Nicole Flanagin remembers exactly the moment an influencer came after her business. It was the early hours of a March morning and the cat cafe owner in Lenoir, North Carolina, got a message. “At 1.37,” she says, “a friend sent me the link to this girl’s TikTok.”
The 41-year-old was already having a bad 24 hours. A mother of four, Flanagin also works at a pet rescue shelter and had spent the previous day unsuccessfully fighting for a dog not to be put down. She got home exhausted and promptly conked out in bed. Then she woke up to the message.
The video began innocuously enough 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!” The woman 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. In the influencer’s 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 knew instantly that the woman was talking about her cafe, Brews and Mews – the only animal cafe in the area. The cats are fosters from local shelters, and children aged six and under can only visit 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: she had more than 170,000 followers, some of whom had already started to comment favourably on the post. Flanagin 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.”
But, amid her rising panic, Flanagin had a nagging feeling that something wasn’t quite right. “She attacked my employee and made out he was just staring at her kid wailing on the floor,” she says. But Brews and Mews hadn’t received an official complaint in its inbox. None of her typically conscientious employees had flagged the incident to her. So Flanagin looked up the CCTV. “I love a good receipt,” she tells me. “I’ve been through a divorce, honey.”
Time-stamped footage from security cameras in the cafe showed the influencer entering and having a conversation lasting less than 40 seconds with a staffer behind the till. She and her child briefly looked at the cats in the window before leaving quietly. There was 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 says. A day and a half later, she decided to post the CCTV on the Brews and Mews TikTok page with an outraged comment about the lies the woman had told. That video now has more than 640,000 views.
The content creator later deleted her review and posted an apology video, where she explained: “I was upset as a parent and clicked that post button before I really thought about what would happen.” But the encounter clearly still rankles Flanagin. “Why is your opinion any more valid or important than mine or somebody else’s?” she says today 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 singer Kelly Clarkson (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 wasn’t for sale, it went around the world and surveillance footage was posted in response.
Flanagin’s fight was another skirmish on the frontline of a growing war between entrepreneurs and online content creators.The relationship is a complicated one: many business owners are thrilled to have the attention, and know that a post can make a difference. But, increasingly, they are feeling burned by influencers behaving badly, and are taking matters into their own hands. It has led to a takedown economy where the “fightback” can go as viral as a sponsored post. One such example relates to Binky Felstead from Made in Chelsea. When her assistant asked 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, in a crackdown on the plague. How did we get here?
Before the rise of the creator economy, it was only Hollywood actors, star athletes and supermodels who expected celeb treatment. Now that rarefied circle has expanded to include social media influencers and many wannabes. They have sprouted across almost every sector: there are influencers for lawn care, Minecraft, dairy farming and more. But the nature of fame has fragmented, too. You could be lining up for a viral apple crumble next to the biggest food influencer in London and be none the wiser. Your son might be a fan of a Roblox creator with a millions-strong following and you might never recognise their username.
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. That can be transformational, particularly for those that struggle to afford traditional advertising. “Influencers absolutely catapulted my business to where it is now,” says Lucy Herron, the founder of the British shoe-wear 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.”
But depending on influencers as a marketing strategy is a double-edged sword. Diva-like behaviour can grow unchecked. Once, Herron sent a free pair of ballerina trainers (retail price £225) to an influencer best known for appearing on a reality show, expecting the customary thank you post on Instagram. Instead, the woman told Herron that she couldn’t publicly thank the brand because it might come to the attention of the tax authorities (according to HMRC, gifted products count towards your taxable income).
After months of back and forth, she reluctantly agreed to post a photo and tag Sloafer. Herron laughed in disbelief when she saw the picture. The woman had worn the black pumps with an all-black outfit and photographed herself standing at the back of a room, her face shrouded in darkness. “It was like collaborating with a ninja,” Herron says. “It sticks in your throat – they could buy a pair of my shoes in every colour and it wouldn’t dent their bank balance.” Still, Herron begrudgingly left a positive comment on the influencer’s page, thanking her for the post. “You have to keep playing the game,” she sighs. (Like all the business owners I spoke to, Herron didn’t want to name names.)
Influencers make for 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. One suggested that hating influencers was a “socially acceptable way to hate women”. “There are obvious valid reasons to criticise influencer culture,” argued the Canadian influencer Levi Coralynn in her video on the controversy, “[but] the conversation has now moved past hating on the industry and people just seem to hate women who participate in it.”
Herron has also been accused of sexism for calling out influencer culture on her social media accounts – particularly when she posted about unfollowing 250 female-owned accounts because she was fed up with sending shoes to influencers who never wore them. “It’s got nothing to do with internalised misogyny,” she tells me. “I’m trying to run a profitable business, and it’s bloody hard enough without someone taking the piss.”
Josh Wheeler, the founder of PR agency Be Broadcast, has worked with influencers for 15 years, often acting as an intermediary between them and brands and businesses. He says there is no one type of influencer most prone to bad behaviour. “I can think of nightmares and angels in all [categories].”
“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,” he explains. That can lead to mixed results for businesses who are pinning their hopes on an influencer’s reach. “There might be a campaign landing on Monday and the talent pulls out on Friday,” he recalls. “You’re, like, ‘OK, cool. Well, we’ve just spent three months on this.’ We’ve seen talent say to staff, ‘Don’t look me in the eye.’” Another was blacklisted after making “deeply inappropriate” comments about a member of Wheeler’s team on a briefing call. Still, he says, businesses sometimes treat influencers with kid gloves. “There is often a nervousness,” he says. “It’s like they forget they’re in charge.”
Perhaps because of this overweening power, a backlash is brewing against what some see as an increasingly noxious sense of entitlement among influencers. Big corporations can afford to put aside a budget to cover extravagant freebies and press trips, but small indies like Sloafer are “operating on knife‑edge profit margins”, Herron explains. Every pair of shoes sent to an influencer is one that they could sell 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 says.
The tantalising possibility of the post that could revitalise your beloved establishment or save your brand is what keeps business owners coming back, says Hubert Zanier, the owner of Kipferl, a London-based restaurant and patisserie that serves Austrian food. In the hospitality industry, influencers have almost completely supplanted the role of the food critic when it comes to spreading the word about their businesses. “A lot of restaurants are struggling,” he says. “They all hope for that one viral post that makes the whole thing explode and pick up.”
Zanier knows this all too well. In 2024, a well‑known London influencer with 100,000 followers left him in the lurch after totting up a £300 bill at his restaurant. The first hint that something was off came when she asked to bring her family – something that Zanier normally wouldn’t accommodate (most restaurants will cover a plus one, but no more). She turned up with her partner, her parents and their dog – and proceeded to order 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.”
Instead, what happened was a months-long dispute between Zanier and the influencer, culminating in the latter calling him after Christmas to scream at him. “I was perplexed,” Zanier says. Typically, influencers will acknowledge a free meal on social media a few days after visiting a restaurant, he explains. But the creator fobbed him off for months. “She started to write really weird stuff, like ‘at the moment my creative juices are not flowing’.” Nine months on – Zanier is nothing if not persistent – the influencer finally gave up and offered to foot the bill. But when he sent it she phoned him up, furiously telling him: “This is absolutely outrageous.”
“I said, ‘I have a small business,’” Zanier recalls. “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 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,” he says today. “But it was really, really unpleasant.” He still works with influencers, but is much more selective about who he invites to his restaurant. “I think they are part of the [food] industry now,” he shrugs. “Just because some of them might be black sheep, it doesn’t mean that they’re all crooked.”
But with such “rogue operators” (as Zanier puts it) circling the industry, it’s no wonder that some establishments are vigorously clamping down. When Borough Market security kicked out the food vloggers Bite Twice for filming there in November, it was said to have marked a “Frankenstein moment” for the hospitality business – the industry had created a monster and was now fighting back. The market now enforces rules against the scourge of content creators clogging up stalls and walkways with their equipment – anybody filming with more than a crew of two (presenter and cameraperson) or with professional-grade equipment must now seek clearance and carry their permit with them. It was hailed as a long-overdue rebalancing of the relationship between businesses and influencers – one that puts paying customers first.
Halfsies Cookie Company founder David Maffei usually spends seven days a week, sometimes up to 10 hours a day, baking in his New York kitchen – as a team of one. In Maffei’s eyes, influencers can provide useful PR for a small business like his. When the model Amber Lancaster posted about Halfsies to her half a million followers, he says, “We sold out for months.”
But influencer culture, he argues, has also spawned a generation of entitled imitators who believe that having a small following justifies A-list treatment from brands and businesses. The worst, he says, are those who fire off blandly friendly copy-and-paste messages to multiple companies, hoping 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, on a Hall of Fame category on his Instagram.
“I’d love to include your amazing products in my bridal party boxes,” one such email request went. “Are you in for some bridal bliss? Let’s chat!” After Maffei pointed out that she had only 1,300 followers on Instagram, the bride-to-be argued, “I’m a beginner influencer.”
“And I’m a beginner astronaut,” Maffei replied. He posted screenshots of the exchange on the Halfsies Instagram account, where it received more than 17,000 likes and was even covered by People magazine. “Don’t lie to me to get free stuff,” he says.
“When you get those messages, it’s quite disheartening,” Anastasia Powers, a luxury balloon artist based in Essex, tells me. She has created dramatic displays for weddings, galas and corporate clients such as Zambrero and Twickenham rugby club. In other words, she’s not short of work – she is currently in the middle of talks with a celebrity DJ to create a display for his birthday – but 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 sighs.
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 says firmly. “They don’t put food on my table.”
She has a policy of turning down all influencer requests and says that other people in her industry are increasingly coming over to her way of thinking. She is in a WhatsApp group chat with fellow business owners to share intel about the worst offenders. “We’ll screenshot the messages, and we’ll all laugh,” she smiles. “Sometimes we’ll coordinate a reply and we’ll all send it to them, which is quite funny.”
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Reshmi Bennett is the Michelin-trained founder of the luxury cake business Anges de Sucre, who made headlines for calling out Made in Chelsea’s Felstead after receiving an email requesting a “gifted” cake for her son Wilder. (Felstead is estimated to be worth between £1.4m and £3m and lives in a £3.6m south-west London house, which is, according to the Daily Mail, largely furnished with freebies.) The former banker turned chef was incensed: “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.”
Bennett’s cakes are expensive and artisanal work – she runs a team of three full-time staff and one part-timer to make towering creations that are hand‑delivered across London and Surrey. “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,” she explains.
Bennett took to Instagram to call Felstead out, even creating a joke fundraiser for the influencer to cover the cost of her son’s birthday cake. “Unfortunately,” Bennett noted on the now-deleted GoFundMe page, “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, 42, has been burned by working for free in the past. An influencer with about 20,000 followers once asked for a birthday cake for her child. As the influencer was local to the area, Bennett hoped it might lead to more customers in the neighbourhood. But when the pictures were posted on Instagram, Bennett’s cake was one of many treats on a dessert table that included cookies, doughnuts and even cakes from her competitors. Worst of all, she only received a single inquiry as a result. It said: “Oh, hi, it’s my daughter’s birthday. Would you like to collaborate?”
“Piss off!” she laughs. “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.”
Cynics might observe that calling out these influencers can be a way to drive attention to your own brand. With the Clarkson case, the jury is out as to whether Art of Play’s response – contesting her account and jokily raising the price of the bird to $15m – was the right one. Still, negativity is the life force of the internet – one study has found that negative posts attract twice as much engagement as positive ones. In much the same way that “de-influencing” videos of creators criticising viral products became a trend in and of itself, negative posts about influencers have become their own cottage industry, with content creators on YouTube breaking down social media beefs for their followers.
But Bennett says that a no-holds-barred approach doesn’t always go down well if you’re a business trying to sell people your product. “I have got some stick,” she acknowledges. “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.” The answer, she says, is for small-business owners to speak out and share what it’s 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 approaching 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 says.
Back in Lenoir, North Carolina, Flanagin is gearing up for the morning shift at Brews and Mews. While she has received support from all over the world after she posted her video, the local community on Facebook have been firmly on the side of the influencer. Critics have said that she should have tried to handle it privately or not posted footage featuring the influencer’s children. “Locally, we’re the devil, yet we’re the first [place] that people call when they find a cat!” Still, her video is staying up. “I don’t regret it, honey. I said it with my whole chest,” she says. “And I would say it all day, every day, again and again.”
