Small businesses push back against influencer freebie demands

CCTV footage contradicted a cat cafe’s fabricated TikTok review

At 1.37 on a March morning, Nicole Flanagin woke to a message from a friend linking to a TikTok video about her business. “At 1.37,” she said, “a friend sent me the link to this girl’s TikTok.” The 41-year-old owner of Brews and Mews in Lenoir, North Carolina – a mother of four who also works at a pet rescue shelter, and who had spent the previous day unsuccessfully fighting for a dog not to be put down – had just fallen asleep when the alert came.

The video opened with a local influencer sitting in her parked car. “For those of you who know me,” she stated, “I do reviews of local businesses. One very special thing about me is I don’t make bad reviews – but I’m kinda mad right now!” She had just taken her child to an unnamed cafe with “animals you can pet”, only to be coldly turned away because she had got its visiting hours wrong, and in her telling she began bargaining with staff to try to let the girl into the area where the animals were kept. No dice. Her daughter started “literally bawling her eyes out … and they were just, like, standing there staring”.

Flanagin recognized her cafe immediately – the only animal cafe in the area, where the cats are fosters from local shelters and children aged six and under can visit only during “Happy Meow-ers” sessions to safeguard the cats’ time away from customers, particularly small, sticky-fingered ones. She looked up the woman’s account and saw that she had more than 170,000 followers, some of whom had already started to comment favourably on the post, and knew it was only a matter of time before internet sleuths tracked down the name of her cafe. “I was, like, I’m going to get crushed. She’s going to close my business,” she said.

But no official complaint had arrived in the cafe’s inbox, and no employee had flagged an incident. “She attacked my employee and made out he was just staring at her kid wailing on the floor,” Flanagin said. So she pulled the security footage: “I love a good receipt. I’ve been through a divorce, honey.” Time-stamped video showed the influencer entering and speaking with a staffer behind the till for less than 40 seconds, after which she and her child briefly looked at the cats in the window and left quietly, with little visible evidence of a toddler tantrum or, indeed, of a rudely gawking employee. “I started watching, and I was, like, ‘This did not happen,’” Flanagin said. A day and a half later she posted the CCTV on the cafe’s TikTok account with an outraged comment about the lies the woman had told; that video has more than 640,000 views. The influencer deleted her review and posted an apology: “I was upset as a parent and clicked that post button before I really thought about what would happen.” Flanagin has no second thoughts: “Why is your opinion any more valid or important than mine or somebody else’s?” she said of influencers. “I don’t regret defending myself.”

It may seem extreme to look up surveillance footage in order to prove a content creator wrong, but Flanagin is not the only small-business owner who has resorted to using CCTV. When the singer Kelly Clarkson – described in the reporting as a celebrity rather than an influencer – posted about what she regarded as bad service at the Art of Play shop in Brooklyn after being told a $15,000 mechanical bird she wanted to buy was not for sale, the story went around the world and surveillance footage was posted in response.

Flanagin’s case fits a broader pattern of conflict between small businesses and content creators, in what The Guardian described as a takedown economy where a business’s “fightback” can go as viral as a sponsored post. Many business owners are thrilled to have the attention and know that a post can make a difference, but increasingly they feel burned by bad experiences with influencers and are taking matters into their own hands. When Binky Felstead of Made in Chelsea had her assistant ask for a free cake for Felstead’s son’s third birthday, the baker snapped, went public and caused a furore – and got an apology. Some independent shops are banning influencers altogether, and Borough Market in London has clarified its rules on filming.

Before the rise of the creator economy, it was only Hollywood actors, star athletes and supermodels who expected celeb treatment. That rarefied circle has since expanded to include social media influencers, who have sprouted across almost every sector: there are influencers for lawn care, Minecraft, dairy farming and more. The nature of fame has fragmented too – a queue for a viral apple crumble could put you beside the biggest food influencer in London and leave you none the wiser, and a child’s favourite Roblox creator might have a millions-strong following whose username you would never recognise.

The commercial stakes are why owners keep coming back. According to Forbes, the influencer economy is worth $250bn and is projected to almost double by 2027. Influencers can shift mountains of product and drive sales for the businesses they choose to work with, which can be transformational for those that struggle to afford traditional advertising. “Influencers absolutely catapulted my business to where it is now,” said Lucy Herron, founder of the British shoe brand Sloafer. “You can sell 50 pairs of shoes in 24 hours, and that is the difference between you being able to put a bit of money in your profit pot and not being able to pay your invoices.”

Herron also described the other side of that bargain. She once sent a free pair of ballerina trainers retailing at £225 to an influencer known for appearing on a reality show, expecting the customary thank-you post on Instagram. The woman said she could not publicly thank the brand because it might come to the attention of the tax authorities, since HMRC treats gifted products as taxable income. After months of back and forth she reluctantly agreed to post a photo and tag Sloafer: she had worn the black pumps with an all-black outfit and photographed herself at the back of a room, her face shrouded in darkness. “It was like collaborating with a ninja,” Herron said. “It sticks in your throat – they could buy a pair of my shoes in every colour and it wouldn’t dent their bank balance.” Herron left a positive comment anyway: “You have to keep playing the game.” Like all the business owners The Guardian interviewed, Herron did not want to name names. She was also accused of sexism after posting about unfollowing 250 female-owned accounts because she was tired of sending shoes to influencers who never wore them. “It’s got nothing to do with internalised misogyny,” Herron said. “I’m trying to run a profitable business, and it’s bloody hard enough without someone taking the piss.”

The Guardian described influencers as “powerful recommendation engines and equally powerful enemies, adept at harnessing their followers’ outrage and weaponising the language of moral virtue.” When Four Winds Craft Guild in Nantucket, Massachusetts, went viral after putting up a “no influencers” sign, some creators accused the owner of misogyny, and one suggested that hating influencers was a “socially acceptable way to hate women.” The Canadian influencer Levi Coralynn argued the other side in a video on the controversy: “There are obvious valid reasons to criticise influencer culture,” she said, “[but] the conversation has now moved past hating on the industry and people just seem to hate women who participate in it.”

Josh Wheeler, founder of the PR agency Be Broadcast, has worked with influencers for 15 years, often as an intermediary between them and brands and businesses. He said there is no single type of creator most prone to bad behavior: “I can think of nightmares and angels in all [categories].” He described the pressure the other way too: “The view from talent and people smelling the money around influencers is that [they are] the future, so everything has to be bent and broken around that influencer.” The results can be costly for businesses pinning their hopes on an influencer’s reach – “There might be a campaign landing on Monday and the talent pulls out on Friday,” Wheeler recalled. “You’re, like, ‘OK, cool. Well, we’ve just spent three months on this.’” He has seen talent tell staff, “Don’t look me in the eye,” and one creator was blacklisted after making “deeply inappropriate” comments about a member of his team on a briefing call. Businesses, Wheeler said, often fail to assert themselves: “There is often a nervousness. It’s like they forget they’re in charge.”

The Guardian reported that a backlash was building against what some see as an increasingly noxious sense of entitlement among influencers. Big corporations can budget for extravagant freebies and press trips; small independents cannot. Herron said Sloafer is “operating on knife-edge profit margins.” Every pair of shoes sent to an influencer is one that could be sold to a customer, but “you’ve always got that thing in the back of your mind where you know a post could sell 20 pairs of shoes,” she said. Hubert Zanier, owner of Kipferl, a London restaurant and patisserie serving Austrian food, said that in hospitality influencers have almost completely supplanted the food critic’s role in spreading the word. “A lot of restaurants are struggling,” he said. “They all hope for that one viral post that makes the whole thing explode and pick up.”

Zanier learned the risk in 2024, when a well-known London influencer with 100,000 followers left him with a £300 bill after first asking to bring her family – something he would not normally accommodate, since most restaurants will cover a plus one but no more. She turned up with her partner, her parents and their dog, and ordered two £38 bottles of red wine and almost £40 worth of schnapps. “My manager texted me and said, ‘Is that OK?’ I was, like, yeah, whatever – maybe we’ll get good coverage out of it,” Zanier said. Instead came a months-long dispute that culminated in the influencer calling him after Christmas to scream at him. “I was perplexed,” Zanier said. Typically, he explained, influencers acknowledge a free meal on social media a few days after visiting a restaurant; this creator put him off for months with excuses such as “at the moment my creative juices are not flowing.” Nine months later she offered to foot the bill, but when he sent it she phoned him to scream, “This is absolutely outrageous.” Zanier said he replied, “I have a small business,” and told her, “You exploited and abused my hospitality. I’ve invited you for lunch with wine and everything. I mean, we’re not friends. What’s the deal here?” The influencer then conceded that she might include the restaurant in a write-up of European restaurants the year after, at which point he admitted defeat. “I just mentally wrote it off,” Zanier said. “But it was really, really unpleasant.” He still works with influencers, selectively: “I think they are part of the [food] industry now. Just because some of them might be black sheep, it doesn’t mean that they’re all crooked.”

With such “rogue operators” – as Zanier puts it – circling the industry, some establishments are tightening their filming rules. When Borough Market security kicked out the food vloggers Bite Twice for filming there in November, the episode was said to mark a “Frankenstein moment” for the hospitality business, in a report describing an industry that had created a monster and was now fighting back. The market now enforces rules against content creators clogging stalls and walkways with equipment: anybody filming with more than a crew of two – a presenter and a cameraperson – or with professional-grade equipment must seek clearance and carry a permit. The Guardian reported the change was hailed as a long-overdue rebalancing of the relationship between businesses and influencers, one that puts paying customers first.

Freebie requests are the daily friction. David Maffei, who bakes alone seven days a week, sometimes up to 10 hours a day, for his New York company Halfsies, said influencers can provide useful PR – when the model Amber Lancaster posted Halfsies to her half a million followers, “We sold out for months.” But Maffei argued the culture has also spawned a generation of entitled imitators who believe a small following justifies A-list treatment, firing off blandly friendly copy-and-paste messages to multiple companies in the hope that someone will take the bait: “They’re, like, ‘Oh, I love your product! They’re such an integral part of my daily life!’” He now collates the cheekiest requests, along with his withering takedowns, in a Hall of Fame category on Instagram. One email read, “I’d love to include your amazing products in my bridal party boxes … Are you in for some bridal bliss? Let’s chat!” After Maffei pointed out that the bride-to-be had only 1,300 followers, she argued, “I’m a beginner influencer.” Maffei replied, “And I’m a beginner astronaut.” He posted screenshots of the exchange on the Halfsies Instagram account, where it received more than 17,000 likes and was covered by People magazine. “Don’t lie to me to get free stuff,” Maffei said.

Anastasia Powers, a luxury balloon artist in Essex, said that when the messages arrive “it’s quite disheartening.” She has created displays for weddings, galas and corporate clients such as Zambrero and Twickenham rugby club and is currently in talks with a celebrity DJ to create a display for his birthday, yet still receives up to 10 freebie requests a month. “You’ve contacted me, so you can see the quality of my work – yet you want it for free and you don’t want to pay me my worth,” Powers said. She founded Poptastic Balloon Company three years ago and is a one-woman business doing everything from designing the display, driving to the location, and sizing and shaping the helium balloons to packing it all down at the end of the day. “Collaborations don’t pay for my petrol, my lights, my stock,” Powers said. “They don’t put food on my table.” She turns down all influencer requests and said other people in her industry are increasingly coming over to her way of thinking. She shares a WhatsApp group with fellow owners to trade intelligence on the worst requests: “We’ll screenshot the messages, and we’ll all laugh. Sometimes we’ll coordinate a reply and we’ll all send it to them, which is quite funny.”

Reshmi Bennett, 42, the Michelin-trained founder of the luxury cake business Anges de Sucre, went public after an assistant to Made in Chelsea’s Binky Felstead requested a “gifted” cake for Felstead’s son Wilder’s third birthday. The Guardian reported that Felstead is estimated to be worth between £1.4m and £3m and lives in a £3.6m south-west London house that, according to the Daily Mail, is largely furnished with freebies. Bennett, a former banker, created a joke fundraiser for the influencer to cover the cost of her son’s birthday cake and wrote, “Your whole persona is to be rich and fabulous, and here you are grifting for free stuff to pretend you’re rich and fabulous to your followers.” On the now-deleted GoFundMe page she noted, “Unfortunately, our energy supplier is old-fashioned and continues to insist on being paid in actual money rather than exposure or engagement.” A representative for Felstead later said: “This was a standard inquiry from Binky’s PA, offering social media exposure in exchange for a birthday cake.” Bennett, who runs a team of three full-time staff and one part-timer hand-delivering cakes across London and Surrey, said her work is expensive and artisanal: “Even though £100 is a lot for the average person to pay for a cake, the costs involved in us making the cake and getting it to the customer have just ballooned.” An earlier gift went to an influencer with about 20,000 followers who was local to the area; Bennett hoped it might lead to more customers in the neighbourhood, but her cake appeared on a dessert table that included cookies, doughnuts and even cakes from her competitors, and she received a single inquiry: “Oh, hi, it’s my daughter’s birthday. Would you like to collaborate?” “Piss off!” Bennett laughed. “Work for free to get more free work? No thanks … I’ve set a filter in my inbox to put emails that have the word ‘sponsorship’ or ‘collaboration’ into spam.” Bennett acknowledged the pushback she gets: “I have got some stick. It’s, like, you could just politely say no and move on. If I do, they just find someone else to [take my place], and it keeps that cycle going.”

Cynics might observe that calling out influencers can drive attention to a brand. The Guardian reported that the jury is out on whether Art of Play’s response to the Clarkson case – contesting her account and jokily raising the price of the bird to $15m – was the right one. Still, one study cited in the reporting found that negative posts attract twice as much engagement as positive ones. In the same way that “de-influencing” videos – creators criticising viral products – became a trend in their own right, negative posts about influencers have become a cottage industry, with YouTube creators breaking down social media beefs for their followers. The answer, Bennett said, is for small-business owners to speak out and share what it is like to work with influencers – the good, the bad and the ugly.

Wheeler, of Be Broadcast, advises businesses to be clear about their expectations when they approach influencers, including getting what they want in exchange in writing. “That early stage is genuinely vital to make sure that your experience doesn’t go pear-shaped,” he said.

Back in Lenoir, support for Flanagin’s video arrived from around the world while the local community on Facebook sided with the influencer, with critics saying she should have handled the matter privately or avoided footage showing the influencer’s children. “Locally, we’re the devil, yet we’re the first [place] that people call when they find a cat!” Flanagin said. Her video is staying up: “I don’t regret it, honey. I said it with my whole chest,” she said. “And I would say it all day, every day, again and again.”