About Nopalera

Nopalera is a modern Mexican beauty brand founded during the pandemic by Sandra Velasquez out of her Brooklyn apartment. A musician for 15 years before this, Sandra had no beauty connections, so she enrolled herself in formulation school and made the first products in her kitchen. The brand launched with soaps and lotion bars but was always something bigger: a luxury, heritage-rooted line built around the nopal cactus and made for ritual, for the global beauty customer, for everyone with a little wanderlust.

‌

Today the brand is powered by scent, with three signature fragrances (Dulce de Cuerpo, Bosque Místico, and Flor de Madera) carried through a full ritual of hand cream, body cream, and more. Sandra became known for turning down every shark on Shark Tank rather than dilute the company's valuation, and the brand later closed a Series A in April 2026, making her one of the very few Latina women to receive institutional investment. One of Nopalera's brand pillars is standing in your worth.

‌

Amanda Parker is Head of Growth, overseeing .com and Amazon growth and all marketing, including the influencer team. A media planner by trade with a decade on the agency side, she has a sharp point of view on where creators fit.

‌

“I think of every creator as just a publisher. It's another place to put an ad, and you're always searching for the most authentic place for your brand to show up. Any beauty brand at scale has to participate in this ecosystem.” — Amanda Parker

That philosophy shapes who tells the brand's story. Nopalera deliberately keeps an open tent, casting across ages and backgrounds because Mexican culture is multigenerational and the brand is about ritual and self-care, not an aspiration of youth.

The Challenge

Before Archive, Nopalera's creator work was entirely manual. The team leaned on free tools like Facebook's Creator Marketplace and plain Instagram, and lived in Google Spreadsheets. It functioned, but it could not grow.

‌

The real issue was not a single broken task; it was a ceiling. There was no way to scale the channel inside that setup, and scale was exactly what the moment demanded. Nopalera had landed in Ulta, online in the US and in stores in Mexico and the Middle East, and creators were the primary way the brand could drive awareness and foot traffic in those new markets. At the same time, earned media value (EMV) had become part of the conversation with retail partners and investors, and a hand-cobbled number does not hold up on a slide in front of major retailers.

The Solution

Nopalera moved its creator program into Archive and made it the primary platform for sourcing, whitelisting, and reporting. The team's day runs on Collections. Edith, the influencer manager, does a first pass through everything that comes in and pulls standouts into an “ad options” collection. Amanda and the media buyer review those for paid potential, and approved picks go straight to a Usage Rights request inside the platform, no more loose links scattered across Slack. The same Collections approach lets the team report holistically on brand moments that are not strictly influencer campaigns, like the brand's feature in Aeroméxico's premium kits.

‌

For paid partnerships, the team uses Creator Search to find the handful of creators they will run flat-fee campaigns with, filtering by location so they reach people who fit the campaign, a creator who can credibly shoot desert vibes in the middle of winter, or who lives in a state where the brand performs. Archive complements Nopalera's affiliate platform, ShopMy, without pigeonholing the team into one pool: as Amanda puts it, Archive keeps them from fishing in too small a pond.

‌

Underneath it all, Archive is how Nopalera finally tracks EMV and program performance from a credible third-party source. That legitimacy is what makes the number usable in the rooms that matter, retail reviews with Ulta and fundraising conversations with investors, because everyone is speaking the same measurement language.

The Results

Today Nopalera runs roughly one campaign a month end to end through Archive, sourcing, whitelisting, and reporting from one platform instead of Google Spreadsheets. The program captures more than 800 pieces of tagged content a month and produces around $600K in monthly EMV, a credible third-party number the team takes into Ulta retail reviews and investor conversations. Creator marketing now spans three countries, supporting Ulta shelf space in the US online, Mexico, and the Middle East. Collections feed Usage Rights requests in batches instead of one-off Slack links, and Creator Search opens up broader, location-precise sourcing well beyond the brand's affiliate pool.

‌

“Archive is a great marriage of simplicity and the sophisticated functionality you actually want. There's enough about influencer marketing that's still manual. Sourcing, the number one pain, need not be one of them.”