Rick Davis / SplashNews.com
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 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.
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.
Ironically, there is color at Gifford’s home today, albeit temporarily. On the afternoon I visit, she is filming content for an upcoming video on her favorite fall decor items. She pulls out a cardboard box of autumnal products, some of which are new and some of which are from the year before: a soft orange throw blanket, pillows, and miniature stuffed pumpkins. If a product is no longer sold on Amazon, there is no reason to feature it in a video — people watching will just ask where it’s from, and Gifford will have nowhere to send them to (and no way to make money on the item). Gifford orders a lot of stuff, and unsurprisingly, a fair portion of products are “not up to par,” she says. In her office, she has a white drawer filled with flops that she will return to Amazon.
Gifford knows, from experience, the exact angles she must capture to sell the items she features in videos: a slow, top-down panning shot of her coffee table; a few seconds of her stepping into the corner of the frame and placing cream ceramic pumpkins on her fireplace mantel. Laura acts as a second set of eyes, standing behind the iPhone on a tripod and telling her daughter whether she’s in frame or whether anything in the shot looks off. Gifford darts around her home, grabbing brief clips that she will later splice together in the choppy, rapid-fire editing style that has become instantly recognizable as “shortform video.” She can tell immediately if her disembodied hand plopped a mini plush pumpkin slightly awkwardly. The camera keeps rolling as she picks it up and does the motion again.
In her lawsuit, Gifford alleges that Sheil copied her, down to specific frames in videos. She claims that repeated pattern and Sheil’s uncannily similar content ultimately cut into Gifford’s own earnings. The similarities extend, in Gifford’s telling, beyond just video content to eerie real-life aspects like her manner of speaking, appearance, and even tattoos.
Walking through the space, I can’t help but recognize a few furniture items that I also saw in Sheil’s home, which I had visited the day before: cream bouclé stools that double as storage; a curved full-length mirror propped up in the corner; a set of circular nesting tables that appear often in both her and Sheil’s videos.
In another world, these two parallel lives could go on indefinitely, accented by the same cream furniture, without crossing paths. But the same systems that make the careers of Sheil and Gifford possible — fine-tuned recommendation algorithms, affiliate marketing, fast fashion and cheap home goods — are now entangling them in a legal battle around ownership, style, and the creator industry.
So, who influenced whom?
Sheil and Gifford aren’t simply two strangers with similar taste. They have a short but relevant history together, as described in court documents and interviews.
In late 2022 and early 2023, when they both lived in Austin, they hung out together in person twice. The meetups were casual, perhaps akin to an outing for networking: both say the goal was “supporting” each other’s business. The first time, in December 2022, the two women — along with a third influencer friend of Gifford’s — met in person, at a shopping mall in Austin.
“It was fine, nothing too crazy,” Sheil says. “I was a little nervous to go into it, just because it was her and a friend that she already had. And I was kind of like the outsider, in a sense. I’d never met either of these girls before.” Sheil’s attorneys write in their reply to the suit that, on this first day out, Gifford “began quizzing Sheil on Sheil’s strategies and techniques” and made “passive aggressive” comments about her young age. They allege that after that day, Gifford’s content started looking more like Sheil’s, a claim Gifford says is “meritless.”
Still, the outing went well enough that the group of three met for a second time in early 2023 — this time at a parking garage in the area, with the intention of taking photos together. Accounts differ on how this second outing went, according to interviews and court documents. Sheil says she felt “excluded” by the other women and left the meetup with a bad taste in her mouth.
“I wasn’t spoken to for the first hour of getting there. There were little things here and there where I was just kind of made to feel unwelcome,” she says.
Gifford and the other influencer say they both left the outings with the impression that things had gone well. The third influencer — whose name is redacted in court filings — writes in an affidavit that there was nothing “rude” about the group’s interactions.
“We had what I seemed to think was a great, professional, friendly relationship,” Gifford says. “So it was blindsiding to have all of this happen, and then even more blindsiding for her to go and make these huge claims all over the place about bullying and harassment,” Gifford says, responding to Sheil’s claims in her response to the lawsuit.
Regardless of what happened at the outings, everyone agrees on what happened next: Sheil blocked Gifford on social media.
“I didn’t really feel a need to keep up a relationship via social media when it wasn’t that great in real life,” Sheil says.
Gifford took no offense — despite its glamorous sheen, the influencer industry can wreak havoc on creators’ mental health if they spend hours a day comparing themselves to other people. So she carried on, unfazed, for 10 months. But then she started hearing from followers that Sheil’s content had begun to closely resemble hers.
“It was brought to my attention by someone who saw [Sheil’s] post on their For You page, thought that it was my post, and then saw that the account name wasn’t my name,” Gifford says. She heard of apparent confusion from “numerous” followers, she says, and then noticed how similar their posts were: the videos and photos didn’t just have the same vibe but also promoted the same Amazon products, according to Gifford’s lawsuit. Gifford also says Sheil had changed her appearance in some ways, like coloring her hair and wearing it in a different style. Gifford hired an attorney, began sending cease and desist orders to Sheil, and registered her social media posts with the US Copyright Office — an unusual step not taken by most influencers.
“Once I got [the cease and desist], I was just so upset. I was crying, I was shocked,” Sheil says. “I was very confused, because [Gifford’s] name hadn’t even come into my mind since I blocked her.”
Sheil and Gifford are but two among the many influencers making money through Amazon’s program, but their case could have paradigm-shifting consequences for everyone else. Gifford is suing Sheil for a litany of offenses, stemming from what she sees as the two women’s strikingly similar videos and photos on social media. The case has potentially wide-reaching implications for influencers and creators, but it stems from a familiar, even ordinary, complaint: Gifford says Sheil won’t stop copying her.
In a complaint filed in the Western District of Texas this spring, Gifford accuses Sheil of “willful, intentional, and purposeful” copyright infringement in dozens of posts across platforms like TikTok and Instagram. Gifford says there’s been a pattern of copying: days or weeks after she would share photos or videos promoting an Amazon product, Sheil shared her own content doing the same thing. In dozens of cases, Gifford says the angle, tone, or the text on Sheil’s posts ripped off hers. Exhibits submitted in court include nearly 70 pages of side-by-side screenshots collected by Gifford comparing her social media posts, personal website, and other platforms where she says Sheil copied her. In one instance, Gifford promoted gold earrings in the shape of a bow, modeling them by gently swooping her hair back to show them off. Just a few days later, Sheil posted her own photos of the same earrings, similarly photographed. In another example submitted to the court, Gifford unboxes and tries on a white two-piece top and short set; a few weeks later, Sheil did the same. The pattern continued for around a year, Gifford alleges.
“It’s obviously very frustrating because I put a lot of time and effort into my business. I work very hard at what I do, and I love what I do,” Gifford says. “It felt like somebody took a piece of my business and is profiting off of it as their own.”
Despite how inescapably ubiquitous the influencer industry has become, there are relatively few norms and laws governing creators. What regulations do exist are poorly enforced. The rates that influencers command vary widely; creators, especially those with smaller followings, are left to their own devices as they negotiate with enormous corporations. Efforts at collective action or unionizing have mostly fallen flat. Laws around sponsored content and copyright exist, but creators bend or even ignore rules regularly. And although influencers are — naturally — influential, there remains a pervasive cultural stigma around their labor: influencers are seen as vapid, and their jobs are considered easy. The upshot is that the general public often has little sympathy for this group of workers, even though they are often exploited, and so they remain unprotected. When things go wrong for an influencer, it is risky to direct blame toward the corporations they cut deals with and close to impossible to direct it toward the audiences that rationalize their entire existence. Influencers may turn on other influencers not so much out of a desire for attention as it is a direct result of the material conditions under which they work. A case like the one between Gifford and Sheil, in other words, was a long time coming.
According to data that Gifford has compiled, and a chart tracking earnings that she shared with me, as Sheil posted more and more similar content, Gifford’s commissions took a hit: months that were historically her biggest earners made much less, up to “a little less than half” of what she ordinarily could expect.
Gifford’s suit includes a wide range of charges beyond copyright infringement. She also accuses Sheil of the misappropriation of her likeness — that is, changing her appearance to look more like Gifford — and profiting from it. Gifford also says Sheil replicated her content style that has come to be associated with her brand and public image.
“I think there aren’t enough clear boundaries in the influencer industry, and unfortunately, a lot of people don’t treat this as a business,” Gifford says. “Which is why I’m having to file a lawsuit to protect my work and my brand.”
Sheil denies she copied Gifford, whether that’s specific videos and products, her appearance, her content style, or her digital presence across different sites. “[Gifford’s] ‘look’ is not original,” Sheil’s attorneys write in a response filed to the court. “For that matter, on that front, neither is Sheil’s.”
Her response to Gifford’s suit opens with a quote attributed to Kim Kardashian, though its origin seems dubious: “People only rain on your parade because they’re jealous of your sun and tired of their shade.” It was Gifford that did the copying, Sheil alleges — not her.
Sheil and Gifford have a similar online persona and aesthetic, apart from just the neutral, minimal houses. They both have long, shiny hair that’s often set in gentle curls or slicked back into a bun. They opt for uncomplicated clothing like fitted tank tops and T-shirts, oversize sweat suits, and chunky off-white sneakers, paired with gold-toned rings, necklaces, and earrings. Their makeup is fresh and glowy, their nails are perfectly manicured, and they make fancy-looking drinks in their spotless white kitchens.
They are what the internet calls “clean girls.”
The “clean girl” is an image, a vibe, a genre — one that promotes self-care, comfort, and looking put-together. The most famous clean girl is perhaps Hailey Bieber, and there are countless explainers, tutorials, think pieces, and critiques of the trending aesthetic online. (There is a fairly obvious slippery slope when you categorize people as pure or virtuous based on how they look — especially when components of the look were originally established in non-white communities.) Minimal makeup and smooth hair alone are not enough to be a clean girl — clean girls have perfect white bedsheets, tidy homes with natural light, and of course, spend a lot of time bathing. Sheil’s and Gifford’s content does not align exactly with all of these tropes of the genre, but it is undeniably appealing to the same audience. Their homes, physical appearance, and implied lifestyle are meant to be aspirational.
Where other young women might watch Gifford’s and Sheil’s videos and dream of a similar home for themselves, Sheil’s invocation of Kardashian is apt: the two women owe a great deal of their look and online persona to the person many consider to be the first true influencer. (“You see why they call me Kris 2.0 at all the events?” Gifford’s mother, Laura, quips at one point while she instructs her daughter to adjust her hair as we snap photos. That’s Kris, as in Kris Jenner, the Kardashian matriarch, of course.)
Rewatching Kim Kardashian’s multiple home tour videos, the most recent of which is from 2022, it’s clear just how influential she’s been for generations of women. Her home, like Gifford’s and Sheil’s, is completely monochromatic in beige and cream. In her tours, she’s wearing neutral clothing that matches the decor. A bouclé armchair that Gifford has in her home appears to be a copy of a similar chair that’s featured prominently in Kardashian’s tour. Kardashian speaks of a minimal, quiet home that makes her feel calm — I’ve heard that more than once before.
Amazon influencers like Gifford and Sheil don’t make content just to inspire people. They post on TikTok and Instagram to redirect audiences back to Amazon. In some ways, it is the most ruthless version of influencer marketing, where every item appearing onscreen is an opportunity for micro-earnings. Amazon declined to provide data on the number of people in its influencer program or how much money the company has paid out. That the company ultimately profiting from the sale is one of the largest retailers in the world makes the whole enterprise a bit off-putting — an empire built on fast, largely low-quality products that look great in photos but come from faceless companies that manufacture mountains of crap, much of which will eventually end up in a landfill. These are not vintage Jean Royère wool armchairs (which sold for $460,000 at auction, according to Christie’s); they are $800 decent-looking dupes that give the impression of luxury. If the argument is that Sheil is duplicating Gifford’s existence, there’s something to be said about the fact that the items both of them promote are also imitations of someone else’s work.
Every post is shoppable, subtly nudging viewers via captions like “All items linked in my amzn sf!” — algo-speak for “Amazon storefront” to evade content filters.
The storefront is a customizable landing page on Amazon where influencers can collect and organize all the products they buy and recommend, sorting them into categories like home decor or beauty. When shoppers navigate to product pages from these links and make a purchase, the influencer gets a cut of the sales. It is a zero-sum game: if you buy pots and pans from one storefront, you (probably) won’t buy the same product again from someone else’s.
Here, too, Gifford accuses Sheil of copying her. During the Cyber Monday sales event in 2023, Gifford claims Sheil listed “a substantial number of the exact products” on her storefront shortly after she did, including a four-piece bowl set and checkerboard throw blanket. On Amazon itself, Gifford says Sheil posted photos modeling a knit sweater set a few days after her — striking a similar pose and promoting the same product, according to exhibits filed in her complaint.
“Searching for new products on Amazon takes a long time. I personally choose every product. I purchase every product myself from Amazon, and I only create content around products that are authentic to my brand,” Gifford says. “So it’s not a coincidence when another creator reviews the same products in the same style after I do it.”