Guide · 5 min read
Instagram DMs that get a boutique to stock your brand
The owner is the one holding a boutique's Instagram, so a DM reaches the person who decides what goes on the counter. Instagram usually gives you one text-only message to a stranger, so I put one true observation about her store, the margin in rupees and one small ask into it. Here are the five I send, brackets left open for your product and your city.
Why the DM beats the email
The owner of a boutique is holding the store's Instagram herself, in between answering the customer who wants to know whether the blue one is back.
She also decides what goes on the counter, which is why I would not write to the info@ address. Whoever opens it cannot take one carton of your stock without asking her first, and by the time the question reaches her your name has fallen off it.
Instagram usually holds a first message to a non-follower to one message, text only, until they accept. So I keep mine under seventy words.
One of those words has to be a number. Give her no figure and she has nothing to hold you against the two labels already on that counter, and she will not write back to ask for one.
Five DMs, and when to send each
Same skeleton: her name, one observation true of her store and false of a hundred others, the PTR (what she pays per piece) with the margin in rupees, then one ask. I cut "beautiful space" out of every draft I read.
1. The first message to a store you have seen
Late morning, after you have read the gridThe observation has to be something you could only know by looking, so I read the last nine posts first.
2. When she looks you up and says nothing
She followed back, and no reply cameShe looked you up, and following back cost her nothing. I answer that with the margin, and I never ask why she went quiet.
3. The one that starts as a story reply
Within the hour she posts, and only when you mean itI reply only to a story about the store. Her holiday photograph is not an opening.
4. The follow-up after silence
Five to seven days later, onceI hold one launch back so the second message has a fact in it. Send it once and then stop.
5. When she asks for the price list
Within the hour, same threadSay the margin in rupees before margin on MRP, the cut against printed price. Rupees get counted, percentages get argued with. An MOQ of one carton stops a careful owner postponing you. The margin calculator works it back from your MRP.
What they check before replying
She opens your profile before she answers, ten seconds of it, deciding whether you will still be delivering in six months. Here are five fixes, in the order I would do them.
- The bio line. I would trade any tagline for one word that says you sell to stores: wholesale, or stockist enquiries. Without it she reads you as online-only.
- The first nine tiles. I would delete a moodboard before a badly lit product shot, because she is trying to picture the pack on her own counter.
- Tagged photos. The tab she opens after the grid, and the only reference a young brand has. Ask your first three stockists to tag you.
- The last post's date. A four month gap reads as a brand that stopped. I would not write to thirty stores in a week when my own grid had not moved in four months.
- A number that is not a DM. She may want to forward you to the partner who buys, and nobody forwards a DM thread.
The rules
Instagram is a small room. Owners in one neighbourhood follow each other, and a screenshot travels further than any catalogue.
- One message, then stop
- I keep this after she accepts the request too. Write again with nothing new in it and you have gone from a stranger she ignored to one she remembers.
- No link in the first DM
- Yours is a stranger's account until she answers, and a stranger's link is the shape spam arrives in. I send it the minute she asks for it.
- One ask
- Samples, or the price list, or a call. Two asks make a message she has to think about, and she will think about it on Sunday.
- Never in bulk
- I would rather send eight DMs I wrote myself than forty pasted ones. Eight is an evening. Forty is a template, and an owner who sells hand-made things can spot a template in one line.
When to move it to WhatsApp
She agreed to hear about you on Instagram. She will order on WhatsApp, because that is where the supplier for everything else in the store already sits.
Move it when she asks for the price list, when a delivery date comes up, or when she says send it to my number, in the line that answers her question. Turn up on her phone before she has answered and you lose the reply you were waiting for.
What to write once you are there is the WhatsApp guide.
Two things founders ask
Should I follow them first?
Follow, read the grid for two minutes, then write. I would not follow thirty in one sitting. She reads her own follower list.
She read it and said nothing. Is that a no?
She has not decided anything. Her Tuesday had a delivery in it and a staff problem, and your message sat under both. Send message four once, then put a month in the diary.
Sources
- One text-only message to a non-follower until they accept: TechCrunch, 3 August 2023, and Instagram's help page on messaging people you do not follow.