So last fall your favorite blogger had this beautiful brown bag that you lusted over. From September through Thanksgiving, that bag was featured in countless Instas and blog posts. It was appearing in your dreams. The blogger couldn't stop talking about how "obsessed" she was with it, talking about how she'd keep it forever and it was such a great investment piece. You spent hours at H&M and Forever 21, maybe even Nordstorm looking for a similar bag that wasn't $1,300.
A year later, you still think about that bag. Maybe it's on sale on Ebay, you think to yourself. You cruise Ebay/Poshmark/Tradesy/Threadflip and lo and behold, there's the bag. Yes, it's truly that beautiful brown purse for a much, much more reasonable price of $350. You've got the cash, even though you'd be eating peanut butter sandwiches for a month.
As you look at the pictures while fumbling through your purse for an AMEX, you start to notice a few things. The wedding ring on the hand holding up the bag in the pictures looks awfully familiar. So does the couch in the background. The name of the shop happens to be the middle name of your favorite blogger. When you finally fork over the $350 buckaroos for the purse, you discover the package is shipping from Bumfuck, California. The same city where that blogger lives.
Let me discuss c/o items for a minute. C/O means "care of" or "courtesy of" and it's a signal that the blogger was given this item for review. I've talked about this before, but lots of people seem to think that bloggers get tons of free stuff. Don't think of those c/o items as free, because they're not. According to the IRS, those items are considered income, meaning I have to pay income taxes on them, not to mention my state's hefty self-employment tax. This can easily be 30% or more of the item's cost. So really, bloggers don't get honest-to-goodness, 100% free stuff. It's just a discount.
What I really want to talk about today is the contracts for c/o merchandise. Let's go back to that brown bag you fell in love with while reading my blog. Yes, I may have posted about how much I loved that damn bag for three months but only because I was contractually obligated to. I may have been required to post four Instagrams a week featuring the bag, and once every other week in an outfit post. This doesn't even cover Twitter or Facebook mentions.
To finally get to the point of this blog post, a lot of the contracts have stipulations regarding what one can do with their c/o items when they're done with them. You might have to wait anywhere from a month or year after the contract ends. Some brands will make you donate instead of selling.
There are a lot of feelings when it comes to bloggers selling their (not truly) free stuff. Some say it's a conflict of interest, others will point out to the insincerity of the blogger and call bullshit. For some bloggers, selling their c/o items help them pay the rent. For others, it's just a way of making a small bit of coin on the side.
So are brands upset that bloggers sell the stuff they gave them? For the most part, no, as long as you keep it on the down low. I sold a lot of my c/o stuff on Ebay under a fake name and sent my items out from a post office half an hour away using a PO Box as a return address. There are bloggers who are much more brazen and will make separate Instagram accounts to sell straight from their closet.
Like everything, though, it all comes down to money. Obviously, these brands want to sell products, that's why I'm getting courtesy goods.
There is no such thing as a free lunch. Over the several year span that I blogged, I received around $75,000 in "free," or more commonly known as "c/o" merchandise. Like I said in a previous post, I had to claim all of this stuff as income and pay sometimes as high as 30% of the item's cost in taxes.
