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A bride asked an artist to provide her with free artwork in exchange for promoting it to her 250,000 social media followers.
In a recent Reddit post published on the “Wedding Shaming” subreddit, the artist shared the email he was sent with the subject line “Inquiry for a custom wedding illustration collaboration.”
“I was contacted by an influencer bride-to-be and offered a unique opportunity to showcase my work to her 250,000 followers. However, she will not be able to make any payment to me,” the artist wrote in the caption of the Reddit post.
Throughout the email, the influencer gave a detailed explanation of her wishes to have a drawing of herself and her partner in their wedding attire to place in their guest book, as well as a background of the wedding venue and her bouquet.
However, the Reddit post highlighted the compensation section, which did not offer traditional pay. “I am a lifestyle blogger and have over 250,000 combined followers on Instagram and TikTok. Once the wedding is over, I will be sharing your artwork and highly recommending your services to my audience,” the bride wrote in the email.
“I’m sure you’ll be overwhelmed by the response from my followers.” The bride continued to plead her case, mentioning that she was working with other vendors who had agreed to provide her and the groom with free services in exchange for social media exposure.
“I think your illustration would be a great addition to our wedding and would be an amazing opportunity for your business to gain more recognition. Last I saw you only had around 1500 followers on Instagram and a business like yours deserves so much more,” the email concluded.
After posting, many people took to the comments section to agree that the artist should say “no” to the influencer for various reasons, with some reflecting on experiences where they accepted influencers and were never promoted and other commenters who thought the influencer might be lying about his followers.
“Aside from the fact that she is a total scammer and you are very unlikely to get business from her followers, I would reject her based on her grammar alone,” one comment began. “She claims to be a lifestyle blogger, but makes several grammatical errors in this email. For example, “Every steps.” She is not a good blogger.”
“He’s probably inflating his follower count, and even if he’s not, he doesn’t have 250,000 individual followers, because those numbers are combined across two platforms. There are probably a lot of duplicate followers, as well as bots and ‘like for like’ accounts who don’t care one bit about his content.”
Another commenter pointed out that 250,000 followers is not enough to earn free products for exposure.
“250,000 COMBINED followers across all platforms isn’t even that high of a number for an ‘influencer.’ Since she shamed the amount of followers her business has, she should respond that she only works with real influencers who have over 1 million followers PER platform,” they wrote.
