Design agency T&T&T's auction website lets you buy social media influencers' personal possessions

Talmor & Talmor & Talmor (T&T&T) is a New York-based creative consultancy and design agency founded in 2016. With work spanning a range of disciplines and areas including branding, creative direction, editorial, packaging and content creation, its most recent project doesn’t quite fit into any of these categories. The Social Media Memorabilia Auction House (SMMAH) is a fake auction site selling fake memorabilia pulled from the account of prominent social media influencers. A “sort of Planet Hollywood-meets-Sotheby’s-meets-Instagram-sponcon” project, SMMAH is intended as both “a form of satire” and a “homage to the wonderful world and industry of social media influencers”.

From Dan Bilzerian’s iPhone case to Jen Selter’s protein shaker, the website offers the chance to bid on a plethora of different objects originally seen on the Instagram account of big names. “We tried to find accounts and people that represent certain social media “archetypes” (the fitness influencer, the bodybuilder, the teen heartthrob, the living-my-best-life-bro etc), the objects we chose were then meant to serve as mini-portraits of said archetype or person,” explains T&T&T founder, Morey Talmor. “For the objects, we tried to find things that say something about the influencer’s world and environment, we also tried to highlight objects that felt unimportant, mundane or silly – hoping to poke some fun at the self-serious nature of some of these Insta posts."

Once the team decided on a person and a possession to feature, it set out to find or reproduce them. Spending much time scouring Amazon and eBay for the real thing, or something very similar, they were required at times to recreate and fake various printed materials and objects. After this, the items in question were shot by photographer Henry Hargreaves before being made available on the website.

“There have been mostly fun and positive responses, as well as a fair share of WTF?‘s. For the most part, people seem to be into it, with a few influencers reacting to the posts on Instagram, and followers of said influencers then commenting and engaging with SMMAH’s Instagram account (a nice social media feedback loop),” says Morey on how SMMAH has been received. “It seems the deeper users delve into the posts and the project, the more fun they seem to be having on the site. Otherwise, we’ve had some good press and the site just got nominated for a Webby Award.”