One Amazon influencer makes a living posting content from her beige home. But after she noticed another account hawking the same minimal aesthetic,...

[Kasgoinjail]

Both these hoes are silly n need a real skill

 

[TAYLONDO SAMSWORTHY]

Bots suing bots

 

[newworldafro]

The influencer lawsuit that could change the industry

Behind the scenes of a court battle for the “clean girl” look.

www.theverge.com

Bad influence​

One Amazon influencer makes a living posting content from her beige home. But after she noticed another account hawking the same minimal aesthetic, a rivalry spiraled into a first-of-its-kind lawsuit. Can the legal system protect the vibe of a creator? And what if that vibe is basic?​

By Mia Sato, platforms and communities reporter with five years of experience covering the companies that shape technology and the people who use their tools.

Photography by Montinique Monroe and Liam James Doyle for The Verge

Nov 26, 2024, 9:32 AM EST

Photo by Liam James Doyle for The Verge

Alyssa Sheil has what some would consider a dream job: she shops online for a living. Every day, an Amazon delivery truck pulls up to her home to drop off jewelry, handbags, desk chairs, fake plants, and transparent birdhouses that allow you to see the inhabitants make a home inside. So many packages arrive in a week that she doesn’t know the exact number when I ask.

Some of these items suck. The ones that don’t might eventually make it into one of Sheil’s videos, shared to her more than 430,000 followers on TikTok and Instagram with titles like “Amazon summer shoe haul,” “ASMR Amazon vacay jewelry unboxing,” and “Amazon kitchen finds I’m obsessed with.”

Sheil’s own Amazon purchases don’t so much decorate her home as they do serve as a set for her online content. When I visit her house in a quiet, clean subdivision outside of Austin, Texas, the first thing I notice is the avalanche of beige and neutrals. Everything around me — the rugs, the art, the books on the shelves — are shades of white, black, or cream. Dainty gold bracelets and necklaces hang undisturbed off an ecru display rack. Fuzzy benches and chairs in shades of eggshell and oyster seem like they have never been sat on. Sheil shows me a round birch-colored side table that I recognize from countless videos of hers. The table and cream chair next to it are surrounded by cool bare white walls, everything bathed in soft natural light filtered through semi-sheer snow-colored curtains. After a few minutes of walking through her home, it starts to feel like I’m browsing paint chips at Lowe’s: Extra White, Grecian Ivory, Shiitake, White Heron. She likes it this way. “It’s definitely very calming,” Sheil, 21, says of her decor. “Growing up, my parents had a bunch of pictures on the walls, they had rooms that had different colors… So when we moved into this place, I was like, ‘I don’t want a bunch of stuff on the walls. I don’t want mismatched things. I just want it to all be cohesive and plain.’” It is not just Sheil who prefers her space to be colorless — a generation of women dream in beige and cream.

Sheil in her home office, where she searches and reviews Amazon products.

Sheil runs what is essentially a one-woman marketing operation, making product recommendations, trying on outfits, and convincing people to buy things they often don’t really need. Every time someone purchases something using her affiliate link, she gets a kickback. Shopping influencers like her have figured out how to build a career off someone else’s impulse buys.

She demonstrates how she might record a video showing off a pair of white mesh kitten heels: attach a phone to a tripod and angle the camera toward a corner in her home office where there is nothing in the background, just a blank wall and part of a chair. The shoes pop against the nothingness, new and clean and buyable. To show off an outfit, Sheil drags a full-length mirror in front of her and snaps into a pose; she is — quite literally — a pro.

The only item in her home not from Amazon is an all-white canvas poster handmade by Sheil that hangs above her work desk. In big block letters, it reads, “I AM SO LUCKY.” Perched beneath this mantra, Sheil plugs away at her computer searching for Amazon products that fit her colorless world.

But all of this — the videos, the big house, her earnings — could come crashing down: Sheil is currently embroiled in a court case centered on the very content that is her livelihood, a Texas lawsuit in which she is being sued for damages that could reach into the millions.

It has been stressful and confusing to navigate lawyers, having to defend herself against accusations lodged at her by another Amazon influencer: copyright infringement, tortious interference with prospective business relations, misappropriating another person’s likeness, among other accusations. Even with the lawsuit looming over her, Sheil is still confident that the industry is ripe with opportunity, that beneath all these ivory stools and black paintings is a gold rush. “I do think that there’s space and definitely enough money for everyone that’s in [the Amazon influencer] program,” she tells me as we sit on her cream sofa. After all, Sheil’s aesthetic is spare, bland, or, if you wanted to be ungenerous, you could call it basic. It’s a look and feel so commonplace on the internet that I can’t imagine anyone claiming ownership over it, especially in a legal context.

The next day, I fly to meet with Sydney Nicole Gifford, 24, the Amazon influencer that is suing Sheil, at her home outside of Minneapolis.

Gifford and her mother, Laura, greet me at the door. They are enthusiastic and inviting. Stepping inside, I am overwhelmed by a familiar palette: alarmingly neutral, not a single speck of color in sight. The house is still and silent, a vessel for content creation. In other words, it’s like I never left Sheil’s house — someone just shuffled the pieces around and plopped me onto a different set.

Gifford, pictured in her home, is suing another Amazon influencer.

Laura Gifford is closely involved in her daughter’s business — she works as her manager, handling email communications, booking travel, and more.

Gifford and her mother are clearly close, and Laura has watched as her daughter has lived out years of her life online. At 12, she was making stop-motion videos and uploading them to YouTube, Laura tells me, and then her platform as an influencer took off four or five years ago.



Gifford seems relaxed as we talk in her airy, spacious home filled to the brim with Amazon products. “I think I feel more calm in neutral spaces,” Gifford says, echoing what Sheil told me the day before. “Now my favorite color is beige.” She’ll sometimes hashtag her social media content with #sadbeigehome, she adds, laughing. “It is a sad beige home, and I like it.”

I have no malice toward the Sad Beige Home, but I, personally, am thrilled I do not live here. Despite the light pouring in from the oversize windows and the electric fireplace glowing in the living room, it feels cold, austere, not suited for life. It reminds me of staying at an Airbnb, with the charms of lived-in coziness — cute window shutters, lots of throw pillows, the setting sun casting gold rays into the kitchen — but where every drawer is empty and bath towels still have price stickers on the inside. Gifford has only lived here a few months, so not everything is set up yet, but the black, white, and cream foundations of the home are settled.

This aggressively neutral aesthetic is wildly popular — it’s so ubiquitous online that I might be the weird one for not liking it. This minimalism is also aspirational; millions of people have seen Gifford’s and Sheil’s videos, and thousands have likely purchased products from their affiliate links. What I was not prepared for, even after watching hours of their content online, was that it wasn’t just their social media profiles that were monochrome: their lives and their homes are exactly the same. It’s like you grabbed the corners of your phone screen and expanded a TikTok video out into a world of neutrals.

So we can start eating off the flagrant stealing of ideas and concepts

Not gone happen. Case will be dismissed.

 

[Illuminatos]

Lol this is bow the content creation game goes. It’s a low barrier to entry field. You find a successful model and a ton of clones will pop up.

Look at the Pop the Balloon show. There’s a ton of clones but Arlette was the original one and gets the most views because it’s the clear cut best one.

 

[bnew]

she deleted or deactivated her tiktok account @alyssasheil

 

[MajesticLion]

 

[horizon]

This shyt is so stupid but you know what? She might actually have a case lmao

 

[O.T.I.S.]

Sharking her tattoo makes it look like an unhealthy obsession

Thats the only thing that stood out as I skimmed


Yeah can’t front, thats drawing the line. It’s definitely obvious and obsessive at that point.

There’s a lot of things you could just chop it up as flat out copying which isn’t necessarily illegal (which probably should be).

But at that point, she’s getting into psycho territory to scar your own body to look like hers.

 

[Richard Glidewell]

White women are fukking crazy and need to be ignored

 

[boskey]

 

[Pressure]

Influencer sues for, checks notes, influencing

 

[RamsayBolton]

At first I thought this was nonsense but the more you scroll the more blatant it gets


idk if this is a legal issue but that second girl is downright creepy

 

[mson]

 

[8WON6]

the side-by-side pics are the whole case. Like on some level a lot of people laugh at the whole influencer thing, but that other chick so blatantly copying, i wouldn't be mad if she won the lawsuit.

 

[Bigblackted4]

Mental illness

On OP and the woman in Op