# Nicole S.

Nicole (Nico) Santos works in retail and e-commerce, with experience spanning operations, photography, technology, partnerships and sales. Santos is now building a company focused on commerce and merchant problems, and writes about customer-first business, collaboration and the role of relationships in commerce.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/nicole-s/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicotsantos
- LinkedIn followers: 16,692
- Median of last 8 posts: 25 reactions, 3 comments (checked 2026-11-02)
- Topics: ecommerce, social-commerce, community-building
- Based on 9 dated posts, latest 2026-09-30

## Summary

Useful for relationship-led thought leadership on social commerce, creator partnerships, merchant problems, and community for commerce audiences.

- Best for: Social-commerce software brands and merchant or agency campaigns needing co-authored thought leadership.
- Not for: Paid affiliate or TikTok Shop video sprints judged on conversion.
- Check first: Confirm commercial terms, deliverables, platform specs, and audience analytics before contacting them.

### Takeaways

- Relationships, not reach, are what actually sell.
- Build alongside founders, not just for them.
- Customer-first craft is learned on the retail floor.

## Main ideas

- **Relationships, not reach, are what actually sell**: Santos's most repeated argument is that commerce runs on relationships rather than audience size. The version Santos uses is "relationship led selling": understanding the merchant, their team, their customers and the problems slowing those teams down. Speed is treated as a tool, not an answer — AI can make a person faster, but it cannot replace trust. The same idea recurs when Santos asks what community looks like once the purchase has been made, and when reflecting that industries and technology change while the people you meet stay with you.
- **Build alongside founders, not just for them**: Santos argues that the companies serving entrepreneurs should treat founders as collaborators instead of a market to sell into. Citing a Shopify statistic that 54% of businesses on the platform are run by women, Santos turns the number into a design question rather than a celebration: what if the industry spent less time building for founders and more time building alongside them — listening, collaborating, bringing different perspectives to the table? The stated conclusion is that the best ideas are built through connection, not in isolation. Santos credits women founders and the men who have mentored, championed and invested in women-led businesses.
- **Customer-first craft is learned on the retail floor**: Santos locates their operating principles in an early retail career rather than in technology. Marking 22 years since a first Black Friday at Nordstrom, Santos describes seven years there learning from people in retail, working with brands, serving customers and selling across departments, and names the lessons that stuck: put the customer first, take ownership, serve people well, stay curious, create with excellence. A later path through operations, photography, technology, partnerships and sales is presented as the reason for a wider view of commerce — the retail grounding is the origin story the other arguments rest on.
- **Community should outlast the transaction**: Santos argues the opportunity in commerce is larger than the sale: ecosystems in which brands, partners and consumers participate in something together. Vendors, merchants and consumers are described as all looking for more meaningful connection, and the question Santos keeps returning to is what building community beyond the business deal, or beyond the moment a purchase is made, actually looks like. The same instinct shows in Santos's industry-event posts, which gather founders, brands, retailers, platforms and technology leaders around creator commerce and partnerships, TikTok Shop, affiliate marketing, AI and live shopping, and treat Utah as a fast-growing hub for consumer brands and creator-led businesses.
- **The current chapter is being built in public, with pilot partners**: Santos writes openly about a new season of building and about who is coming along with it. The posts are first-person progress updates: a return to the entrepreneurial world, a named brand as an early pilot, a stated partnership with Yeco and its team, a keynote slot promoted to a local audience. They typically close with an invitation to connect directly. This is a signal of stage and openness rather than a documented commercial offer — no sponsorship, paid-post format or rate card appears anywhere in the reviewed posts.

## Work to read

- [Twenty-two years in retail: the Nordstrom years](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/nicotsantos_this-year-marks-22-years-since-i-worked-my-activity-7505289548390903808-11Ul)
- [What they are building now: pilot partners and relationship-led selling](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/nicotsantos_i-caught-up-today-with-one-of-my-favorite-activity-7510763523573174272-PQ15)
- [Building alongside founders, not just for them](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/nicotsantos_womenintech-womenfounders-shopify-activity-7516191545931239425-N4Xg)
- [Community beyond the transaction](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/nicotsantos_caught-up-with-my-friend-haley-kelly-co-founder-activity-7511122375569141760-Q_HU)
- [Speaking at a social commerce summit](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/nicotsantos_utah-friends-the-social-commerce-news-activity-7503175009645772800-Ncns)
- [The values test: leading with intention, not ambition](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/nicotsantos_loved-connecting-with-jennifer-villalba-activity-7518742790227288064-_jC9)

## Brand relationships

- **Nordstrom** (employment)
- **Yeco** (disclosed_partnership)
- **Social Commerce News** (mention)
- **Shopify** (mention)

## Partnerships

The reviewed material documents partnership activity in a business-development sense rather than a published creator-sponsorship program. Santos writes about partnering with Yeco and its team, about a brand in the Shopify ecosystem becoming one of the first pilots for what Santos is launching, and about speaking at a Social Commerce News summit in New York while promoting the Salt Lake City edition. Across the posts, the recurring method is relationship-led selling: understanding the merchant, their team and their customers, and treating AI as an accelerant rather than a replacement for trust. What is not present is any public sponsorship offer, rate card, deliverable list, platform specification, or stated partnership inquiry route. The reviewed posts contain no disclosure of a paid sponsorship and no description of how a brand would commission work. For a buyer, that means collaboration terms are undocumented in the available evidence: the practical next step is a direct conversation rather than a form or published package. This reflects what the reviewed material does and does not show; it is not a finding that Santos never accepts sponsorships.

## Alternatives

- Jamie Gutfreund: Choose Jamie Gutfreund when the same brief needs category-level evidence and an audience already assembled rather than a merchant-relationship narrative. Their reviewed posts carry a Forbes piece built on named executive interviews — LTK's Amber Venz Box, WPP Media's Patricia Marangé, Target's Pat Burke — and eMarketer figures on affiliate spending, plus a SoCom Los Angeles session that debuts an "Apples to Apples" platform market map and a method for comparing creator performance on equal terms. For a software company whose buyer is senior brand or agency leadership still running affiliate and creator work in disconnected teams, the fragmenting-organisation diagnosis is already this creator's published thesis, and the vendor inherits an established publication and a social-commerce conference rather than having to build one.
- Yenan Wang: Choose Yenan Wang when the same brief should be anchored in live shopping and cross-market comparison. Their reviewed posts draw on four years at TikTok, including leading TikTok LIVE UK and its European creator network, and use current figures: creators above one million followers at 10.66% of China's livestream-commerce GMV against 89.34% for mid-size and smaller streamers, brand-owned livestreams past half of GMV, Meituan's AI hosts running around the clock with an 82% rise in average daily transaction value, and TikTok Shop UK LIVE up 55% year on year. The same material carries a usable argument for a tooling vendor — that entertainment, media and the storefront are collapsing into one system, so the creator is both distribution and channel. A buyer whose merchant and agency readers are deciding what live shopping is worth in the West gets a more concrete forecast here than from a general partnership case.
- Jason Munk: Choose Jason Munk when the brief should speak to customer-success and account-management leaders in software. Their reviewed posts give a practitioner account of moving from account management into customer success and rebuilding the function from reactive support into proactive engagement with success plans, customer outcomes and growth, plus a report from the Utah Customer Success Meetup at Awardco covering four breakout sessions and a regional group for staying connected. If the software company's goal is the retention-and-expansion side of merchant relationships — the work that happens after the sale — this creator already writes in that register and can convene a customer-success audience that a commerce tool would otherwise reach late.

---
AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/