I’ve been in this space since 2013, which means I’ve been through different waves of people saying it’s over, or that it’s not a long-term plan, and lately it’s being talked about more than it has in years. There was a Vulture piece called “The Influencer Recession,” about aspirational content losing its grip and creators turning to what the writer calls brand-safe rage bait just to get seen.
Jennings’ argument is that this is a supply problem. Too many people want to work in the attention economy, and attention runs on supply and demand, so the formula that worked ten years ago, post something aspirational enough consistently enough and an audience finds you, has stopped working. She points out that individual creators are now competing against clipping farms, companies paying people thousands of dollars to flood platforms with clips, which means an average post has almost no chance of reaching anybody new. On top of that, the aspirational stuff reads as tone deaf now, and luxury has gotten too common to signal anything, with one creator telling her that everyone has an Hermès these days. So people are reaching for rage bait instead, because anger still moves. She's right that it's happening, but I don't think it's a great strategy (more on this later).
NPR followed in August with an episode titled “The influencer era is dead. What’s next?” And talks about streaming as what comes next, and brands buying their way into the background of somebody’s live stream, then paying clippers pennies to spread those moments around. That’s the billboard model again, just cheaper. I’m no streamer, but when it comes to fashion, beauty and lifestyle brands, that’s not what I’m seeing. Brand budgets were at their wildest around 2020 and they’ve tightened since, but the deals didn’t disappear, they got selective. Brands are being much more careful about who they work with, and what they’re asking for isn’t eyeballs anymore.
I started my blog right after we got married in 2013, called Thrifts & Threads (my then IG handle too), thrift store finds mixed with whatever was already hanging in my closet. I loved fashion but we were also doing Dave Ramsey’s envelope system to pay off our credit card and student loan debt, so I didn’t have much extra to spend on my clothing budget, and finding cashmere or leather at a thrift shop and styling it was how I grew my blog. I was so excited when a brand reached out wanting to send me an item to feature in my email blast, because I could get the clothes I loved without increasing my clothing budget, and when another blogger told me I should be making a rate card and charging for those features and getting paid for my time, my mind was blown. This is was my first rate card:
My husband and I got really strategic and were so consistent, working on the blog on the weekends to make sure we had posts ready for the week while we were at our corporate jobs. Once I started making a little money at it, I also had a weekly section about how to start a blog and grow on Instagram, and my email list ended up being those who wanted outfit ideas plus other potential bloggers trying to build their own site.
I packed up my desk of my corporate marketing job at an insurance firm, in June of 2015, right as Jadyn got out of school for the summer. The blog had been outearning my salary for six months in a row and I wasn’t planning to leave if it hadn’t. I remember standing there thinking I really hope this keeps going, because it felt so freeing, no more late nights and weekends working on the blog, now I could be productive during the day with it! I also didn’t want it to be a failure and I didn’t want to waste the momentum my blog had going as my readership kept going up and that helped book even more blog post jobs. My CEO and CFO at the time were so supportive but I’m sure were a bit confused about what I was doing, because at the time I put in my notice I had 50k followers on IG and they were shocked it was making me money but also happy for me. I drove home that day thankful and completely determined to stay consistent and help people even more than I had been. Anthony left the following year after the business matched his salary six months as well.
Quitting meant I could pick Jadyn up from school and she no longer had to do the after school care, and it was the first time I ever felt like I had a flexible job to be there for her. She was eight and loved my blog because in her mind that’s why I was there every day at pickup.
We kept posting and focusing energy on hitting the Instagram algorithm to increase my followers, and every week I’d watch the numbers go up when I posted specific photos at certain times of day. I’d post ripped skinny jeans holding a coffee on a Thursday evening and it would do so well. I knew exactly what to post and when, and I’d hit some kind of flow.
I won Breakthrough Blogger of the Year at the 2015 Bloglovin’ awards and got my first agent for sponsored deals, and every deal we booked made us more excited that we’d made the right call going full-time.
My first designer fashion show was Chloé, fall 2016. And I only got invited because I’d bought one of their bags and worn it on repeat and kept using their #chloegirls hashtag, and someone in their PR office noticed and invited me. I’d never even been to Europe before; I had only recently traveled out of the country for the first time ever for our honeymoon. Anthony said well, we’re going, we have no clue what we’re doing but we’ll figure it out! They sent me an outfit and bag to wear to the show, and I sat in there certain I wasn’t supposed to be there, because my blog was called Thrifts and Threads and this was designer fashion. But I was so inspired, already thinking about getting home and writing up the trends I’d seen and the outfits I’d worn. That trip was where we figured out we loved traveling and loved not being tied to an office, and it made us want to work even harder to keep the whole thing going.
Nobody paid me for that bag. I bought it, I wore it constantly, I tagged it, and a person at Chloé happened to see it. That was the entire mechanism back then, and nobody was measuring anything. It was all happening organically, and I was very excited that I had saved up for that bag, believe me I was going to be posting it everyday!
The early deals were blog traffic and email inclusions, then Instagram got added on, so it was a blog post plus a grid post. When Snapchat and Stories showed up brands wanted the daily check-in, you walking through your day on video, and I was terrible at it. I’d been shooting outfit photos in sunglasses for years and suddenly I was supposed to talk to a camera without them, and I felt so awkward. I forced myself to get over it and learn it anyway, because you either evolve or die in this business. A deal by then was a feature plus a post plus stories, sometimes all three.
I only got on TikTok because of Jadyn. It was her favorite app and I didn’t understand it at all, so she’d sit and show me videos, and what I noticed was that I was barely seeing any fashion on there. That looked like an opportunity. I started in 2019 and was posting from the shows in Milan and Paris that March, right before COVID hit, and it opened doors to brands I wouldn’t have reached otherwise. Then the pandemic came, with everyone stuck at home the whole thing took off, and I gained millions of followers in a few months. At one point I was posting two TikToks a day, heavy on outfit transitions, and the editing ate hours because of all the clips, and that was on top of Instagram photos and the blog (which by then had become brittanyxavier.com). Everyone was trying to crack the code on going viral and brands were paying whoever managed it. Something had to give, so we stopped posting on the blog and put everything into video. We also grew my YouTube channel to over a million by focusing on strategy for that. Audiences followed whoever was most viral then, and brands paid for my reach.
But something began to happen…