FaintFlex Vol. 3 - IG Mood Boards
An underrated, yet powerful way to connect with your audience.
Instagram Mood Board account @liljupiterr designed a shoe for K-Swiss (via Instagram)
FaintFlex is a newsletter covering new media & personality-driven startups.
My favorite quote this week came from Jen Rubio, co-founder & brilliant brand strategist behind modern travel startup Away:
Personable brands understand how to relate with their audience beyond just talking about their products. One of the best ways to learn how to do this is studying Instagram Mood Board accounts.
Put simply, Mood Board account admins curate visuals of things they like and get inspiration from. They tend to effortlessly follow an unspoken aesthetic, often times evoking feelings of nostalgia. And they’re normally built around a niche like animation or a subcategory of fashion, but not necessarily restricted to it.
These accounts become tastemakers of their digital communities by consistently digging up & curating visuals that aren’t easily found elsewhere, adding their commentary to it. I’ve noticed many people use their personal Instagram Story as a mood board, naturally sharing content that they discovered on a curation account.
And once the trust is built, they tend to be great sources of discovery for smaller brands & micro-influencers that match the aesthetic. Mood boards are essentially discovery rabbit holes for everything you love.
@TheCredibleSource
My favorite example of this right now is a fashion account called @TheCredibleSource. Although the admin is anonymous, the tone I feel is a black female in their mid-late twenties, whose friend group consists of independent fashion designers, stylists, & fashion enthusiasts.
I think this might be the owner of @TheCredibleSource, since no one was tagged in the photo (via Instagram)
IG Grid Strategy
@TheCredibleSource’s grid consists of unique celebrity outfit candid photos of men & women, as well as individuals with smaller followings that match the aesthetic. These individuals are often designers of their own brands like Gabriel Salcedo, which you see get sprinkled in & casually promoted throughout their content.
There are endless amounts of curated fashion Instagram accounts (one of the first was @menwithclass, which has since become a conglomerate reaching 230 million people/month through their 9 accounts).
What’s interesting about @TheCredibleSource’s grid strategy is how they effortlessly incorporate reoccurring themes & tones through their captions. For example, each time they spot someone wearing a unique jacket, they use the caption #coatcheck. Other notable themed captions include “flight fits matter” whenever fashionable personalities are spotted at the airport. Each theme & individual can be associated with a mood.
As an avid follower, you begin to associate their themes with things that aren’t even posted on their page yet, which is pretty powerful considering it’s an anonymous admin. And even though it can be hard to keep up with their multiple posts/day, I still tend to catchup on what they posted each night before I fall asleep, sharing posts that resonate with me to my Story.
They’re also really good at occasionally sprinkling in questions they know will spark debates among their community related to other culturally relevant things like music.
IG Stories Strategy
@TheCredibleSource’s stories, at times, are even more entertaining than the grid posts, adding more personality to their curated feed. The visuals curated for the story are usually themed each day around a certain style with an occasional meme.
For example, the other day they posted a ton of images of fashionable pop culture figures with shorter, colorful hair and ended with “must be something in the water.”
They also use stories to showcase their seasonal “cop list” or items they intend on purchasing this season. It usually consists of products from familiar brands, as well as smaller brands that I hadn’t heard of previously.
For example, this Steve Jobs t-shirt made by an indie designer was included on the Spring Cop List, which is something I’d include on my personal mood board.
However, the admin purposely doesn’t tag the brands in these posts because I believe they want to see which products prompt people to ask where they can buy it from. And it isn’t just limited to fashion - they can include anything lifestyle related.
They even incorporate music playlists into their stories, sharing their personal playlists, as well as ones used for fashion shoots & other fashion-related pop up events.
Startups with Public Mood Boards
If your brand is aesthetically-driven, public mood boards can be an interesting way to connect with your fans. One company that comes to mind that does this is Rowing Blazers - a youthful men’s classics apparel brand infused with streetwear.
Their Instagram feed is primarily product shots, however they have a separate public mood board account titled @RBMoodboard, which consists of the visuals that inspired their previous season collections.
Another example of an Instagram brand feed that feels more like a mood board is Y Combinator-backed women’s retailer Bulletin.
Mood board accounts have become an incredible discovery source for new brands, rising influencers, & artists. I suggest either building relationships with mood boards that align with your brand, and/or creating your own if it makes sense.
Mood boards like @Liljupiterr can generate hundreds of thousands of engaged fans, which resulted in a shoe design collaboration with K-Swiss that now trades above $200 on StockX (retailed at $75). Although normally smaller in numbers, they tend to attract true tastemakers.
Influencer Spotlight: Studio86
Sheng & Bao Vang - co-founders of Studio86 & Hlub Jewelry
Studio86 is a YouTube channel founded by female vintage fashion & lifestyle micro-influencers Bao Vang & Sheng Vang. They stood out to me because they’re Asian American sisters of Hmong descent, which is something I don’t come across often.
And they recently just co-founded a Hmong inspired jewelry brand titled Hlub, which means love in their native language. I haven’t dove deep into their content yet, but they each have solid engagement & align with my “influencer team” prediction. I’ve added them to my radar.
Interesting News
Y Combinator bets on the booming podcast industry by backing Brew.
YouTuber Nikita Dragun Launches Cosmetics Brand Dragun Beauty.
Thanks for reading! Let me know if this sparked a thought, and please share if you enjoyed it.
- Aaron