Caroline Calloway is an Instagram influencer whose name you maybe only learned this week after her so-called “creativity tour” imploded. In December, Calloway began selling $165 tickets to events in cities across the United States where she would serve her guests homemade vegan salads, provide materials for making orchid crowns, teach lessons on being your best self, and send attendees home with customized care packages and personal letters. But events in Brooklyn and Washington, D.C. did not exactly go as planned. (Sample complaint: “There wasn’t an orchid crown! Just a single flower to put in our hair that we didn’t keep. Mason jar had a little pack of wildflower seeds.”) Calloway pulled the plug on the rest of the tour, and promised to refund anyone who had attended or bought tickets to the events.
While some attendees and fans expressed disappointment online, Calloway has cultivated such a cult of personality that the majority of her fans do not appear to feel slighted at all. Thus, on Wednesday, just two days after announcing she was canceling the tour, Calloway posted an Instagram Story announcing that the tour is back on.
Calloway said she initially cancelled “because if you read enough bad things about yourself on the internet you will start to believe they’re true.” Her tour went viral via a Twitter thread posted by journalist Kayleigh Donaldson. (You can read Intelligencer’s earlier coverage of the thread and tour here.) “I sold out a speaking tour in cities across America. 80 people attended last weekend,” Calloway wrote. “50 in New York and 30 people in DC – EVEN WITH THE BLIZZARD. A few of them didn’t like it. BUT ALMOST EVERYONE WHO DID LOVED IT AND FOUND VALUE IN THE EXPERIENCE I CREATED FOR THEM.”
Fans who purchased tickets to the original tour can expect to be contacted by Calloway soon to rebook. Anyone who attended the first two stops has already been fully refunded, but Calloway writes they “can now DECIDE what value the experience I created held for you. You can pay your full price ticket; you can pay less; you can pay nothing at all and keep your full refund.” (Unclear if this means those wanting to pay anything or everything would have to repay her, since she has already issued their refunds.) “I’m not doing this to make myself rich,” she added. No word on whether the un-canceled tour will, in fact, have fresh orchid crowns.
