Summary
CHALLENGE
- A team of just two co-founders plus one working student, with no one dedicated to affiliates.
- An affiliate app set up three years earlier (GoAffPro) never gained traction.
- Micro-influencers often post once, then stop when sales don’t come immediately.
SOLUTION
- Switched to UpPromote for easier payment automation after hearing it recommended on a podcast.
- Recruited a midwife with around 400,000 Instagram followers who had bought the product herself.
- Built a hybrid deal (fixed fee plus 20% commission) with a 15% discount for her audience.
- Ran separate, hand-curated programs for midwives, moms of babies, and moms of toddlers.
RESULTS
- 392 affiliate orders through UpPromote in the first seven months of 2026.
- Close to 10% of the store’s 4,327 total Shopify orders so far this year.
- A July sales spike driven by the 400,000-follower midwife.
LESSONS
- A perfectly matched niche partner can outperform a bigger, broader influencer.
- An affiliate tool only pays off when you commit real effort to it.
- With a small team, recruiting affiliates from loyal customers scales without adding headcount.
Talking Hands is a German startup that turns sign language into flipbooks, helping small children communicate before they can speak.
The idea is personal. Co-founder Laura’s sister has Down syndrome and couldn’t speak until she was seven, and that struggle to be understood inspired a playful way for any child to learn signs.
Six years in, the company is still small: co-founders Maria Möller and Laura, plus one working student. That lean setup shapes everything about how they run affiliate marketing.
Why wasn’t Talking Hands’ first affiliate program working?
Talking Hands had dabbled in affiliate marketing before. Three years ago they set up GoAffPro, but it never gained traction.
We had a handful of affiliates, and there wasn’t really that much happening, because we also didn’t put too much work into the whole affiliate thing.
Maria Möller, Co-founder of Talking Hands
Then Maria started hearing other startups talk about real affiliate success. After learning about UpPromote through a podcast featuring another German brand, the team decided to give the channel one more, more serious try. Easier payment automation sealed the switch.
What made Talking Hands’ affiliate program take off?
Three moves turned a dormant program into a real revenue channel: the right partner, a deal built for a niche brand, and programs tailored to each audience.
The breakthrough came from an unexpected place: an existing customer. A midwife with around 400,000 Instagram followers, a specialist in babies and parenting, bought a Talking Hands flipbook herself in January.
She actually bought our product by herself. We saw it on her story, and then our Shopify store just got a lot of orders.
Maria Möller, Co-founder of Talking Hands
That was the signal. The team reached out, and after a long back-and-forth, the midwife agreed to collaborate. Her audience was a near-exact match for the product, which made her far more valuable than a bigger, broader influencer.
Big influencers usually want money upfront. As a small brand, Talking Hands couldn’t take that risk blind, so they built a hybrid deal: a fixed fee plus affiliate commission on top. The midwife earns 20%, above the 15% Talking Hands gives other affiliates, and her community gets 15% off.
Even 20% is still like a 5X ROS. But then her community gets another 15% off, so the margin isn’t amazing… we’re hoping they come back and buy again.
Maria Möller, Co-founder of Talking Hands
The upfront fee removed the risk for the brand, while the commission kept the incentive aligned once sales started coming in.
Behind the partnerships sits a carefully segmented structure. Talking Hands runs separate programs for midwives, for moms of babies, and for moms of toddlers. Each program has its own onboarding, because the benefits of sign language differ by age, and every affiliate is hand-picked rather than mass-recruited.
What results has Talking Hands seen with UpPromote?
The more serious approach paid off quickly. Since starting in January 2026, Talking Hands has logged 392 affiliate orders through UpPromote in a little under seven months.
Against 4,327 total Shopify orders so far this year, that works out to close to 10% of all orders coming from affiliates.
July was pretty high, because it was this mega influencer.
Maria Möller, Co-founder of Talking Hands
For a two-person startup that had barely touched affiliate marketing a year earlier, a near-10% share is a meaningful new revenue stream.
What’s next for Talking Hands?
The hard part now is momentum. Most of the brand’s roughly 30 affiliates are micro-influencers with up to 5,000 followers, and keeping them active is tough for a tiny team.
They initially start posting, but then sales don’t come up immediately. They get frustrated and just stop posting.
Maria Möller, Co-founder of Talking Hands
To grow without adding headcount, Maria plans to recruit affiliates from the brand’s own Shopify customers, people who already love the product, through an email invitation and a dedicated program for existing buyers. It’s a low-effort way to turn happy customers into the next perfect-fit partners.
