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By Rittika rana • Jul 19, 2026
There was a time when shopping ended after the purchase. You bought something because you needed it, took it home, and started using it.
Social media changed that relationship.
Today, buying is often only the beginning. Products are unboxed, arranged, reviewed, styled, compared, linked, and turned into content. A few purchases become a “mini haul.” A larger order becomes a seasonal, festive, beauty, fashion, stationery, or home décor haul.
Haul content can be useful when it offers honest reviews or helps viewers understand products. The problem begins when the quantity itself becomes the attraction. Instead of helping people decide what they need, the content can make buying several products at once feel ordinary.
Researchers studying online haul videos have noted how the format connects social-media participation with overconsumption, particularly within fashion. The study, published through the Association for Computing Machinery, found that haul discussions often sit within a wider culture of accelerated production, consumption, and disposal.
The environmental question is therefore not whether every haul is harmful. It is what happens when shopping in volume becomes entertainment.
A shopping haul is content in which someone displays and discusses several products purchased together. Fashion hauls may include clothes from a recent sale. Beauty hauls can feature skincare, makeup, and personal-care products. Home hauls show décor, storage products, kitchen tools, or seasonal objects.
The format originally helped viewers see how products looked outside advertisements. It could provide information about fabric, fit, packaging, colour, price, or performance.
But the format also changed what a normal purchase looked like.
Buying one shirt does not create much content. Buying ten shirts creates an unboxing, a try-on video, multiple outfit combinations, links, discount codes, and follow-up posts. Quantity makes the content longer and often more engaging.
This creates an uncomfortable cycle. More products generate more content, and more content can generate more purchases.
Haul culture does not operate through direct advertising alone. It works by making shopping feel social.
A creator may say that a product is affordable, trending, almost sold out, or worth trying before a sale ends. Viewers may feel that buying the same item allows them to participate in the conversation or recreate a particular lifestyle.
Discount codes, affiliate links, limited-time offers, rapid product launches, and personalised recommendations make this easier. The purchase no longer begins with “Do I need this?” It begins with “Everyone seems to be buying this.”
Recent research on deinfluencing describes the trend as a response to this environment, encouraging more mindful choices and directly challenging overconsumption. The study published in the Journal of Business Research argues that deinfluencing can promote both sustainability and personal wellbeing by questioning unnecessary consumption.
That response exists because haul culture is no longer limited to fashion.
Fashion hauls are the most visible form, but the same behaviour now appears across many product categories.
A beauty haul may contain several serums, lip products, fragrances, or moisturisers that perform similar functions. A home décor haul may replace usable objects because a new colour or aesthetic is trending. A stationery haul may include notebooks and pens that take years to finish.
Technology hauls can turn phone cases, chargers, headphones, keyboards, and accessories into frequently replaced style objects. Even sustainable products can become part of the pattern.
Someone may buy several reusable bottles, multiple tote bags, bamboo organisers, zero-waste kits, and a new collection of “eco-friendly” products despite already owning functional alternatives.
Changing the material does not automatically change the behaviour.
A haul made entirely of sustainable products can still be overconsumption.
The environmental impact of a haul does not begin when the parcel arrives.
Every product requires raw materials, manufacturing, energy, packaging, and transportation. Clothing may involve fibres, dyes, finishing, stitching, and multiple stages of global production. Cosmetics require formulations, containers, pumps, lids, boxes, and labels. Home products use wood, metals, plastics, ceramics, textiles, or glass.
Then there is delivery.
Large online orders may arrive in separate packages from different warehouses or sellers. Each item may include an outer delivery bag, product box, protective plastic, tissue paper, labels, and return documents.
The problem becomes more complex when several products are ordered with the intention of keeping only one or two. Returns require additional transport, inspection, repackaging, storage, and sometimes disposal.
The Ellen MacArthur Foundation notes that online retail experiences higher return rates than physical retail and explains how better reverse-logistics systems are needed to return usable products to circulation instead of allowing them to become waste.
The environmental footprint is therefore not only the product someone keeps. It also includes everything ordered, delivered, returned, damaged, or never meaningfully used.
Haul culture often hides another form of waste: underuse.
A skincare product may expire before it is finished. A trend-led dress may be worn once. A decorative item may remain in storage after the aesthetic changes. A gadget accessory may become incompatible with the next device.
The problem is not owning more than the absolute minimum. People buy products for enjoyment, self-expression, experimentation, and convenience. The question is whether those products are given enough use to justify the resources behind them.
A low-priced product can feel like a small decision. But when several inexpensive items are bought repeatedly, the total material footprint may be much larger than it appears.
This is why the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s work on circular fashion focuses not only on better materials but also on keeping products in use for longer through reuse, repair, resale, and circular business models.
The anti-haul reverses the traditional format.
Instead of showing what someone purchased, creators explain what they decided not to buy. They may question repetitive products, low-quality trends, misleading claims, poor value, or items they already own in another form.
Deinfluencing follows a similar direction. It challenges the idea that every popular product deserves a place in everyone’s home.
Underconsumption content goes further by showing older phones, repeated outfits, repaired belongings, partially used products, and ordinary homes without constant upgrades. Its appeal comes partly from making continued use visible in an online culture built around newness.
These trends are not perfect. Underconsumption itself can become an aesthetic, and anti-haul creators may still recommend alternatives. But they create space for a different question:
What if content helped us use things better instead of constantly finding new things to buy?
The alternative to a haul is not necessarily giving up fashion or discovery. Resale, rental, repair, borrowing, and swapping can keep existing products in circulation.
FreeUp allows users to sell and purchase pre-owned fashion, accessories, books, toys, beauty products, and home items. It creates a route for unused belongings to reach another user instead of remaining forgotten or becoming waste.
ZThrifts brings verified thrift curators and second-hand fashion listings together on one marketplace. Its focus on curated vintage, streetwear, and pre-loved clothing shows how second-hand discovery can compete with the excitement of conventional fashion drops.
Flyrobe offers ethnic wear, western outfits, accessories, and occasion clothing on rent. Rental can be useful for weddings and events where an expensive outfit may otherwise be purchased for a single use.
Date The Ramp provides designer clothing and accessories through rental and purchase options. It represents an access-based model in which temporary use can replace ownership for selected occasions.
These platforms are not impact-free. Rental can involve packaging, delivery, returns, and cleaning. Second-hand shopping can also become another form of hauling if people continue buying more than they use.
The better approach is not simply to replace a fast-fashion haul with a thrift haul. It is to use rental and resale to extend product life while also reducing overall consumption.
Before placing a large order, it helps to ask a few simple questions.
This is not about removing enjoyment from shopping. It is about placing a small pause between influence and action.
Haul culture reflects a much larger change in consumption. Products are no longer only things we use. They have become material for posts, trends, identities, and online participation.
But once the camera is turned off, the objects remain.
They still need to be worn, stored, cleaned, finished, repaired, returned, resold, or discarded.
The alternative is not perfection, minimalism, or refusing every purchase. It is allowing usefulness to matter more than volume.
Buy what fits your life. Use what you already own. Repeat outfits. Finish products. Repair small damage. Rent for one-time occasions. Sell or share what no longer serves you.
Because the most sustainable haul may not be a haul at all.
It may simply be choosing one thing carefully—and using it well.
Haul culture is the trend of buying and showing multiple products online, often through fashion, beauty, home décor or shopping videos.
Haul culture can encourage overconsumption, more packaging waste, frequent returns and products that are used only a few times.
A shopping haul is content where someone shares several newly purchased items, usually from online or retail shopping.
Haul culture increases demand for cheap, trend-led clothing that is often bought quickly and replaced quickly.
Not always. Buying too many “sustainable” products can still create waste if they are not needed or used properly.
An anti-haul is content where people explain what they are not buying and why, often to avoid unnecessary purchases.
Pause before buying, check if you already own something similar and ask whether you will use the product often.
They can be better because they extend product life, but they still work best when used thoughtfully and not for overbuying.
Repairing, renting, borrowing, swapping, buying second-hand and using what you already own are better alternatives.
The goal is not to stop shopping completely, but to buy less, choose better and use products for longer.
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