, time freed up

The primary goal was direct purchase. Result: CPA clearly lower than traditional advertising. According to Calori, the reason is structural. Influencer content is more native, and when it's run as a whitelist ad from the influencer's own profile, it converts better than a generic brand ad.

A top performer in their entire history

Iiris Fräntilä's video became one of Calori's best-performing ads in their entire history. Several other videos also performed above average, so the campaign's structure produced results — not just a single hit.

10 hours a month saved

The time savings have a concrete measure. Calori's estimate: per video, ~30–60 minutes of manual coordination time saved. At a 10-video-per-month cadence, that's ~10 hours per month freed up for strategy work and content development.

07, Takeaway

Intent beats reach

One of the campaign's most important findings was about audience quality. A mega-influencer's video can rack up millions of views, but if the audience follows dozens of similar accounts, intent is low. They watch, they don't buy.

Vaiku enables a different approach: reaching a smaller but strongly engaged audience. Influencers whose followers react, comment, ask questions, and buy. It's a structurally more durable way to build a campaign than hunting individual viral hits.

Combined with the fact that the entire process — contracts, messages, payouts — stays in one place, the outcome is what Calori's team was originally aiming for: more results from the same workload.