When fast-fashion online retailer Shein invited six influencers to tour one of its factories in Guangzhou, China, in late June, online backlash against both the brand and its influencer partners was swift. As videos of the creators exploring the sleek, high-tech factory began flooding TikTok and Instagram, thousands of people began condemning the group of influencers for their glib dismissal of the allegations of poor working conditions and forced labor that have been repeatedly leveled against Shein. 

Shein is one of several brands that have faced criticism in recent months for influencer trips, raising questions about the value of these trips in a brand’s creator strategy. But several influencer marketing experts agree that influencer trips can still play a unique role in drawing large amounts of consumer attention and in strengthening relationships with creators. Brands just need to be prepared to address potential controversy that may arise on social media as the internet’s attention swivels to them.

Influencer trips aren’t a new phenomenon—cosmetics brand Tarte has hosted over a dozen trips since 2015, and fashion brands such as Revolve also leaned into these experience-based influencer partnerships in the same timeframe—but these trips seem to have become a magnet for social media controversy over the past year.

For Shein, intense scrutiny around its influencer trip stemmed from its goal of having creators help counter allegations against the brand regarding working conditions, as it attempts to further expand into the U.S. This led a number of people to compare the trip to a propaganda tactic, and creators on the trip faced criticism for glossing over these alleged labor abuses in their social posts.

One creator on the trip, Destene Sudduth, received a flood of critical comments after saying, “I expected this facility to be so filled with people just slaving away…[but] they weren’t even sweating,” while another, Dani Carbonari, was attacked for a now-deleted video in which she called herself an “investigative journalist.”

“Shein is committed to transparency and this trip reflects one way in which we are listening to feedback, providing an opportunity to show a group of influencers how Shein works through a visit to our innovation center and enabling them to share their own insights with their followers,” a Shein spokesperson said in a statement. “Their social media videos and commentary are authentic, and we respect and stand by each influencer’s perspective and voice on their experience. We look forward to continuing to provide more transparency around our on-demand business model and operations.”

Lately, even influencer trips designed to more simply grab consumers’ attention with an influx of glamorous social media content have stirred up controversy. 

Tarte, for example, has come under fire for multiple influencer trips in the past several months. In May, the brand faced accusations of racism after Bria Jones, a Black creator invited on the brand’s trip to the F1 Grand Prix in Miami, said in a now-deleted TikTok video that her itinerary for the trip didn’t include the day of the final race, though many of the other influencers on the trip would be attending that race. And, in January, Tarte’s extravagant trip to Dubai sparked an online firestorm as people criticized the brand for hosting such an opulent experience amid an economic downturn. Tarte did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

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“Creators and brands are being held to a higher standard of authenticity than ever before, and consumers are far more aware of influencer marketing than they have ever been,” said Julianne Fraser, president and CEO of influencer marketing agency Dialogue New York. “If a brand is essentially using a megaphone and engaging with these high-profile influencers, every detail will be noticed.”

To trip or not to trip

In a typical influencer-brand deal, a creator will make a handful of social media posts spread out across several weeks or months. But influencer trips instead produce a large, simultaneous blast of posts from multiple creators, which can generate significant “momentum” and buzz around the brand that individual posts can’t, said Natalie Silverstein, chief innovation officer at Collectively, an influencer marketing agency. 

“If there's a season that fits a certain brand or type of product, an influencer trip can be a way to just draw more attention and take over more share of voice for a short period of time, which can kind of give a little bit of a pop to the brand,” she said. For example, a clothing brand launching a swimwear collection could benefit from having a dozen creators simultaneously sharing videos of themselves lounging on the beach clad in the brand’s new swimsuits. 

“A brand can become a bit more salient in people’s feeds when [influencers’] posts about it are more concentrated over a shorter period,” she added. “That concentration of attention can be really valuable for certain brands in terms of pushing products.” 

Along with the rush of posts creators share during the trip itself, these experiences can also generate “a high volume of great social content that the brand can use for many months to come,” Fraser said. As brands increasingly look to creators to help them produce social content for their owned channels, having a backlog of photos and videos from an influencer trip on hand can help brands meet demands for creator-produced content.

For that content to be engaging and effective, however, the brand needs to ensure the experiences it offers influencers on the trip are equally interesting, Fraser said. A brand simply tasking creators with sharing videos of themselves luxuriating at a five-star resort and mentioning the brand in passing won’t see the same returns as if the brand is interwoven throughout the trip experience, she said.

These trips can be a great opportunity to educate influencers about the brand by giving them a behind-the-scenes look at how a product is created or immersing them in the culture surrounding the brand, Fraser continued. For example, when tasked with organizing an influencer trip for Japanese beauty brand Clé de Peau Beauté in 2019, Fraser brought creators to the brand’s Tokyo headquarters and took them to meet the kimono artisan whose work was the inspiration behind the packaging of the brand’s “Kimono Dream” product line.

“It's so important to give influencers engaging, exciting educational experiences to speak about. There has to be some sort of message behind their content that can ring true,” she said. “If you invite an influencer to meet the founder and hear their story, or to participate in some kind of experience that really brings a product to life, the quality of the content you’re going to get from the influencers will be so much richer.” 

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Brittany Bright, founder of creator education platform The Influencer League and a content creator herself, echoes Fraser’s stance on the importance of curating experiences for influencers that reflect the brand or its ethos. In her previous role as associate director of influencer marketing at communications agency Modern Citizen, she organized two influencer trips last summer to a Vietnam-based automaker’s factory ahead of the company’s launch in the U.S. Because the vehicles hadn’t yet been brought to the U.S., these trips were the most effective way for the brand to amass social media content directly from U.S. consumers, Bright said.

She invited three different “buckets” of influencers on the trip—lifestyle and fashion creators, who made content surrounding the trip “feel more stylish and fun”; parents, who could speak to the brand’s larger vehicles; and automotive influencers with extensive knowledge of vehicles. Though all of these creators were exposed to the same experiences on the trip, such as seeing the cars being built and testing out how it felt to sit inside them, each group of creators brought their own content style and voice to the posts, which gave the brand a larger breadth of content to draw from for its own social media posts, Bright said.

But perhaps most importantly, influencer trips can help brands bolster their relationships with creators. When a creator is able to engage with and learn directly rather than through influencer marketing platforms or direct messages, they often develop a greater connection and sense of loyalty to the brand, Collectively’s Silverstein said. She suggests focusing on existing influencer partners, though, rather than inviting a group of creators who are largely unfamiliar with the brand.

“These trips are really a great way to deepen relationships with existing partners who have been really great advocates for the brand,” she said. “It’s a smart thing to do, because there’s already goodwill and trust there. And the best way to guard against controversy is having that foundation of trust with the creators who are joining you on the trip and making sure they feel like they are being taken care of.” 

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However, influencer trips require massive investments from brands in order to bring them to life, especially when international travel is involved. For the two trips that Bright organized to Vietnam, for example, the company had to cover the airfare and hotel costs for 20 influencers and their plus-ones, along with additional costs for travel between cities within Vietnam and for the various events throughout the trip. The company also paid creators upwards of $60,000 for their work producing social media content while on the trip, rather than solely offering them an all-expenses-paid trip, she said. 

“Free trips are great, but are you also compensating me for my time and the content that I'm going to create? Because at the end of the day, influencers are not media and media is not an influencer,” she added. “As an influencer, you should be getting paid to do this.”

International trips with large groups of influencers invited can easily rack up seven-figure budgets, Bright said. Fraser agreed that international trips require six-to-seven-figure budgets, depending on the number of influencers involved, the destination of the trip, the cost of the experiences and events involved in the trip, and each influencer’s rates. She estimated a trip with five influencers could cost anywhere from $58,0000 to $325,000.

Because of the steep costs associated with sprawling brand trips, her agency isn’t advising their clients—other than a travel brand, Elsewhere—to host international experiences for influencers, she said. Collectively has backed away from influencer trips, too, despite working with brands on several of them prior to the pandemic, Silverstein said. 

Fraser is instead “supporting almost all of [her] clients on localized, U.S.-based experiences” such as dinner parties, she said, in response to surging interest from these brands in incorporating influencers into experiential marketing. 

“People are so hungry for that in-person connection and experiences to connect to a brand,” she said. “But these [international] trips aren’t really a discussion with our clients, and we’re not recommending them.”

Countering the TikTok controversy cycle

Until recently, many brands had hosted influencer trips with little incident. Throughout the mid-to-late 2010s, brands such as Revolve and even Tarte hosted dozens of star-studded international trips that didn’t immediately devolve into online controversy. But the influencer trip landscape has shifted after its resurgence from a pandemic-induced pause, Silverstein said.

“It's really been a post-pandemic phenomenon that these trips are not as easy-breezy as they used to be,” she said. “There’s just been more criticism—whether it’s criticism of displays of opulence that feel out of step with culture; because the diversity is not there among creators; there’s tiers of experiences based on people’s status as a creator; or a brand is trying to use a creator trip for reputation burnishing and the internet is just not having it.”

“I think it’s a bit of a reflection of the culture of criticism that now exists, really, through TikTok,” she continued. 

TikTok was certainly the birthplace of much of the criticism surrounding the recent Tarte and Shein influencer trips, where hashtags tied to the trips each received tens of millions of views and users stitched creators’ videos to offer their perspectives on the trip or tear into the brand or the creators at the heart of these controversies. Others added the wry sense of humor popular on TikTok to the situation, such as one user who parodied the Shein factory trip by pretending to be a brand ambassador visiting the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.

The fact that a large portion of these recent influencer trips unfolded on TikTok—where the creators’ content can be served up to anyone, not just their followers—is the root of some of the internet uproar around the trips, said James Nord, founder and CEO of influencer marketing agency Fohr. When influencer trips were at their peak in the 2010s, creators were primarily posting their content from these trips to Instagram, where these posts rarely reached beyond those creators’ followers. 

But when algorithms determine the content users encounter in their social media feeds, rather than who the user follows, “views often come from people that don’t follow that influencer, so there’s no context for their content and these people don’t know them,” Nord said. “Maybe they don’t even like them.” 

And since the influencer marketing industry has ballooned in size since the 2010s, many consumers have also become more conscious of—and subsequently, more critical of—influencer trips than they were pre-pandemic, he said. 

“In 2016, this industry was tiny,” Nord said. “Nobody paid attention to it; it wasn’t something that everyone was doing yet. But now, there’s just so much more attention on these trips than when they were happening six years ago or so.” 

These controversies are having real impact on brands beyond just social media callouts. According to data from market research firm Morning Consult, U.S. consumers’ purchasing consideration from Shein dropped following the brand’s influencer trip from roughly 22% to 15%, and the percentage of consumers who reported “distrusting” Shein jumped five percentage points to about 17%.

Similarly, following Tarte’s F1 Grand Prix trip in May, consumers’ net trust in the cosmetics brand plummeted 11 percentage points, from 18% to just 7%, which Morning Consult retailer and e-commerce analyst Claire Tassin called “the biggest downtrend [she’d] ever seen for Tarte in terms of consumer trust.”

“These influencer trips are a huge investment for the brand because of their ability to take over a platform like TikTok,” she said. “But it’s kind of a double-edged sword. TikTok can be a fantastic amplifier of your message, but it can also be a fantastic amplifier of your criticism.”

Prior to Shein’s influencer trip, much of the controversy around these trips has stemmed from a lack of diversity among the creators involved, or from brands not paying creators beyond covering their travel costs, Bright said. Tarte has been accused multiple times of prioritizing white influencers when choosing attendees for these trips; and, in the case of the F1 trip, of providing a “tiered” experience for the different creators, where Jones, one of the Black creators invited on the trip, wasn’t invited to the final day of the race.

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Brands should ensure all influencers on these trips receive equal experiences, rather than adjusting them based on the size of a creator’s following or any other factors, Silverstein said. And when selecting which influencers to invite, diversity should be one of the key factors considered along with standard metrics such as engagement rate or follower size, she said.

The responses from Tarte and Shein to their respective influencer trip controversies also fueled some of the internet firestorms surrounding them. In Tarte’s case, CEO Maureen Kelly responded to Jones’ video about being treated differently than other influencers with a now-deleted “get ready with me” video that many considered inappropriate due to its casual format. And attention toward the Shein trip was heightened when a few of the creators on the trip, particularly Carbonari, began doubling down on their claims of Shein’s sustainable manufacturing practices and safe working conditions with a flurry of social media posts. 

Though brands can’t fully prevent controversy from arising from an influencer trip, one of the most effective ways to avoid one of these scenarios is to communicate clearly and openly with influencers about the trip and the expectations on both ends of the deal, Silverstein said. From the start, brands should be “making sure creators really understand the brand and feel confident about who the brand is and what the brand represents,” rather than simply focusing on the trip and its itinerary, she said. 

Creators, too, should do their homework about the brand and not just blindly agree to an influencer trip with a company they have never partnered with previously, Bright added. “It has to be a mutually-aligned decision, and not just an opportunity for a free trip,” she said. 

Brands should also work closely with their PR teams to think through different possible scenarios of how an influencer trip can go awry and develop plans to respond to these potential outcomes, Nord said. In other words, “the worst time to make those decisions is when the situation is already happening,” he said.

“Influencer trips can absolutely help bring that added level of attention to the brand,” Nord said. “But the flipside is, you have to do these trips really well, because with more attention comes more scrutiny. And, if executed improperly, these trips have much more of a chance of getting the kind of attention a brand wouldn’t want to receive.”