52k Instagram followers — gone in an instant

One day in 2024, Rose Hermalin suddenly received a rapid-fire series of Instagram takedown notices in the space of about 10 minutes. The emails came in so fast she didn’t even have a chance to act — and the Bread & Water Instagram account was immediately suspended.

Hermalin started Bread & Water Print Shop in 2015 in her basement, creating the kind of T-shirts she wanted to wear but couldn’t find anywhere else. She launched an Instagram account for the business in 2016 and over the next eight years had amassed 52,000 followers.

There’s never a good time to lose such a valuable marketing channel, but for Hermalin it was especially bad luck.

Over the years, Bread & Water had expanded its offerings to include sweatshirts, crop tops, stickers, and prints. She had also recently upgraded her press and equipment, which was allowing her to do more multicolor print jobs.

“I was like, ‘I'm gonna have to get a new job,’” she says.

She attempted to get the account back by talking to people who work at Meta and emailing with her congresswoman’s office, all to no avail.

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However, Hermalin started a new account (@breadandwaterprintshop), which now has more than 14,000 followers. “I‘d been so convinced that Instagram didn’t really work at all anymore,” she says, “and so it's been interesting to see that there is still the opportunity for organic reach.”

Of course, building an Instagram account today has been a far different experience for Hermalin, but she’s done so successfully with a few crucial strategies.

Don’t panic and discard what was working before.

Hermalin grew her old Instagram account organically, without buying ads. “I think I tried one time, like when I was first starting out, and the return is not worthwhile,” she says. “There‘s no way to predict who’s going to see anything.”

That strategy didn’t change when she launched a new account. If anything, she was even more deliberate about her approach. Faced with a fresh algorithm disconnected from her previous social media accounts (and years of ingrained browsing habits) she focused on slow-and-steady growth.

To that end, she continued posting her usual content — photos of herself wearing her T-shirt designs — with just small tweaks, like using more trending audio.

“I don‘t think I’ve changed the posting I‘m doing in any meaningful way,” Hermalin says. “If anything, before I was trying to do more reels and more stuff to keep up with Instagram. And now I’m like, ‘It works or it doesn't.’”

Additionally, she didn’t rush to launch Bread & Water on a new social media channel like TikTok, as she wasn’t interested in creating videos. Among other things, they were too time-consuming to create with everything else she had on her plate.

Create content with old and new followers in mind.

With her account suspension, Hermalin lost access to her previous account’s data, so she has no way of knowing which of Bread & Water’s current followers overlap with her previous list.

However, she’s actually picked up different followers thanks to the efforts of Bread & Water advocates. “I do have a lot of people who have told me that they didn't follow me before and they only found me because somebody posted about my new account,” she says.

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Hermalin doesn’t typically rely on metrics to guide her posting strategy but has started tracking how many followers versus non-follower views the Bread & Water account receives.

This statistic was illuminating. “The new account does seem to be getting a lot more non-follower views, which I assume are from messages and discover pages,” she theorizes.

As she’s grown the account, she reminds herself that not everyone knows her inventory inside and out.

“I‘ll be like, ‘Man, this shirt is just not selling. I guess nobody likes it.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, it‘s because I’ve never posted it on an Instagram account that anybody can see,’” she laughs. “I remember to be a little bit more holistic. There are more people who don‘t know the whole shtick that I’m doing.”

Leverage the power of your other marketing channels.

Even though Bread & Water’s old Instagram had more than 50,000 followers, Hermalin was realistic about the account’s actual reach and impact.

“Everybody knows that follower count doesn't indicate how many people are seeing your stuff, because of the algorithm,” she says.

This figure was also “about twice as many people as I had on my mailing list,” which Hermalin built from customers who had ordered from Bread & Water.

The day Hermalin lost her Instagram account, she sent a message to this email list. “I was like, ‘Hey, I got shut down. I have a new account. If you could share it, that would be really cool.’ And tons of people did.”

Ever since, Hermalin has been using her email list more, sending messages on a consistent basis with useful information for customers.

“[Previously] I would use it for big sales, [like] Black Friday and stuff like that, but never really sent regular missives or anything,” she says. “And I‘ve started doing a weekly [email] with ‘Here’s the things that I‘ve posted on Instagram. Here is what is new. Here is what is leaving. Here’s what's on sale.’”

Hermalin also recently sent out a survey to the list for market research, asking her followers what they like in a T-shirt. The answer surprised her: The punk mashups Bread & Water had moved away from in recent years were actually what customers wanted to buy.

“A lot of the feedback I got was, ‘Oh, I missed the mashup stuff that you used to do. That's why I followed you. Your new stuff is cool, but your old stuff was cool,’” she says. “So I’ve been getting excited this year to delve back into that.”