My Tangle with Baldwin Beauty Stuff in 2020
Right, so 2020. Remember that year? Stuck indoors, mostly. Trying to find things to do. I remember seeing ads pop up online for something called ‘Baldwin Beauty 2020’. Honestly, never heard of it before then. Seemed to come out of nowhere.
My sister-in-law, Sarah, she got really into it for a hot minute. Bought a starter kit or something. She was convinced this was her ticket, gonna make a killing selling it online from her living room. Sounded good on paper, I guess. Everything was moving online then.
She called me one afternoon, totally stressed out. She wasn’t great with computers and asked if I could help her figure out how to list this stuff, maybe on eBay or Facebook Marketplace. I had some time on my hands, you know how it was back then, so I said sure, why not. Figured it’d be simple.
Getting Started Wasn’t Smooth
First, I drove over to her place – masked up and all that. She had this box full of creams, serums, shiny little bottles. Looked alright, decent packaging. The name ‘Baldwin Beauty 2020’ was stamped on everything. We spread it all out on her dining table.
- Step 1: Photos. Tried taking pictures with her phone. The lighting was terrible. Everything had a glare or looked washed out. We spent like an hour moving lamps around, trying different angles. Finally got some usable shots, but they weren’t amazing.
- Step 2: Descriptions. Sarah had this little brochure that came with the kit. Full of buzzwords like ‘revolutionary formula’ and ‘age-defying’. I tried to write simple descriptions based on that, what the stuff was supposed to do. Felt kinda silly typing it all out.
- Step 3: Listing Online. We decided Facebook Marketplace might be easiest. Less hassle than setting up a whole shop. So, I started creating the listings. Uploading photos, pasting descriptions, setting prices. Sarah wasn’t sure about pricing, just wanted to get back what she paid.
It took basically the whole afternoon just to get maybe five or six products listed. It was fiddly work. Upload speeds were slow, the interface kept changing. Typical tech headaches.
The Waiting Game and What Happened
Then we waited. And waited. Got a few messages, mostly people asking if the price was negotiable or offering way less. Lots of tire-kickers. Sarah got discouraged pretty quick. She expected sales to just roll in.
I told her online selling takes time, you gotta keep at it, maybe share the listings in local groups. We tried that for a bit. Shared them in a few neighborhood buy-and-sell groups.
The results were pretty meh.
She sold maybe two items over the next couple of weeks. To someone local who picked them up from her porch. Barely made a dent in the box of stuff. The ‘Baldwin Beauty 2020’ hype, if there ever was any, didn’t seem to reach our little corner of the internet.
In the end, she just kinda gave up. Packed the box back up, shoved it in a closet. Said it was more trouble than it was worth. I felt bad, put in a decent bit of effort trying to help her out. But it was a good reminder for me too. Just because something looks shiny online doesn’t mean it’s easy money. Especially not in a weird year like 2020 when everyone was trying something new to get by. That whole Baldwin Beauty thing just became another one of those weird little projects from the lockdown era.
