@saltyvagabonds 156 Giftings in a few months! If you’re creating content and you’re NOT on ShopMy yet, we need to talk. 😂 Everything I’m wearing was gifted through ShopMy, and we’re officially at 156 giftings. And yes, I’m still just as excited every time a package shows up. 🫶🏼😭 If you’ve been wondering how girls are getting gifted clothes, skincare, beauty products and all these PR packages, ShopMy is one of the ways they’re doing it. I’ve reached Icon status on the platform, and I’ve learned SO much about getting gifting opportunities, connecting with brands and turning the products I already love into actual partnerships. So I finally put everything into one guide because I know some of you are sitting on content that brands would LOVE. #shopmy #shopmygifting #shopmycreator #brandgifting #contentcreatortips ♬ original sound – SaltyVagabonds | Travel Family

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At a Glance

Let’s Get One Thing Straight First

I have been gifted 156 times on ShopMy as I write this. I’m at the Icon tier with a creator score of 110 out of 100, my talent card shows over $20,000 a month in sales volume for brands, and I have referred 75 creators onto the platform who’ve been approved.

And I have never once messaged a brand asking them to send me something.

I’m telling you that up front because most of what’s out there about ShopMy gifting is either “here’s my script for DMing brands” or “hit Trendsetter and the floodgates open,” and neither of those matched what actually happened to me. So this is the version from someone who did it the boring way, as a family travel creator who is Latina, an Air Force veteran, and a curvy girl who does not fit the college girl aesthetic most people think brands want.

If you’re brand new and still figuring out what ShopMy is, start with my complete guide to ShopMy for beginners and come back. If you haven’t joined yet, apply through my referral link. It helps you get through the door, and every creator I’ve referred who got approved came in that way.

Where Gifting Actually Lives in ShopMy

Everything brand related sits in one place: the Gifting and Codes tab. Under My Gifting Requests you’ll see four tabs, and it helps to know what each one is before you get excited about the wrong thing.

• Gifting. Free product, no strings. This post.
• Discount Codes. Codes brands issue you for your audience. Sometimes a brand offers one alongside a gift. Great for you and your audience, and a whole topic on its own that I’ll be covering soon.
• Opportunities. Paid deals. A brand says “post this on your story, share these links, and we’ll pay you X.” You accept or you don’t. It is not gifting and it should never be confused with gifting, though you can receive gifting as part of completing an opportunity. More on that below
• Spotlights. ShopMy’s ad feature. When you post about a brand, the brand can run your content as an ad under your handle with your link attached, and you earn commission on what that ad sells. I wrote a full walkthrough of Spotlights on day one if you want the details.

Keep those four separate in your head. A lot of the frustration I see in comment sections comes from people treating gifting like an Opportunity.

One overlap worth knowing about: sometimes gifting comes attached to an Opportunity. A brand will message you first, “we’re running this campaign, are you interested?” and if you say yes, the gift and the paid Opportunity land at the same time, because the product is for the campaign.

And sometimes you don’t know that’s the plan. I’ve had brands send a gift with no mention of anything, then offer me an Opportunity for that same product about two weeks later. That’s one more reason to post what you genuinely like from your gifting. It can turn into paid partnerships.

How a Gifting Request Actually Arrives

A gifting request and a message show up at the same time. You’ll get a notification, a lookbook lands in your gifting tab, and a note from the brand lands in your inbox.

The note usually says one of a few things: here’s our lookbook, pick what you’d like. Or we have a product launch coming and we’d love for you to try it. Or, once in a while, we’re running a campaign around this product.

That’s the brand offering. You’re not agreeing to anything by opening it.

Lookbooks, Explained Properly

A lookbook is the brand’s menu. There are two kinds.

The single item lookbook. The brand already knows what it’s sending. It’s one product or one set bundle, so you’re really just confirming and adding your shipping details.

The catalog lookbook. The brand shows you a bunch of products with a budget attached, and the budget works one of three ways:

• a dollar cap only (pick anything that adds up under the cap)
• an item cap only (pick up to a certain number of things)
• both at once

Your selections have to fit inside every limit at the same time. So if a brand gives you a $200 cap and the lookbook has four $100 dresses in it, the answer is two dresses, not four. And here’s the part people miss: going over doesn’t get trimmed down to fit. It just doesn’t send. So build your picks inside the cap on purpose.

The lookbook will also tell you if it’s tied to a product launch or a campaign, which is useful context for what the brand is hoping for. It’s still not an obligation.

Accepting a Gift: Notes, Shipping, and Tracking

Once you pick what you want, you confirm shipping. Two small things worth knowing here:

You can send the brand a note. On desktop, there’s a spot to add it right when you accept. On the phone, you can message them after you hit the shipping confirmation. I usually send a quick thank you. It takes ten seconds and these are real people on the other end.

You can change the shipping address. You are not locked to one address. I’ve had gifts sent to my oldest daughter because the product was a better fit for her than for me, and she did the post for it on our socials. If you travel and you know where you’ll be for a bit, send it there. Mainland shipping runs at the brand’s normal turnaround. Hawaii, where we are right now, takes forever, so plan for that if you’re here too.

Tracking lives inside ShopMy. Most brands add the carrier and tracking details right into the gifting record, so you can see if it’s USPS, UPS, or FedEx and when it’s landing. Chat, shipping, and the gift itself all sit in one spot. That’s a big reason I barely accept gifting through email anymore… if it’s coming through ShopMy, I can trust it and I can track it.

What Actually Shows Up

Bigger brands tend to ship from a distribution center, and it feels like a normal order. Smaller brands are hands on. You can tell, because there’s usually a handwritten note.

Most gifts come with a postcard or a little insert explaining the product, why they sent it, and what they’re hoping you’ll notice if you do share. Beauty and makeup sets almost always come with that kind of guidance. Fashion brands mostly just want to see you wearing it. Wellness, Tech and gadget brands land somewhere in between.

None of that is a contract. It’s a wish list.

Do You Have to Post? No. And Here’s Why That Matters

Gifting on ShopMy is free product. The brand wants you to try it, and they’d love it if you talked about it, but you are not required to post, review, tag, or mention anything.

That’s the whole reason the platform is fun. It’s the reason creators light up when a request comes in. There are no strings.

Twice in 156 giftings, a brand tried to make posting mandatory if I accepted the product. The first one I did, to see how it worked. The second came attached to an Opportunity, and I said yes before I’d seen what the product actually was. Once it arrived in the lookbook and I saw the value, it was clear a mandatory story post to my audience, which is over 100,000 people across Instagram and Facebook alone since my stories post to both, was not a fair exchange for that product at all. So I asked the brand to remove me from the Opportunity and I turned down the gift completely. I may never get gifted by them again and I’m fine with that.

Here’s why it matters. The moment you accept product in exchange for a post, it stops being a PR gift and becomes a gifted collaboration. Brands that structure it that way know exactly what they’re doing, and it takes advantage of creators, because the whole reason this platform is special is that gifting comes with no strings. Worse, once you say yes to one, that brand expects a post for every future gift. You just taught them that your content is free.

If a brand wants guaranteed posts, that’s an Opportunity, and Opportunities come with a fee. Keep the two separate and protect the culture that makes gifting worth having.

Why Brands Gift (From the Creator’s Chair)

I’m not on the brand side, but after 156 of these, the patterns are obvious, and it all comes down to what campaign the brand is running.

Mass seeding. Some brands are just trying to get word of mouth into the algorithm. They send a lot of product to a lot of people and they genuinely don’t care who you are. They want volume of voices. A small creator can absolutely get gifted here.

Get it in your hands. Bigger brands often just want their product in your life so it shows up naturally in your content over time. They’ll refresh you without you asking, and they don’t need a big “here’s my paid promotion” moment. They want it in the background of your real life.

Think product placement. Back to the Future, E.T., pretty much every movie you grew up on had a soda or a candy sitting in frame for a reason. You can probably picture a Christmas movie right now where a kid pulls out a can of Coke and taps on a frosted window, and you couldn’t tell me which movie it was, but you remember the can. That’s the point. You didn’t consciously clock it as an ad. It just became part of the scene. Brands understand that if their product keeps showing up in your content, and your content is reaching people, that’s marketing. Your audience follows you for your vibe. Your community is there because they like what you’ve got, and a big part of that is belonging.

So the products that keep appearing in your world become part of the culture you’ve built, and that’s what sells them. If you fit a brand’s aesthetic and their product is in your feed nine times out of ten, they’re getting a ton of marketing whether you ever make a dedicated reel about it or not. The big brands know this, which is exactly why they don’t require a post.

That’s also why you shouldn’t get your feelings hurt when you tag a brand and they don’t repost you. That was never the purpose. If a brand wants something on their own feed, they hire a photographer, or a specific creator or model who fits their exact brand dynamic.

We’ve run paid campaigns now for adidas, REI, AT&T, and Navy Federal, and the bigger the brand, the more legal restrictions they have on what they can acknowledge or share. They might not react to your post at all. They still want their product showing up in your life as a normal, everyday household item. That’s the whole play.

Product launches. New brands and new lines want people talking about the thing right now. Sometimes there’s a campaign attached, sometimes it’s just “we’re launching, try it.”

Proven sales. A lot of brands, especially small businesses, want to see that your audience buys before they’ll send you a $200 dress. They can see your clicks, your orders, and where your shoppers are. If your only sales are your friends and your own purchases, they know.

Aesthetic fit. And then there are luxury, fitness, and wellness brands that care way more about whether you match their ideal customer than about your follower count. This is the one that should make small creators feel better. I’ve been gifted by four different fitness brands, and every one of them is built around body inclusivity for women. I’m a curvy girl. I fit those brands. I am likely never going to get gifted by the brand whose whole feed is skinny college girls, and that’s fine, because I’m not their customer either.

There are thousands of brands on ShopMy. People get stuck on the five they personally shop from and assume those are the only ones that matter. You don’t have to change who you are to get gifted. You have to find the brands that already want someone like you.

My Gifting Timeline, Tier by Tier

Here’s what it looked like for me, because the tier advice online is mostly wrong.

Enthusiast and Ambassador. My first gift came from a skincare brand while I was still an Ambassador. Then three more brands within about a month: eyewear, a fragrance brand, and a travel gear brand. I also declined one that month because it was socks and I wasn’t interested in socks at the time.

Then it went quiet. A whole month of nothing. Then a holiday lookbook that expired because I was out of the country and couldn’t ship it anywhere. Then a few more in December, and I took three of the four. After that it just trickled. A random one here and there.

Trendsetter. Nothing changed. I know everyone tells you Trendsetter is where gifting opens up, because that’s the tier where you can chat with brands and request gifting. For me, the volume did not move at all.

Icon. This is where it flipped, and it flipped for one reason: I was actually making sales. A lot of them. Once my order volume was visible, brands started reaching out on their own. I went from a trickle to 2 to 4 gifting requests a day, sometimes one, and it runs heavier at the start of the month when brands launch their campaigns and quieter in summer when they pull back before fall and holiday.

The tier status didn’t do that. The sales did. If you want the tier mechanics, I broke them down in my Trendsetter fast track post and my Icon tier post.

What to Expect: Size, Range, and Frequency

So you can set real expectations instead of TikTok expectations:

• The smallest gifts I’ve gotten were $10 to $15 items. The biggest lookbook so far had a $600 cap.
• Most lookbooks land in the $100 to $300 range. That’s my experience at Icon with real sales behind me. It may not be yours yet, and that’s normal.
• My favorites have been beauty and clothing, about equally. Clothing is fun because you get to pick from a curated list and try things you’d never have pulled off a rack yourself.
• Brands regift. I’ve had brands send a second and third round without me ever posting the first one.

Should You Ask Brands for Gifting? My Honest Answer

No. Or at least, not yet.

I have never once reached out to a brand and asked for a gift. I know a lot of girls do, and there are scripts all over TikTok for it. Here’s my problem with it: if you don’t have sales to back you up, the ask reads exactly how it sounds. The brand can see you tagging them on three platforms. They know you’re trying to get free product. That’s not a relationship, that’s a cold pitch with a bow on it.

The same hour you’d spend writing a DM to a brand that will probably say no, you could spend making a post that links to a product you already own and love. That post has a real chance of earning commission. It also, over time, becomes the sales history that makes brands come to you instead.

If you want free stuff to request all day long, TikTok Shop exists. If you want to build something that pays, this is the platform, and gifting is the smallest piece of it.

Say Yes More Than You Think You Should

Here’s the part I didn’t expect. Some of the best products in my life right now are things I would never have bought.

When a lookbook comes in and my first reaction is “eh, I’d never reach for that,” I usually say yes anyway. And a handful of times, the thing showed up, we tried it, and we fell in love with it. I’ve gone back and bought several gifted products with my own money because they earned it. One apparel brand I’d never have shopped sent me pieces, I liked them, I posted a photo, it went viral, and that brand is now one of my top sellers.

It takes hearing about a product something like seven times before most of us will spend our own money on it. Gifting skips that. It puts new things in your hands for free, and your audience gets your real reaction. For me, part of full time travel is being open to new things, and I think that’s honestly why I say yes so often.

One more thing I didn’t plan: I’ve linked brands that weren’t on ShopMy yet just because I liked them. Twice now, a brand joined the platform, saw I’d been linking them, and reached out to send me product. A makeup brand and an apparel brand. That only happens when you link what you actually like.

After It Arrives: The Etiquette Nobody Tells You

None of this is required. It’s just what I do, and it may be why brands keep coming back.

Say thank you. A quick note when you accept, or after it arrives if you really love it.

Link it. If you like the product, put a photo of it in one of your ShopMy collections and link it. Brand managers can see that. It shows you cared enough to make it shoppable, which is more than most creators do.

Let it show up naturally. If you genuinely like something, it’ll end up in your content on its own, in the background of a story or on you while you’re talking about something else. That’s the whole point of “get it in your hands” seeding.

Only ask for a refresh if you’re actually posting the brand. Otherwise it reads as disingenuous, and it is.

Remember who’s on the other end. Sometimes it’s a marketing manager. Sometimes it’s an intern. That intern will work somewhere else next year and they’ll remember you. This is networking. Be someone people want to work with.

And think about the trade. It’s called a partnership for a reason. The gift is awesome, but what are you doing for the brand? Pick the brands that actually align with your content and your audience, and the relationship builds itself because the product fits your life anyway.

When to Say No

Hard no to anything that goes against your values or that you would never share with your audience. There are products on the platform, including adult products, that just aren’t going to be for everyone. If it isn’t genuine to you, decline it.

Soft no is different. “That color isn’t me” or “that’s kind of ugly” or “I don’t know how I feel about that”… I’d say yes to those. Be open. That’s where the surprises come from.

And declining carries no risk. I’ve turned down lookbooks and had the same brand come back months later with something different. Nobody is keeping score.

Gifting Doesn’t Pay the Bills

I want to end here because I think this is where people get it twisted.

Gifting is cool. It feels like an arrival. It gives you a little credibility and a lot of dopamine. But the free gift is not the goal, and if it is your goal, you’re going to plateau fast.

The creators making real money on ShopMy are posting about the products they were gifted so they can earn commission on them. That’s the loop. A $200 dress pays you $20 to $30 every time someone buys it through your link. Some creators are selling $1,000 to $20,000 items and doing very well. Gifting helps you make commissions. Commissions, Opportunities, and paid collabs are what actually pay.

The opportunity that’s come out of this platform for our family has been incredible, and almost none of it was the free product. So enjoy the gifts. Say yes to them. And keep your eyes on the bigger thing.

Want to See Who’s Actually Gifted Me?

I’m keeping a running directory of every brand that has gifted us on ShopMy, with photos and links, so you can see what this looks like in real life instead of taking my word for it.

And if a brand ever tells you your discount code “leaked” and pulls your commission, I wrote about what that actually means from the creator side.

Ready to Start?

If you’re not on ShopMy yet, apply through my referral link. Then go work the first week checklist in my setup guide, link the things you already own, and let the gifting find you.

I’m rooting for you 💖✨

The Full ShopMy Creator Series

• A Complete Guide to ShopMy for Beginners
• Is ShopMy Worth It in 2026? My Honest Review
• ShopMy vs LTK
• ShopMy for Beginners: Setup Guide
• How to Use ShopMy on Pinterest
• How to Reach Trendsetter Tier
• ShopMy Icon Tier, Explained
• ShopMy Spotlights, Day One
• How to Get Gifted on ShopMy. You are here ✨