Waking up to the ping of a notification, with dozens more eagerly waiting for your attention, is the dream for those of us that live on the internet. Who needs an alarm when you’ve got 140000 adoring followers waiting for your every spot, and waking you up every morning with a veritable river of pings? Not Zenée Bellwether, that’s for sure.
To be fair to Zenée, she did have an alarm clock — right next to the stained glass art and the marble sculpture. All things she didn’t use but came in handy for photoshoots and giving her hordes of fans a (sanitised) peak into her home. They never get to see the messy floors and uncleaned rugs and dozens of broken cameras; probably for the best.
Like most young influencers, Zenée didn’t set out with the goal of making instagram her job when she first made an account. Even with those monochrome, poorly taken photos of that she used to post, she got more attention than she’d bargained for. A bit of attention is a tempting thing. You can quickly grow to love the dopamine rush it gives you, and post more and more in an effort to replicate that initial feeling. Easier said than done, which is why Zenée was still going strong 5 years since she first posted a photo of her posing with an empty glass of Weatherspoon’s lemonade. She’d come a long way, the recent post of her on a Caribbean beach is more than testament to that.
Rather than sharing some rather questionable beverage content, Zenée quickly learnt that legions of adoring fans will do a lot of what she tells them. Whether that be liking a particular post, buying a product or going after a rival that had been acting up. She wasn’t proud of the last one. Probably wouldn’t go as far as saying she’d never do it again though.
Living in Mayfair in one of those Edwardian mansions that have a flag over the front door, Zenée was never short of attention in school. But again, a bit of attention is a tempting thing. Getting tens of thousands of likes and comments full of heart emojis does help with that. As do all the inquiries she gets to advertise products online. Her favourite type of messages, not that she’d ever tell her followers that.
But she refused to work with any companies that use animal products or foreign workers whose conditions she wasn’t aware of, regardless of how popular it may seem. Again, living in Mayfair it isn’t difficult to develop the types of views she did even if she missed a lot of the nuance. Denouncing people for eating meat without knowing their situation doesn’t exactly reek of complete knowledge. But her heart was in the right place, as was her wallet. You don’t donate to all the animal welfare charities this side of the Thames just to show off on social media. Especially without even posting about it.
A bit like attention, money can be tempting. A little bit and you want more. To buy that flowing red dress, a bottle of Dior perfume or even a hat that you’ve been putting off buying because you don’t really need it. Soon enough the thrill of securing a partnership for a product placement wasn’t enough, neither was being paid to do a photoshoot. She needed more — something that was quintessentially Zenée, not what she was being paid to promote. When you’ve lived your whole life for the world to see, maybe you want to do something for yourself for once (of course, that the world will see as well).
You wouldn’t call this a calling per se, but it was an urge, an urge to do something that mattered to her without compromising her rather good monthly flow of income and lifestyle. Passionate, but not (too) controversial.
Looking through her instagram feed one morning, absently scrolling to check her likes and interactions, it struck Zenée that almost every third photo was that of a dog, or a cat if you looked a smidgen harder. Adorable animals she came across on her travels, or cute critters she hired specifically for this very purpose. A deeper look would show that the captions included a lot of animal activism, a tad naive perhaps, but activism nonetheless. An even deeper proved that her animal posts got the most likes; her followers loved them. She had a bit of a brand without even knowing it, now it was simply a matter of knowing how to harness it.
Inspiration struck this time in the most internet-y of Internet places — a dog photo. Nothing fancy, just a little puppy with its smiling owner. But what made the photo was a miniature Chesterfield on which the dog was lounging on. It was just as detailed as a regular one, just smaller and cuter. And what was better? Zenée found that the name of the brand was tagged in it..
She was clever enough to know to not buy directly from the brand, her frequent interactions with dodgy brands had shown that most just nick products off each other and price them to the roof. So she dug deeper, looking at the where the brand got their products from. It was all a rather complex web, like all supply chains. No one wants to advertise where they source their goods for exactly this reason.
But when all the information is in the public domain, it was only a matter of time before she found it. Turns out snooping on social media is a pretty transferable skill if you think about it. She’d managed to cut through all the layers of suppliers, stockists and distributors to find the firm that was selling these little pet furniture pieces.
When she clicked on the suspiciously polished (for a non customer facing company) website, all her instincts screamed SCAM. But it wasn’t, it couldn’t be, after all she’d dug through to come here. They were something called a “dropshipper”, supplying a plethora of big and small companies with their catalogues without needing them to hold stock. This would be immensely good for her, storage was a huge worry. 22 year olds don’t tend to have the deepest knowledge of shipping logistics, surprisingly enough.
Zenée’s snooping inspired research turned up pages of advice on how she needs to build herself a customer base and a brand. But this was her biggest asset — her legions of adoring fans, the Zenarmy if you may. More conventionally known as her almost 85,000 instagram followers.
She started out by putting out little hints on her posts and stories; ‘something big’ was coming, ‘The Project’ was finally to be unveiled. After a few days of building up the hype, Zenée finally revealed her big secret to much fanfare. Not that anything she did wouldn’t get fanfare regardless. Particularly intense fanfare then, in this case.
She’d done the groundwork already, setting up a website and talking to the dropshipper to get everything in order before the day. They were more than eager to comply; working with a (relatively) famous influencer didn’t happen every day.
It would be ironic to worry about the welfare of animals and not look at the status of the workers that made these miniature furniture products. So even before contacting them, she made sure the optics looked good. Being in the public eye means you need to look out for your own principals as much how you’re perceived.
Of course, she didn’t want to find out that underpaid children made her furniture. As much to preserve her image as for worker welfare. But regardless, less than ideal intentions sometimes lead to good results.
For the first time in years, the influencer had done something without being influenced herself. This was her story, her project, her work. A furniture retailer that offered little pet furniture, made sustainably. Leveraging her brand and her knowledge of what her followers want, Zenée built her business from the ground up. The existing social media presence helped, of course, but it’s never easy to run a business profitably, in any circumstances.
So hats off to the influencer from Mayfair. How you’re perceived doesn’t define you. You do.