Sunday Riley Allegedly Asks Employees to Leave Positive Reviews
News exploded yesterday that Sunday Riley asked their employees to leave positive reviews of their products on sites like Sephora. A Reddit user shared an internal company e-mail yesterday stating that employees are asked to write fake positive reviews daily.
The story was picked up on Estee Laundry yesterday which is an Instagram beauty news account. At this time Estee Laudry took a copy of the e-mail from Reddit to share on their account and proceeded to tag Sunday Riley in the post and this is where the real tea gets spilled…
Sunday Riley’s official Instagram account replied to Estee Laundry and admitted they do indeed ask employees to write positive reviews. One of the most interesting statements in Sunday Riley’s reply was the following:
“At one point, we did encourage people to post positive reviews at the launch of this product, consistent with their experiences. There are a lot of reasons for doing that, including the fact that competitors will often post negative reviews of products to swing opinion.” Note the fact they accuse other brands of posting negative reviews as this is somewhat important in the grand scheme of things. Why is this important? Because as you may know recently there was some gossip going around that youTubers/influencers were being paid for reviews and product mentions on their channels. Ok, nothing really new there! We all knew that, that’s their job. However, there was also mention that allegedly in some cases a brand would ask for a positive review and also, for the influencer to proceed to talk negative about a competitive brand’s product. I thought it was interesting Sunday Riley pretty much confirmed something that was somewhat hazy before.
There’s some sense of shock when I read all this but also, I consider myself somewhat of a smart consumer and I do realize many reviews on Amazon, Sephora, and other retail sites don’t always ring true. I guess it’s just a little surprising to hear a company stand up and actually admit it is in fact true.
It also comes as unexpected from a beloved niche and indie brand like Sunday Riley. I’m sure it’ll be very disappointing news for fans of the brand.
Again, all of you are very smart consumers and none of this likely comes as any great surprise. But I still find it a little sad none the less!
I hope Sunday Riley learns a lesson from all of this and I hope that lesson is learned by other beauty brands. Quality, formula, packaging, it all speaks for itself. We wouldn’t need fake reviews if the products performed as well as they are marketed as.