There is a corner of the internet where the drawers don’t look like your drawers. They are stocked and they’re aesthetic — translation: they’re neatly arranged in acrylic clear stacking boxes or neutral-toned storage containers — and they look like they could belong to Khloé Kardashian. Touchland hand sanitizers in every color, single-use travel spoolies, miniature perfumes, a year’s supply of Tide-to-Go sticks. Seemingly every possible laundry product is neatly labeled and in prettier containers than they came in. Guest bathrooms, fridges, home coffee bars, and purse towers (purse towers!) are scrubbed and stocked in ear-tickling videos. It’s an e-commerce-fed production of aesthetic excess that inspires admiration, envy, and accusations of overconsumption in the comments section.
These are spaces where shopping addiction turns into well-organized eye candy, and they belong to several very popular content creators who have racked up millions of followers and views inviting scrollers to participate in aspirational restocks, resets, declutters, and deep cleans. Join @imjuliekay and her 5.2 million TikTok followers in restocking her “purse must-haves.” Kay’s bejeweled manicure will delicately add miniature beauty blenders to an acrylic container next to the mini Tic Tacs. In a separate drawer, she keeps packets of wipes: teeth-cleaning wipes, “Wipe That Tush” wipes, Wet Ones, deodorant wipes. In another drawer she keeps her supply of mini Caboodles, which she’ll later use for packing the purse must-haves for the purse. Meanwhile, @operation_niki is deep-cleaning her hotel room for her 2.6 million Instagram “besties.” She’s packed the obvious vacation essentials: a portable door lock, disposable bedsheets, a brand-new Sponge Daddy, and multiple travel-size disinfectants. Prefer food restocks? @_catben_ is pouring her potato chips into air-locked plastic Tupperware and her broccoli from a plastic bag to a plastic fridge organizer. One of her 12.9 million TikTok followers will inevitably comment something like, “So you’re rich rich.” On every platform where short-form videos tempt thumbs to press a heart icon, the ASMR scrape of hard-plastic organizers being Tetris’d in an empty drawer has become inescapable — and conveniently, there’s a shoppable link if you want your own. The “Vtopmart 25 PCS Clear Plastic Drawer Organizers Set” is the No. 25 best seller in Amazon’s Home and Kitchen category.
Outside of the comments section and affiliate links, there are real-life people, mostly women, who are the driving force behind this side of the influencer industry. After watching one, two, then 5,000 of these videos, I had to know: Where do these women put their dirty sponges? Do they need that many Stanley tumblers? What do they do when a family member gifts them an ugly mug that doesn’t fit the rest of their aesthetic? Do they genuinely enjoy this level of over-the-top organization? Are they buying too much stuff?
Micah Enriquez started growing her Instagram and TikTok accounts @makeitwithmicah during the pandemic when her two children were homeschooling online. A type A self-starter with a law degree, Enriquez researched how to become an influencer as a means of earning money from home. She learned to track trends and manage brand partnerships and now has nearly 3 million followers between the two platforms. As a full-time creator, she posts thrifty Dollar Tree DIYs (make pretend-cake for your toddler with a sponge and some felt!) and seasonal resets (stock your coffee bar with candy corn in a porcelain pumpkin!) and prefers it to working in law. “Nobody likes you when you’re an attorney,” she tells me during a Zoom call.
Rochelle Stewart of @operation_niki and Catherine Benson of @_catben_ have similar origin stories: mothers stuck at home during the pandemic who were able to successfully monetize their genuine passion for cleanliness and organization and become full-time content creators. For them, tidiness is a philosophy. “I always say ‘messy home, messy mind,’” Stewart, who lives in Nashville with her husband and three children, explains over email. “A clean home helps me keep my mind clutter-free; it helps me get through my day.” She creates her videos, Stewart says, as the need to clean arises. Similarly, Benson, who lives in Kentucky with her four children and swears she only owns four vacuum cleaners, says over the phone that she finds it personally satisfying to maintain a tidy home (though she admits sometimes she just doesn’t show her dirty sponges). In fact, it comes so naturally to her that when asked about the pressure to keep up with restocking trends and social-media demands, she says it isn’t an issue, “it just provides more motivation to enhance the organization and aesthetic of my living space.” She’s particularly passionate about the editing part of her job: “I love how it all comes together,” she says. She favors a finger-snap transition from messy drawer *snap* to pretty, organized drawer.
On the Zoom with Enriquez, she looks exactly like someone who would have a Valentine’s-themed-movie-night snack drawer: perfect hair and makeup, athleisure, a cute water glass with a glass straw. I asked if she still genuinely, truly enjoys the constant organizing and stocking, even now that it’s her job. Again, tidiness is described philosophically. “Look, my mind works better, our household runs better. I can be a better mother, wife, human being when everything has its place. Turns out other people need that too,” Enriquez says of how her content has found an audience. “My mother worked a lot and she didn’t have time for any of this. It takes a lot of time to organize. Now, I have the time and I feel like I can help other people make their lives more manageable.” She tells me a story about leaving her husband alone with their toddler-age daughter while she went on vacation. Everything being well organized meant he could easily find what he needed to make lunches and get their daughter dressed: “Women always have to know where everything in the house is; organizing takes away that burden.”
Stewart’s videos range from very specific deep cleans (behind the refrigerator) to mom-off-duty self-care (baths and the Dr. Dennis Gross LED face mask). “My kids do not have the same cleaning goals as me, so that can be stressful,” she says. She addresses her followers as her “besties” and voice-overs vague but relatable tidbits about her life and her cleaning philosophy. But the key component of her videos is the exaggerated level of gadgetry: electronic tile scrubbers, a snack-holding attachment for her Stanley tumbler, a machine that turns her bath into a bubbling Jacuzzi, a penguin that keeps her refrigerator smelling fresh. Benson rarely uses voice-over or her own face in her videos. She sticks to tried-and-true ASMR clicks and clacks as she resets a living room or laundry room from behind the camera. A lot of her content involves taking things out of their original packaging and putting them into nicer-looking things. “I do not transfer everything, I promise, but I like having containers that separate and organize the space that’s already there. It’s just about making little moments beautiful,” she says. With every pretty container, Benson, Stewart, and Enriquez are able to own a lot of stuff and maintain a “minimal” aesthetic.
And it’s those containers, and the containers in the containers, and the contents of said containers, and the gadgets that keep everything, including the containers, clean that are the real stars of the show. And the creators’ Amazon storefronts, where Benson, Stewart, and Enriquez make up to 10 percent commission on any direct sale of the products they feature. Additionally, they’re able to earn commission on any shopping purchases made by someone who follows their affiliate link to Amazon, within a 24-hour window — so they cash in on your entire shopping spree just by clicking a link in their Instagram Stories. Target and Walmart have similar influencer programs. On top of this, they all negotiate brand partnerships, post sponsored content (Stewart posts often in partnership with Scrub Daddy), and earn money from TikTok views. For someone like Stewart, who often speaks in her videos about her family’s past living in a one-bedroom apartment, living paycheck to paycheck, the financial freedom to shop for things she doesn’t exclusively need is her success story.
Deeper into the restock rabbit hole, you’ll find creators like Brook Villela of @brooktheshopaholic and Michael Duvall of @michaelduvallxo, for whom cleaning serves a different purpose than decluttering the mind — it’s about making room for more. Villela likes to share restocks and reorganizations of her purse tower (again, purse tower!): a pink stack of drawers filled with purse essentials. Less ASMR-centric, she is typically explaining her process in voice-over, with details about her personal life sprinkled in. Filming as she goes, she’ll sort through her collection of wallets in the purse tower: Her Victoria’s Secret wallets, organized by color gradient, go in one drawer; her Steve Madden wallets go in another; and her designer wallets go in the top drawer for display. She’ll explain which wallets she’s choosing to declutter and why. The other drawers in the purse tower hold Bath & Body Works hand sanitizers, Touchland hand sanitizers, festive hand-sanitizer covers, a collection of Victoria’s Secret keychains, and purse candy. She’ll declutter those as well — to make room for whatever she brings home in her next haul.
Duvall, who posts daily vlogs on YouTube and has a growing following of 760,000 on TikTok, begins his videos with a friendly “What’s up, girlie,” narrating whatever it is he’s doing, whether it’s pushing around a cart at Home Goods or meticulously decorating and stocking his pink double-wide home in Louisville, Kentucky, with all things aesthetically cute, pink, Barbie, or Hello Kitty. On a call with Duvall, he explains that he grew up poor and attributes that to his love for shopping “now that I have my own money.” He has an entire room dedicated to toys.
But the organizing and restocking videos are new for him; he saw the genre trending and decided to try it himself: “I’ve been doing so much shopping just for TikToks over the past year, so it was starting to get really cluttered.” He’s now in the process of going aesthetically minimalist, and the organizing and cleaning content he’s been posting lately feels like a nod to the popularity of accounts like @operation_niki. Since January, Duvall has been earning enough money to create content full-time after four years as a pre-K teacher. He says he’s being more judicious about what he actually buys, focusing on buying quality and saving money for things like travel (he was recently able to afford his first solo vacation). When he films his shopping videos now, Duvall will often show what he thought was cute but didn’t buy (but maybe that you should buy).
One reason these videos are so popular, aside from the brain-scraping ASMR, is that they have what you don’t, and they clean and organize more than you ever could unless it was your full-time job. Most of the comments on these videos include some variation on “I need that,” “I want that,” or “How do you have the energy for that?” There are plenty of critics as well, and overconsumption is the most popular rebuttal for this kind of content. “Why have we been trained to think that shopping is the only way that we can get happiness,” asks @webravelygo in a TikTok stitch with one of Stewart’s videos in which she defends her lifestyle because of her rags-to-riches background. “She claims to be decluttering and then will do a massive haul for her followers … I respect the hustle, but I don’t respect the conspicuous displays of consumption,” says Diana of @DepressionDotGov in a “de-influencing” duet with one of Villela’s haul videos. Throughout Villela’s video, Diana reiterates the unnecessary excessiveness of everything Villela has purchased.
So what actually happens to the decluttered Hello Kitty mugs? Or the egg organizer that was cute last month but now there’s a cuter, more organized egg organizer on the market? When I ask about how they dispose of things they no longer use, all the influencers I spoke with more or less say the same thing: a lot goes to friends and family and some gets gifted to followers for giveaways. Enriquez says she has success putting things out on the curb for lucky neighbors, and the rest gets donated to Goodwill or similar organizations. “They’re probably sick of me,” says Duvall of his Goodwill drop-offs. As for the seasonal decor, “it all goes in tote bags in the garage,” says Stewart, who typically restocks her coffee bar with seasonally themed supplies (pink sprinkles for Valentine’s Day!).
Benson explains that scrolling for new gadgets is part of her daily routine, and she recently posted a Temu haul video where a few commenters were quick to point out she already has a few of the items. “If I weren’t creating content, I probably wouldn’t have as much stuff. But I’m always creating content,” admits Enriquez, who recently acquired her own “purse tower.”
Maybe these influencers wouldn’t consume so much if they were more strict about environmental impact, or if they weren’t Amazon influencers who make commissions through affiliate links, or if they weren’t mothers, but this is the business of their content. It perpetuates itself: haul, restock, declutter, deep clean leads to views, links, commission, brand deals, potential six-figure salaries, which then leads back to haul.
When a video of Enriquez’s salad-bar drawer (salad-bar drawer!) surpassed 100 million views, she felt the pressure of online critics. The refrigerator drawer, stocked with crisp lettuce, shredded carrots, and Babybel cheeses taken out of their original packaging and put in shiny acrylic organizers, inspired a lot of positive comments: @carla_pencil wrote “I need that fridge 👏.” And a lot of eyerolls: @dreamteam_377 wrote “All that food will go to waste. But it looks good for the ’gram.” “I have a family of four, and in any given week, we’re having 20 people visit our house. It’s not overconsumption if everything is getting consumed,” says Enriquez. She responded to the criticism on Instagram in a since-deleted video. When we chat, she tells me she finds a tinge of irony in the inevitable critique of being a woman who is successful on social media: “This is a space where women are empowered. We’re women sharing cool things with each other directly. You want it to go back to men running QVC?”
By Charlotte Barnett , 2024-04-10 14:00:19
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