The line outside The Foundry at Puritan Mill in Atlanta began forming before 3 p.m. on Saturday, August 1, though doors wouldn’t open until 4. Inside, beauty creator Shelby Ann Bell was preparing to welcome 200 fans—her “besties”—to the second edition of Bestie Club.
Bell, 28, began creating content in 2021. Her breakthrough came in April 2025, when one of her TikToks featuring an all-drugstore makeup routine went viral. Today, she has 2.5 million TikTok followers and 244,000 Instagram followers.
To them, Bell has become something of a drugstore goddess, highlighting the best each brand has to offer (Milani for bronzer; Hard Candy for setting sprays) and showing her audience how to use each product. Her followers not only listen intently; they also buy. And many go on to film themselves using her favorite products in the way she recommends.
Only 200 Bestie Club tickets were available. Priced at $75 and accompanied by a gift bag worth over $800, they sold out in less than a minute. More than 30,000 people were on the Eventbrite page when tickets went live in May, and many of those who secured a ticket flew or drove for hours to experience Bell’s online community in person.
“I've never seen an influencer do anything like this, and not just influencers, right? I kind of classify Shelby, at this point, as like a B-list or C-list celebrity, and I don't really ever see any other celebrities doing this either, and celebrities are launching makeup and beauty brands all the time, and they're not doing this,” Tylor Lee Slay, a 31-year-old data analyst who creates content in his spare time, told BeautyMatter. Slay first met Bell after winning a contest tied to a product she co-created with Thayers and fellow creator Nina Pool earlier this year. He has remained in touch with Bell ever since.
Bell understands the power she has to drive sales, yet remains remarkably unjaded and committed to using that influence for good. For example, she said, a Meet & Greet with Kopari, with whom she had just launched Brown Sugar Cream, a limited-edition hair and body mist sold on Kopari’s site and in Ulta Beauty stores, was paired with an event at which a number of local Dallas influencers joined Shelby to pack around 150 bags of beauty products at a women’s shelter.
The idea for Bestie Club came to Bell as she was approaching one million followers, last June. The first event took place last September in Charlotte, North Carolina. Most creators, she said, mark that occasion with friends, or with brands who send celebratory gifts, but she wanted something different: “I wanted a way for us to really connect with the people that make up the one million followers in real life,” Bell told BeautyMatter.
“How could we create this in-person experience where they could come and everything is included?” Bell said of her vision for the event, explaining that she wanted the space to allow the guests to be able to network not only with each other, but also to meet the brands in real life.
Creating community in this way feels obvious to her: “I think this should be the standard of what we're doing as people with large platforms where we're building these really loyal communities. I mean, this is not to toot my own horn, but when I post about a product, these are the people that are going out to the stores and selling it out. It's not me. They're going to spend their hard-earned money on a product based on my recommendation, and they credit me. They are recreating my makeup routines. They are the ones who gave me the platform that I have,” she said.
Guests at the event came seeking community, freebies, and of course, face time with their favorite creator. Before the event had even kicked off, a group chat with over 230 members had formed on Instagram. Some members—all previously strangers—met for brunch beforehand. Others shared products that their fellow attendees had forgotten to pack. Since then, they’ve been quick to like, comment, and amplify each other’s event content, serving as each other’s hype squads.
Beauty events can feel crowded and transactional, Aria Hill, 29, and an Atlanta local, told BeautyMatter. “We didn't get tickets to [Sephoria] or [Ulta Beauty World] this year, and I was like, this seems more cared for,” she said, explaining that she felt it was “not just about the money and about getting people to come and post about it. It really feels like a community. It feels like a family. It feels like [Bell] is showing us products she believes in.” Hill and her sister, who attended together, had gone to Sephoria previously, which they said felt more “transactional … at the end, it was a madhouse [of] just like buckets of stuff.”
For Maham Javed, 30, attending meant the chance to meet like-minded beauty enthusiasts. When asked why she had driven 12 hours overnight with her boyfriend from New Jersey, she said, “Just to make new friends and get to know people because I’m kind of an introvert.”
Javed had already attended one of Bell’s Meet & Greets at an Ulta Beauty in New York City. Like many Bestie Club attendees, she is also an aspiring content creator.
For participating brands, meanwhile, Bestie Club offered direct access to enthusiastic customers, who were often already familiar with their products. Many said they were wearing items Bell had recommended, such as Milani’s $13.99 Cheek Kiss Cream Bronzer. At the Hard Candy table, where a branded claw machine drew one of the day’s longest lines, visitors told Dena Silver, the brand’s Director of Influencer and PR, that they had been eager to try Glass on Lock Setting Spray, another Bell favorite.
With women accounting for 99% of the room, Bestie Club had the air of a giant sorority meeting, with zero bitchiness.
“Shelby's one of those unicorn creators—she's so relatable in the way she speaks to products and the way she's able to hack them and help her [audience] to find dupes for products that might be a little bit more expensive,” Valeria Navarro, Assistant Vice President, Head of Brand Engagement at Thayers, told BeautyMatter.
For the event’s three-hour duration, the atmosphere was a lovefest. Bell used her own money to fly in a contest winner and her plus-one, put them up in a hotel, arrange for a makeup artist, execute an influencer-trip–style room drop, and cover their Ubers.
When contest winner Shumyla Mirza, 37, was asked how she could sense Bell’s authenticity without knowing her offline, Mirza’s best friend and plus-one, Megan Najjar, chimed in. Previously unfamiliar with Bell, Najjar said, “I think it’s just a vibe because I'm new to following her, and it was our first time meeting her today. But it was just her eye contact, her body language. She's in tune with you. She's listening to you.”
Javed described a similar feeling: “She's just so sweet. Like, the moment she pops up on your feed, it's just all smiles and giggles. She literally talks to you through the screen, and you feel connected with her. She's just a girl's girl, and I love her,” she said.
Bell’s familiarity is now becoming widespread enough within the industry that her first name is often enough. “It's almost like she's become like a one-name wonder,” Silver said. “I meet with influencers all the time, and they’re like, ‘Oh, Shelby!’ They don't even have to say her name because … we know.”
That familiarity is translating into measurable social capital. According to agentic community management and social listening platform Nectar Social, Bell’s posts generated 77.8 million plays from May through early August, even as her posting cadence slowed. She posted 30% less in July than in June, but her reach still increased 15%.
More than 1,600 user-generated posts about Bell generated another 96.3 million plays, with UGC volume rising 56% from June to July. In the first five days of August, those posts had already generated nearly half of July’s total plays—an indication of the event’s momentum.
And of course, crucially, her influence also converts to sales. After Bell featured Milani’s bronzer in her April 2025 viral drugstore makeup post, sales tripled across all of the brand’s key retailers, Jessica Talpos, Vice President of Marketing at Milani, told BeautyMatter.
Hard Candy contracted Bell to post once about its Glass on Lock setting spray, but after Bell posted six times, generating over 1.5 million views, the product became Walmart’s #1 setting spray launch at the retailer this season based on units sold.
Shelby Ann Bell was born in Wagener, South Carolina, where the population is roughly 700. Growing up, she had a love of beauty—and access to a Dollar General and a gas station.
Eventually, she moved to Aiken, South Carolina, where she worked simultaneously as a third-grade teacher and professional makeup artist, when she began creating content. With the nearest Ulta Beauty and Sephora more than an hour away, she fell in love with drugstore makeup. That passion eventually became her content niche, and a key differentiating factor in the crowded creator landscape.
As a “queer kid from Mississippi,” Slay related to Bell’s experience. “[Where I’m from] all we really know is like, college football. The education wasn't very good, and I didn't really have access [to beauty]. We didn't even have a Dollar Tree. We had a gas station. That's it. My skincare was like sunscreen from a gas station,” he recalled. “I felt like [Bell] understood the barriers to beauty, and that's something a lot of people are disconnected from … I never had to experience shame or guilt when I was consuming content from Shelby, and it inspired me to start making my own content, too.”
Thayers was one of four brands to return for the second Bestie Club. At its table, guests could have a cosmetic case monogrammed and pick up a bag containing the Milky Mist Bell co-created and the brand’s Milky Toner.
“Activating at Shelby’s Bestie Club allowed [us] to [continue] our ongoing relationship with [Bell] as a creator, but also it gives us the opportunity to come together and celebrate the shared values that we both have, and the opportunity to connect with our consumers one-on-one because ultimately, they're the ones that inspire our products,” Navarro said. Those values, she said, include a focus on community.
Attendee Taylor Mae Higginson, another winner of the contest tied to the Milky Mist launch, shared a photo of a vanity Bell had purchased for her after they met at a New York event. Higginson had since covered the vanity in Thayers merchandise. Bell personally offered her a complimentary Bestie Club ticket, although Higginson, 29, paid her own travel expenses from Utah.
Higginson is also an aspiring creator and a member of the Thayers ambassador program. “It's probably the best ambassador program I've ever been part of. They really make me feel seen,” she said. Bestie Club brought her relationships with Bell and Thayers full circle.
Reaching consumers through a creator’s community provides an authentic path to brand discovery, Talpos said. It feels “not like we're overselling, but like they can truly discover it from a person that they already trust and [have a] relationship with,” she said.
At a time when some creators are taking to TikTok to complain about a “No Influencers” sign at Nantucket businesses, and others are being lambasted for attending a ChatGPT brand trip, Grace Murray Vazquez, Executive Vice President of Strategy at influencer marketing agency Fohr, sees Bestie Club as a beacon for the industry’s future.
“The reality is, every brand on the planet’s [priorities are] attention, trust, relevance to their audience, and ability to [convert],” she said. As trust in institutions declines, consumers increasingly turn to people who resonate with them, and Bell has already earned that relationship with her audience, Murray Vazquez observed. In other words, where Bell is now, she doesn’t need to wait for brands to co-create with; rather, they need an invitation into the community she has built.
Bell is adamant that she does not view the growing Bestie Club franchise as a financial opportunity, though the potential is clear. She said ticket sales generated around $15,000, falling just short of the venue’s roughly $16,000 rental cost. Ticket sales “help to cover some of those overhead costs, but to be completely transparent, a lot of it is coming out of our pocket, and that is A-OK with me. “I don't have a problem with that at all. In fact, it's my honor to be able to host an event like this and foot the bill.”
But Bestie Club is growing. This year, brands paid to participate, though Bell and her manager were flexible on rates based on their existing relationships with the partner brands. The event hosted 16 sponsors—a 67% increase in brand activations from its first edition. Some operated tables; others sponsored particular elements, such as food provided by MCoBeauty. Thirty-six brands contributed to the gift bag; they did not pay a fee to contribute, but it goes without saying that Bell likely could charge for access to her captive audience.
As Hill put it, “A lot of consumers miss interaction: meeting people and talking about a product. I feel like when you go into a Macy’s, someone sprays you with a perfume, you keep it moving. But here, you want to hang out. You're around like-minded people; it feels safe.”
