I was offered the sacred honour of promoting someone else’s tat for free. A brief foray into the glamorous world of influencing — and an even briefer exit.
Apparently, I’m an influencer now. A brand offered me the chance to post about their product in exchange for the sacred honour of keeping it, and then flogging it myself. I passed. But hey, can you claim to be an influencer?
We have a website for selling vintage items. We received, out of the blue, an email from a vintage-style homeware company. They said how much they loved our site and my product, blah blah blah, and how fantastic my product would look displaying their product.
They offered to send some boxes of the product and asked me to remove some furniture from my warehouse, take photos of the product in a stylized setting, and then send the images to them.
The “Collaboration” That Wasn’t
To be honest, this is a process that would probably take me a day, and what would my reward for influencing be? Oh dear, not very much.
In exchange for my time and professional input, I will be allowed to keep all of the items, and they will allow me the right to use my photographs to sell their product that I had to photograph for them. This sort of product is pretty much worthless and we don’t deal in small items anyway.
I don’t know if this was the beginning of a negotiation. If it was, it didn’t go very well as I immediately blocked them.
I think this is what you call the bargain basement, in-the-gutter influencing where the influencer doesn’t actually get anything.
The Real Damage of Repro Tat
I sell on Etsy and other platforms, but Etsy is my main form of income. It was supposed to be just for the retail of craft and vintage goods. However, in a race to the bottom, they have been swamped with reproduction goods disguised as homeware with a vintage look — low grade rubbish from China. They say they are trying to clamp down on this.
It’s been bad for business, so the irony, of course, is these people contacted me and basically want me to promote a product that has actually been quite bad for my business. Clearly, irony and business acumen are very much lacking from these people. I guess you have to admire their cheek.
But this is the world we live in now — where people want a quick buck for no effort, with an expectation that if you give someone something, they’ll give something in return. But they seem to have taken out of the equation the fact that most people who run businesses have worked bloody hard to build them up. When someone comes along waving hollow promises and frankly insults your integrity, you will not get very far.
But there are loads of these firms around. They sell, as I say, on Etsy, eBay, Amazon, etc. And they import absolute rubbish: vintage-style signs, mugs, candles, small pieces of furniture, kitchenalia, crap clocks — all from the same mass suppliers in China. There’s absolutely no variety, and they’re all scrapping for the same market. At the same time, beautiful vintage goods — the ones their products emulate badly — are sitting in antique shops and online platforms, ready for people to buy. Products with real quality and history. And frankly, at the same price. So I think any vintage sellers they contact as their “influencing agent” will tell them the same thing: thanks but no thanks.
#Influencer #Etsyseller #Online Retail #Vintage Retail #Content Creation
The Rights of Fans. 