cleaningmad
New member
tl;dr version: I've been on the receiving end of piles and piles of freebies and gifts and it's honestly not all its cracked up to be, and yes labeling gets hopelessly screwed up. It's a nightmare.
Long response:
Hi all, I've been lurking a while. I just wanted to pop in with some experience I have with this. Probably no one will read this, and maybe it doesn't apply to the Hinch situation at all, I don't know, but here you go.
I had a very popular infertility blog back in the early aughts, and after I finally got pregnant with my son, I had blog readers sending me all kinds of things. It was incredibly overwhelming, and I didn't have a management team or anything, since sponsored blogs and 'influencers' weren't a thing yet. We had a post office box we shared for public use, while keeping our home address private. The post office box got so backed up, they were calling us to pick up huge bags of parcels. Meanwhile, I was sick with hyperemesis gravidarium (throwing up twenty times a day, on IVs and a picc line for nourishment), my cervix stitched, and on bedrest.
When I tried to go through the gifts and post pictures and thank-you messages, links to people's shops, etc, I got a surge of hate in my email box about how spoiled I was, and how gross it was to get all these gifts when surely, as a popular blogger, I must have income pouring in from my blog ads.
It felt like a damned if I do, damned if I don't situation, and honestly, some of the stuff was really awful. Loads was mislabeled, some had no identification at all (might have been the post office mistake in handling? I know sometimes my husband screwed things up when he was opening boxes and parcels and trying to organize things for me... if someone had shipped me something directly from the store, he didn't always realize he needed to keep the packing slip with the gift so I could see who sent it, or read the gift message or whatever.) If people were handing her gifts at book signings, it would be very easy to lose the card, as they probably weren't prepared to go home with piles of presents. I know she's marketing savvy but the book scene is still new for her.
On top of it all, loads of it was from people just trying to get free advertisement for their shops. A ton of it was stuff I couldn't even use. I cloth diapered (my son was allergic to disposables) and breastfed (lucky me) and so I donated the disposable diapers and wipes to shelters and got hate for that because I was ungrateful and/or snobbish. Donated bottles and pacifiers/dummies because my baby wouldn't take anything but me, and got called selfish and cruel for shaming moms who use those things, even though I never shamed anyone and was really careful to make sure my wording was inclusive and accepting of all moms. I received clothes for the wrong gender (kept those in case I ever had a girl, and finally donated them with tears in my eyes 15 years later), received clothes that were too small to use (my baby weighed over 10 pounds because of my gestational diabetes), or just clothes we couldn't use because the fabrics irritated my son's skin.
I had folks who had sent me stuff feel like they deserved a shout out or a thank you, and then when they didn't get it, unfollowed and blocked me, and even went to snark sites to complain about me. It was hard to ignore the hurt/upset people because I could understand why they felt sad. They truly wanted to send me something nice, which omg, so incredible, right? But I also struggled with how much I should post. The sheer amount of gifts was off-putting to readers. It felt like such an impossible, bizarre, surreal position to be in. I still don't know how I should have handled it, except to maybe have asked that people make a donation to a charity or Hyperemesis foundation in my name or something if they really wanted to do something for me? I wonder if that would have worked. Or to somehow keep my location/PO box private. I don't know.
Sigh. I don't know if any of this relates to Hinch, but to put things in perspective, my blog was getting around 180K in traffic every month. By no means huge compared to today's influencers, but the gifts were impossible to manage. There was no social media yet. I received hundreds of comments on each post, and hundreds of emails every day. Companies of all kinds were contacting me for sponsorships every single day. It was insane.
Anyway, I ran Hinch's instagram through our company audit system (we check influencer's ratios for potential sponsorships... I work for a vacation/cruise clothing company) and her 2M followers comes back as 83% legit, which is actually really good. That doesn't scream paid followers at all, though the system isn't perfect. I ran my small, personal instagram through to see how it compared. My instagram is private, for family and friends only and so I know for a fact everyone on there is legit, and I got an 85% result. I think it docs followers who don't have a profile picture or any posts of their own... so people like my grandma, great aunts, etc. who are only on instagram to follow family count as spam or fake. Anyway, so let's say Hinch has 80% real followers. That's still something like 1.6 million followers. Even if a relatively small percentage of that number sent her gifts, I can't imagine how impossible it might be to manage/juggle. I also know of no influencer whose representation company helps with any of this. They'll coordinate the sponsorships, but they certainly aren't sending anyone over to help juggle gifts from readers... or even the packages sent by paid sponsors. Maybe the UK is different, but I'd be completely shocked if she had any help outside friends/family with the gifts coming in unless she's hired assistants, which is something she should consider if she hasn't already.
I'm so full of cringe over the tommy bottle sterilizer or whatever. She says it's highly rated, but I read poor reviews and the risk of bacteria and infection, and it just seems insane. No one needs a $200 sterilizer to make a bottle, my god. It reminds me of some of the sponsorships I took on later (once the sponsored blog thing became big) thinking they were relevant or a good fit, and instead it was a pile of junk I was never going to use, but the company had paid, so I felt obligated. I ended up removing all sponsorship info from my blog altogether and only offered sidebar ads, and then eventually closed down my blog altogether because the whole monetization of it all took the fun out of the project. Anyway, no one here cares, instagram is a very different beast, I realize.
Anyway, I'm not trying to be a white knight for Hinch or anything. I'm very concerned about the chemicals she dumps down her drain and her lack of disclosure for ads and sponsorships (which is why I'm here). I just had some maybe unique experience with the gift thing and wanted to share.
All that said, I wish I could tell all fans not to send money or gifts to their favorite celebrities/personalities. There are other ways to be supportive that don't result in a PR nightmare.
This is too long, sorry, I'm hopped up on allergy medicine. I'll shut up.
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Can't stand self righteous parents, and can't stand people who aren't parents dishing out advice even more
she can easily afford all this stuff so it’s quite frustrating watching her get all this stuff for free when half of it won’t be used anyway so why can’t she donate stuff to parents who maybe can’t afford lavish gifts for their babies? I’m a single parent and was throughout my pregnancy and I was still working full time and worked my arse off whilst paying a mortgage to buy things for my son, I bought a lot of secondhand (thanks to Facebook market place
) and saved up for months to buy the pram as I wanted Atleast one new thing, she’ll probably get a pram gifted to her aswell 
!!!