ProductWind helps brands drive e-commerce sales by coordinating thousands of micro-influencers to drive traffic and sales to retailers and marketplaces, solving the challenge of lengthy product launch cycles that typically cost brands six to nine months of time and major marketing investment. 

The company’s software platform turns creator campaigns from unpredictable content generation into organized word-of-mouth campaigns that increase product visibility within Amazon and other marketplaces.

“The algorithm is the decision maker on how successful your product will be,” explains Tim Wilson, Chief Revenue Officer at ProductWind. “In the past, if you were a consumer brand, you would meet with the Buyer and have weeks of strategy sessions to win them over. That role has changed, and much of the product placement – both organic and sponsored – is now determined by the algorithm.”

ProductWind emerged in 2020 after founder and former Amazon product lead Jason Kowalski observed that brands were investing heavily in influencer marketing without understanding how to drive retail sales. Tim, who joined the company three years ago, was attracted by this approach to a persistent market challenge.

“What I thought was super interesting was how ProductWind’s approach focused on helping companies launch new products faster,” Tim shares. “From my experience talking to consumer brands, I knew they struggled.”

The Philosophy of ProductWind

ProductWind has built its business on a core belief: As retailers become more AI-powered, brands must update their marketing strategy and playbook.

“AI is already here in the retail channel, but most brands are still looking for a strategy. A question we believe worth asking is, ‘How do you market to the algorithm?’” Tim states. “We find that most consumer brands don’t. It’s not part of their strategy.”

Instead of solely focusing on the end consumer, ProductWind argues that brands must recognize they have two distinct customers: the end shopper and the retailer AI algorithm.

“The better you can market to both, the more you get a magnified share of voice,” Tim explains. “People have taken their traditional approaches and obsessed over the end shopper and have been ignoring the algorithm at their own peril.”

With increased competition from both domestic and international sellers, as well as a growing investment in advertising, brands struggle to drive media efficiency while enhancing product visibility and credibility. Tim believes they’re all trying to gain momentum, whether for new product launches or to boost products that have slowed sales or faced inventory challenges.

“They’re all struggling to drive product visibility and to get to a point where they feel like, if it’s a product launch, it’s retail ready, and if it’s not a product launch, they can just boost it,” he says.

How ProductWind Markets to the Algorithm

Tim explains that while many brands focus on optimizing product listings, titles, and descriptions—what he calls “the 20%”—they’re missing the more impactful signals that algorithms value.

“80% of the algorithm is focused on five things: traffic, external traffic, conversion, sales, and sales velocity,” Tim reveals. “Those five things signal to the algorithm that your product is what people want to buy. The most important of those five is sales velocity.”

According to Tim, the algorithm thrives on a large volume of traffic from numerous trusted creators and brand advocates. “Think thousands of creators, not 10 or 20. When you activate a large number of creators to promote a product, you communicate to the algorithm that the promoted product is gaining popularity—it’s “hot” and “getting hotter.” 

When this happens, Tim adds, organic ranking improves, and sponsored ads become cheaper, creating a positive snowball effect: a higher organic rank leads to more efficient media spend, increased traffic drives more sales, which generates more reviews, and the cycle continues.

Orchestrating Success at Scale

ProductWind’s approach involves working with hundreds or thousands of creators for a single campaign, categorizing them based on their behavioral tendencies and strengths.

“The big unlock for us occurred a couple of years ago,” Tim shares. “We used to believe that the more content you had online, the more likely your product was to be successful. But we learned that it was extremely difficult to reliably and predictably understand the results from launching a hundred TikTok videos, for example.”

Instead, ProductWind now focuses on understanding each creator’s behavioral patterns and strengths, organizing them into different functional groups. Some creators excel at driving traffic, while others are better at generating content and sharing opinions.

“If you’re good at driving traffic and clicks, you go into one bucket. If you’re someone who enjoys generating content and sharing your opinion on things, those people are great because they’re going to be good about putting out the word and creating content,” Tim explains.

The company then designs these creators’ activities, strategically releasing them in waves to signal growing popularity to the algorithm.

“The other big unlock is scale,” Tim says. “We used to activate a dozen creators with mixed results. But then we found that algorithms love scale. If we have, let’s say, 500 brand advocates that’ll each share it with 20 people, that’s 10,000 visits of external traffic.”

Measuring What Matters

Unlike traditional influencer marketing metrics that focus on reach and engagement, ProductWind tracks specific e-commerce performance indicators directly connected to algorithmic success:

“Our software automatically tracks your product’s organic placement and sponsored ad efficiency. So this product was organically ranked 88th for the search term ‘earbuds,’ and now it’s ranked ninth,” Tim explains. “We track your SEO, organic placement, sponsored product placement, unit sales, reviews, and BSR [Best Seller Rank].” 

Organic and sponsored product placement together represent a product’s “share of voice” on the platform, which Tim identifies as a leading indicator of future sales. “If somebody knows how many placements you have and where you are, that is your share of voice. And share of voice is a leading indicator of future sales. If you have more products ranked higher, your sales will likely increase.”

To gather this data, ProductWind combines third-party data providers like Helium 10, first-party data from integrated seller accounts, and their web scraping to monitor real-time in-stock rates and detail page changes.

Results for Brands

While Tim couldn’t name specific clients, he shared several case studies of ProductWind’s impact for Fortune 500 companies:

“We had a customer last year whose holiday was super important for them, and they were unhappy with the amount of inventory space that Amazon gave them in their warehouse. They worked with ProductWind to run a campaign over the summer and into the fall, aiming to increase their IPI score on Amazon. And sure enough, it did. They got dramatically more warehouse space and had the largest holiday ever.”

Another example involved a CPG beverage company that saw improvement in search visibility: “When we started working with them, one of the results of the campaign was that the product went from not being on page one for search to being on page one for an additional 31 different search terms. Those 31 different search terms resulted in around 400,000 additional searches that their product was in front of.”

As Tim explains, such improvements in organic ranking deliver cascading benefits across the entire e-commerce ecosystem. “Because these platforms are algorithmically driven, everything is connected,” he says. “So, organic placement not only drives visibility and an increase in traffic for your listing but will also improve your sponsored product rank, which means your media efficiency will improve. And that’s when everything starts to snowball.”

Influencer Marketing for E-Commerce

Within the growing creator economy, Tim sees influencers becoming more integrated into the e-commerce ecosystem.

“Mary Meeker, a famous analyst in Silicon Valley, said several years ago, ‘I see retailers are becoming brands and brands are becoming retailers.’ This was a big shift, and I see that happening with the influencer space as well,” Tim observes. “Some of the bigger influencers are starting to become their own brand in the sense of a social media identity, but also with products, retailers, and storefronts. Influencers are becoming micro-malls.”

While this transformation creates promising possibilities, it also presents implementation challenges. Tim notes that the traditional affiliate model, for instance, doesn’t fully address the algorithmic dimension of e-commerce.

ProductWind is adapting to meet changing market needs. “We are doubling down on automation and use cases,” Tim explains, adding that the platform now offers multiple automated solutions that brands can activate with minimal setup. “All you have to do is click the button for the use case you need, and it’ll automate everything for you.”

The company believes its algorithm-focused approach will become more essential as the creator economy matures. “Using influencers to influence the algorithm is something that eventually everyone will be doing,” Tim predicts.

A Team Approach to Creator Marketing

For executives working in the creator economy, Tim offers a key insight based on ProductWind’s experience running thousands of creators across campaigns: specialization and scale yield better results than expecting creators to be all-in-one solutions.

“I would ask them to look at the real objective of your client’s campaign and be sure you’re finding the people with that core strength,” Tim advises. “I feel like we often expect creators to be able to do all these different things for the brand, and very few people are MrBeast. Very few people can do all these different things.”

Instead, Tim advocates for a team approach, leveraging each creator’s natural strengths rather than expecting a few influencers to excel at everything.

“To do things right, you need a team to solve your customers’ problems,” he advises. “Use data to determine people’s natural strengths, then put them in a position to play to those strengths. These problems are complex, and you need many different things to go right for the customer to succeed. So putting people in a position to play to their innate strengths is critical.”