Instagram influencer with 2M followers fails to sell 36 t-shirts

> "But I was getting such good feedback that people loved it & were gonna buy it"

Welcome to creating your own business/project 101. Never trust feedback from friends, or basically anyone not handing you money or committing their own time to it.

This is the first hard lesson you learn and probably the most important one.

Also the fact she "flew out" a photographer and makeup artist was a questionable business choice for something that could have been tested for free, considering her apparent reach. Either way even bad press like this is good for business.

Second time I’ve seen this article, what I fail to understand why this person receives so much attention for this. My gut instinct was that this was just a marketing campaign. Everyone wants to see a person with that many followers fail. Seeing them fail makes us feel like we are more similar. Same as articles/memes that talk about bill gates standing in line for something. In Dutch we say as reaction to that, “Hij is zo lekker gewoon gebleven”. It translates to something like that he didn’t let the fame get into his head. But the Dutch version is more often then not used as sarcasm.

I sometimes worry a bit when reading these kind of articles, is there an agenda behind it? Is it actually true? Can recommend the podcast: Benjamin walkers theory of everything.

Anyway it’s hard to understand what kind of influence influencers have. Perhaps you are better off with 100 followers that really are invested then 2 million followers that mindlessly like your grams to forget about their own lives for half a second. I think it’s similar to buying a lottery ticket, you buy the ability to wonder what kind of person you would be if you win. Or in the case of influencers, what it would be like to have their lifestyle.

What. No picture of the shirt?

How can we assess the circumstance without the shirt?

If the shirt was weak it would be unsurprising that it failed to sell. If her audience is girls, it would need to be a girl's shirt that aligns with the her style, presuming it's one her followers would seek to emulate. If her audience is guys, it needs to appeal to guys, such that they'll probably wear it in a working rotation of commodity utility t-shirts.

Providing that she's attractive and offering a certain type of appeal, her followers are probably guys cruising Instagram for the bikini shots. Quick guess: her audience would only want t-shirts that appeal to a form masculinity that speaks nothing to whether they're there to beat off to her pictures. She'd need to dance around that, in order to craft a product that she can move into their hands, such that they'll understand they're funding more bikini photo shoots.

Fraud or no, I'm guessing that FB isn't going to simply let free posts be able to reach near the same number of impressions as a "Sponsored Post". This is why we don't see chronological or unfiltered submissions in timelines/news-feeds -- free users reaching intended consumer audiences more effectively is a threat to the business models of the advertising companies that host their social networks. In other words, why would I pay for a sponsored post if it were cheaper and more effective to reach out to my own network or work with another user?

Instagram is a big shell game. Most of the likes and follows these so-called "influencers" get are from other wannabe influencers. If I can like your stuff enough, maybe you'll like and follow me back. Even if a fair number of followers have real people on the other end of them, the engagement is often quite superficial and transactional.

First I thought that it would be an article making jokes about her "influence", fake followers and so on, but after reading I felt sympathy. She tries to create her own clothes brand, maybe she doesn't know anything about it, maybe she has failed this time, but it is a valuable experience. It is not like you are going to succeed from the first time, but it is better to do anything than nothing. Don't understand the negative comments. Maybe they are from people who have no followers?

I'm surprised people are commenting on fake vs. real followers. Even if the 2M followers are real, that would not necessarily translate into selling T-shirts.

Do the T-shirts even look good? Is a T-shirt what people want? Why do I want another T-shirt when I have dozens of good-looking free ones already? These are the real questions.

Probably because of fake followers. You can buy a few hundred thousand at a time on fiverr. They no longer 'sell followers' probably due to fiverr ToS changes, but they will 'promote your account' which I'm sure is the same thing.

As a gag I once bought a million twitter followers for around $400. They decayed at about 5% per month until only a few thousand were left when I closed my twitter account.

example: https://www.fiverr.com/search/gigs?utf8=%E2%9C%93&source=top...

I’ve seen this variations of this article posted on twitter. While I think there’s lessons to learn, I think there’s more to be unpacked here. For example, what clothes was she selling? For how much? I’ve read she did very little advertising (only one or two posts) but to be honest, her IG is pretty bare. I’m surprised she has 2m followers at all.

Is this more or less crazy than: 'Company worth 100 billion dollars fails to make profit'?

1% engagement is a good metric to hit on social for real followers. Obviously not a 100% always accurate rule but apply and you’ll see instantly who bought fake followers.

Influencers with million of followers are no longer where the money is because their audiences have been desensitized towards those ads and messages, and they have learned to completely tune it out. Micro-influencers are where the actions take place nowadays.

In my opinion, much of future online shopping will be done on social media platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, etc... where you may see a demo photo/video of a product, you simply click buy and complete the transaction right there without ever having to leave the platform to a third party website.

I believe Instagram already has this feature up now, but its availability is limited to only big brands. They are probably using it as a pilot to collect relevant data and to optimize those metrics before launching the feature platform wide.

I've recently seen something similar when Paul Rigby launched his crowdfunding campaign for "Don't Do That, Donald" https://unbound.com/books/dont-do-that-donald/. With tens of thousands of followers, many teaser images posted over more than a year, an apparently well designed products, and a widely talked about subject, I thought he would hit his funding levels trivially, but it seems to be surprisingly slow going.

So will she have to get a real job now?

I confuse ‘influencer’ with attention seeker.

Fake followers/likes no doubt. Hell I could knock on 10 doors and sell one tshirt.

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