How do I pitch a brand for a collaboration as a creator?

Typical views means a figure that doesn’t hinge on one viral video. The median is the simplest: sort the views of, say, your last nine Reels from lowest to highest, and with nine values the fifth is your median. Where to find these numbers and how a media kit is built is covered in the media kit guide.

Keep the whole message short enough to fit on one phone screen. The reader then knows within a minute who is writing, what you suggest and what it costs. Make clear if your price excludes VAT. If you use the German Kleinunternehmer rules (small business scheme, § 19 UStG), you don’t show VAT, according to the Hessian tax authority, so your price is the final amount. Also say that the price covers publishing on your own channel. If the brand wants to run the post as an ad, that gets its own quote.

Replace everything in square brackets and delete what doesn’t fit. The first template proposes a paid post, the second asks about an affiliate programme, meaning a commission on sales through your link. The third is your one follow-up. The fourth is the first message in German, for brands whose team works in German. The English templates state the fee excluding VAT: if the brand is based outside Germany, your service is generally treated as supplied where the brand runs its business (§ 3a(2) UStG), and no German VAT is added.

A free product matters for both labelling and tax. According to the German media authorities’ guidelines (May 2025), even handing over a product sent to you can count as consideration, which makes your post advertising. For image and text posts, “Werbung” or “Anzeige” (German for advertisement) goes at the start. If the product is the focus of a video, such as a Reel about that very product, you show “Werbung” on screen for the whole video. If it only appears in passing, a product placement notice at the start is enough, and for products you received free only once their value is over €100, including the combined value of one brand’s products. If the video shows a discount code or where to buy the product, the guidelines no longer treat it as product placement but as advertising.

For tax, the Hessian tax authority (June 2026) says you record the product as income if you work as a creator regularly, promote it and may keep it afterwards, at the usual retail price reduced by usual discounts. According to the tax authority, such benefits in kind generally trigger VAT as well. If you have to send the goods back or they are of very low value, things may differ. The example shows how to turn this into a counter-offer. Below it are three replies to copy: a counter-offer with a fee, the product with an affiliate link, and a polite no.

1. Say a brand offers you a jacket that costs €120 in its shop and would like a Reel in return.
2. Assume your base price for a Reel is €450. You use the Kleinunternehmer rules and don’t charge VAT.
3. If you may keep the jacket, you record it as income, here without any usual discount, so at €120.
4. Your counter-offer: the jacket plus a €330 fee, €450 in total. If you do charge VAT, the product itself can trigger VAT too. How to split the offer then is something to settle with your tax adviser.

Look on the brand’s website for a press, PR or partnerships contact. Some brands run creator partnerships through an agency or an application form. If the website names such a route or a dedicated address, use it rather than customer service. A short DM to the brand account works for a first question, such as who the right person is. Send the offer with numbers by email, where it can be forwarded and filed.

Then there is German competition law. Under § 7(2) no. 2 UWG, advertising by email or other electronic mail without the recipient’s prior express consent is always an unacceptable nuisance. Unlike for phone calls, this also applies when the recipient is a business, and the law sets no minimum number of messages. An exception in § 7(3) covers advertising to customers whose address a business obtained in a sale, which hardly fits here. The law doesn’t say explicitly if a brand that names its own address for partnerships has thereby consented to requests sent there. So use exactly that route, write personally, and never send mass emails to a bought list.

If you hear nothing, follow up once, about a week later, and leave it there. § 7(1) sentence 2 UWG explicitly names advertising to someone who clearly doesn’t want it as an unacceptable nuisance. After a no, don’t send the same offer again.

The figure covers trading companies, not every brand. Still, it suggests that whoever reads your message may never have worked with creators. So explain in one sentence how the collaboration works, and offer a first step that is easy to say yes to: a single post, or a commission on sales through your link. Bitkom Research surveyed managing directors and board members in calendar weeks 11 to 19 of 2025.

Your wyrld storefront shows a brand what you actually recommend: products you use yourself from over 90,000 partner shops, grouped into collections and with up to five of your own photos per product. Put the storefront link in your pitch. The brand then sees at a glance which of its products, or which from its category, you already feature.

To earn through affiliate links on wyrld, you don’t need to ask each brand about an affiliate programme. When you add a product link to your storefront, wyrld identifies the brand, name and variant, looks for the same item across the partner shops and creates the affiliate link for each offer it finds, without you signing up to any network. If wyrld finds the item in several partner shops, your community sees the offers side by side with their prices and buys where it likes, directly from the shop and at no extra cost. According to Bitkom (2022), 65% of online shoppers in Germany say the lowest price is a decisive factor when choosing a shop. Depending on the shop, you earn per click, per sale or both, settled monthly by Gutschrift (self-billing credit note). A personal pitch then matters most for paid posts.

Through wyrld Boost, brands also pay for campaigns that run across many creators at once, paid out by KPIs set in advance. You decide yourself if you take part, and no campaigns are promised to you. The creator terms don’t require exclusivity, so you can keep using your own collaborations and other affiliate programmes alongside wyrld. One limit is set in § 6(2) of the creator terms: you don’t continue business with brands you met through wyrld by bypassing wyrld to earn commission outside the platform. If you work with a talent agency, it gets its own dashboard and runs your storefront together with you. A commission share you agree with your agency is deducted from your earnings by wyrld, and your agency receives its own credit note. wyrld is free for creators.