Episode 148: Resisting the Message of “Newness,” with Sara of Club Sandwich

Welcome to Clotheshorse, the podcast that has owned their share of belts that were purely ornamental.

I’m your host, Amanda, and this is episode 148. Today’s guest is Sara, a creative marketing professional and founder of Club Sandwich, a New York City-based vintage resale brand specializing in ’70s, ’80s and preloved designer pieces. Our conversation is a long boi because we talked about a lot of different important and interesting topics. We start by calling out the sort of “invisible” marketing techniques that fill us with a sense of a need on a regular basis, and how we can be more mindful (and hopefully overcome them). Then we’ll shift into talking about how to build a wardrobe that embodies the slow fashion way of life. And how to avoid the trap of “novelty” items that can only be worn once or twice. And then we’ll touch on the importance of closet organization and how to approach a closet cleanout in a productive way. Throughout this, we’ll be sharing our love of vintage and secondhand clothing.

This conversation is so long that there will not be any audio essays in this episode…but don’t worry, we have a few more episodes this year for the rest of them. In fact, I have one more spot for an audio essay. So if you are a small business owner who was too shy to submit one earlier, if you get it to me by 12/18, you can secure that last spot! If you missed this round, there will be another chance in the middle of next year, so stay tuned for that!

All, right…let’s jump into my long conversation with Sara. After that, I’ll tell you about a problem plaguing Amazon (and some other platforms): fraudulent reviews (and how they happen).

Thanks again to Sara for spending several hours with me. I hope all of you enjoyed our conversation as much as I did! I know she shared her contact info in the convo, but I’m just going to reiterate it: Shop the collection at shopclubsandwich.co and join the club at @shopclubsandwich. I’ll share that info in the show notes, too!

As I mentioned before our conversation (and during it), surprise surprise, there are a lot of fraudulent product reviews on Amazon and other sites. And it’s really hard to crack down on them, despite many efforts. That’s because the methods are super sneaky and really elaborate!

If you have ever received some random small thing in the mail that you did not order, you were part of a reviews scam called “brushing.” And this has happened to a few friends of mine, who started receiving the oddest things: a pack of scrunchies, clip on hair extensions, fake finger nails, a picture frame…all things they had not ordered that were very inexpensive and mostly unremarkable.

Okay, so how does “brushing” work? Third-party sellers on Amazon, eBay and other online retailers pay people to write fake, positive reviews about their products. These “brushers” need to trick the website into thinking they purchased the thing they actually ordered, so they have to create a legitimate transaction. They’ll use a fake account to place gift orders and just have them sent to a random person whose address they found online. Many of these sites don’t have the technological infrastructure to confirm that the item actually receiving the review was really purchased, they just work off of tracking numbers. So, the “brusher” will often place an order for something cheap, focusing on items that are lightweight and free to ship.

When the package is delivered to the random recipient, it enables the “brusher” to write a verified review. As the recipient of the product, you don’t need to be afraid that someone has stolen your identity or hacked your account. But all of us need to be aware that some (or many) of the reviews we read might be fake.

But there is another, even more complicated machine creating fake reviews. I am going to share a Wired article called “Inside the Underground Market for Fake Amazon Reviews.” It’s fascinating because it really shows how complex this system is. There are agents out there whose sole business is coordinating fake positive reviews. If you’ve ever seen an ad online offering you free stuff or a “100% rebate” on Amazon items, these were a part of the process of procuring people to write these reviews. Often it involves joining Facebook groups where tasks and tips are shared. Members are presented with a list of things that need reviews, and these items can range from $5 to even $1000 in value. So this can be a lucrative way to accumulate things you need or just want. Basically the scam works this way: you are told what to purchase on Amazon. You receive it, write the review, share proof of the review, and you receive a payment that covers the cost of the item. And you get to keep the item. This has nothing to do with Amazon itself (outside of the actual purchase). Rather, these agents are the “middle person” between the brand selling on Amazon and the people writing the reviews.

The Wired article focuses on a PhD student at UC Davis who started noticing these ads and joined a bunch of the Facebook groups. He managed to collect a lot of information, including surveying some of the buyers and agents. He found that of those surveyed, “people were writing an average of 10 reviews per month for products with a total value between $120 and $2,400. Agents earned $4 or $5 for each review they secured, with average monthly earnings of $150.”

The agents are an important part of this puzzle. The reviewers (which they call Jennies, as in Jenny from the block or friend of the pod, Jenny Herbert) are coached very carefully on how to execute the process from searching for the item to leaving the review, all to make the fake review unspottable by Amazon’s algorithm. The agents never give out direct links to the items, because that can trigger Amazon’s fraud department. Instead, they coach the “Jennies” on how to search in more realistic ways, from clicking through other related items, marking other reviews as helpful, and even asking questions on the pages. Jennies are expected to include a photo and/or video and write a review that is more than 300 words. They are also coached to leave negative reviews on other products in order to make their profile seem more genuine. And of course, it is ideal if the Jennies are regular Amazon customers with Prime accounts.

Why all of this skullduggery and intrigue? Well, while no one fully understands how Amazon’s algorithm works, everyone knows that highly rated products land at the top of a search, particularly if they have a lot of reviews. And research has indicated that customers are 2-3 times more likely to purchase something with a lot of positive reviews.

Amazon has many faults, but they don’t love the fake reviews. Why? Because a customer who buys something with a lot of fake positive reviews and then hates the item they purchased is less likely to return. And overall, it’s just not a good look for Amazon, who (to be diplomatic here) faces a lot of other big PR issues in the first place. The problem is that spotting these fake reviews is nearly impossible *because* the agents are so good at coaching the Jennies. So instead the company has tried to go after the Facebook groups where Jennies are recruited and coached. In July, the company filed a lawsuit against more than 10,000 of these Facebook groups.

But unfortunately, fake Amazon reviews are just the tip of the iceberg. You can find them anywhere, from ebay to Orbitz to google maps. It’s really really hard to spot the fakes.

So what’s a customer to do? To be honest, I don’t have a real answer here. There is an app you can download called Fakespot (you can also add it to your browser). I added it to Chrome and went on to Amazon to check out some stuff (random things, like a white faux fur hat, an Airpods charging case that was listed as “amazon’s choice”) and a cat bed. And all of them had a score that was at least one star lower than Amazon’s score after Fakespot pulled out the fake reviews. You can also use Fakespot on Best Buy, eBay, Walmart, Sephora, and Shopify. On the Sephora website, I clicked on a Sephora brand lip gloss that supposedly had 4 stars. But according to Fakespot, the real score was two stars, receiving a D grade for the legitimacy of its reviews. I recommend adding this to your browser–just search Fakespot–or downloading the app because it’s super eye opening.

Otherwise, we just have to cast a critical eye. These scams are super sneaky, so it’s easy to fall for them, but definitely read more than just a few reviews! Ultimately, all we can do is…the best we can do! I think it helps to write our own reviews because it helps other people out there break through the noise. But wow, this world is so complicated, so full of things that make it even more difficult to make the right choices…it’s important to remember that it’s progress not perfection, whether we buy a dress that we can’t wear with anything else or we fall for some fake good reviews. Stuff happens. The best thing we can do is learn from it and try to do better in the future. Most of us are harder on ourselves than our worst critics. Or maybe we embody the words of our worst critics and turn them up two notches. I don’t know. But what I do know is that we’re all doing our best and that leads to good things, even if there are weird stops along the way.