By Mia Sato | The Verge
One Amazon influencer makes a living posting content from her beige home. But after she noticed another account hawking the same minimal aesthetic, a rivalry spiraled into a first-of-its-kind lawsuit. Can the legal system protect the vibe of a creator? And what if that vibe is basic?
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.
“This is a good case to demonstrate how current intellectual property laws are not well equipped to protect modern brand personas. Copyright does not generally protect artistic styles, no matter how mindfully an influencer curates their vibe. In this case, the plaintiff alleges copying of some creative elements of her posts, including text and video content, but those claims seem pretty bland. Trade dress is better suited to protect a brand’s “look and feel,” but unregistered trade dress can be difficult to establish and typically requires at least 5 years of extensive use.”
–Paul Coble, chair of Rose Law Group’s AI, intellectual property, and technology law departments
