On why follower count is a poor way to judge a designer, what to look at instead, and why the same logic applies to your own business.
Followers was never the point.
Caption: The quietest designers are often the ones putting everything into the work rather than the audience.
A founder trusted me with her brand recently, and at the time I had fewer than a thousand followers.
I want to name that plainly because I think it says something worth examining. She was making a significant investment in something that mattered enormously to her business, and she chose based on the work rather than the audience size. That decision required her to override an instinct most of us have absorbed without ever deciding to.
The instinct is this: popularity is evidence of quality. If a lot of people follow someone, they must be good, because surely all those people cannot be wrong.
It is a reasonable shortcut. It is also, in creative work, one of the least reliable signals available.
“A follower count measures how well someone markets themselves. It tells you almost nothing about how well they will handle your brand.”
Why founders default to follower count
Nobody chooses a designer by audience size because they think it is the ideal method. They do it because evaluating design quality is genuinely hard when you are not a designer.
You can look at a portfolio and tell whether you like it. What you cannot easily tell is whether the work is strategically sound, whether the designer arrived at those decisions through a rigorous process or copied a trend, whether they will understand a business like yours, or whether the beautiful case study you are looking at actually performed for the client who commissioned it.
So you reach for a proxy. Follower count is visible, comparable, and requires no expertise to interpret. It feels like evidence.
But it measures a completely different skill than the one you are hiring for. Building a large following requires consistency, algorithm literacy, trend awareness, and a willingness to make content optimised for reach. Those are real skills. They are just not the skills that produce a brand identity still working for your business in five years.
What to look at instead
If you are choosing someone to build your brand, here is what actually predicts whether the work will be good.
Better signals than follower count
Does the work look different from project to project? A designer applying the same aesthetic to every client is decorating, not positioning.
Do they show the thinking or only the final design? Ask why a colour or a logo mark was chosen.
Do they ask about your story before your budget?
Have they worked with businesses at your stage? Not your industry necessarily. Your stage. The problems are stage specific.
Do the testimonials talk about business outcomes?
None of these are visible at a glance, which is exactly why the follower count shortcut is so tempting. Evaluating properly takes a conversation and some attention. It is slower. It is also the difference between a brand that works and a brand you will be redoing in two years.
Client Example
A founder told me she had almost gone with a designer whose account had close to a hundred thousand followers. The portfolio was beautiful and the reels were excellent. But when she looked closely, every brand in the portfolio looked like a variation of the same one. Same palette family, same typographic instincts, same layout logic, regardless of whether the client was a bakery or a wellness studio or a jewellery label. She realised she would be receiving that designer’s aesthetic rather than her own brand. It was a good aesthetic. It just was not hers, and it would not have been distinctive, because a dozen other businesses already had it.
Why this matters for your business too
Here is the part that is really about you rather than about me.
If you are building a lifestyle brand with a smaller audience than your competitors, you are on the other side of this exact dynamic. Customers are looking at you and at a larger brand, and some of them are using audience size as a proxy for quality in precisely the way I have just described.
You cannot control that instinct. What you can control is how much evidence you give someone to override it. A brand that communicates real intention, genuine craft, and a specific point of view gives a customer a reason to trust you that has nothing to do with how many people already do.
That is what strong branding does for a small business competing against a bigger one. It replaces social proof with actual proof. It lets a customer see the quality directly, rather than needing a crowd to confirm it for her first.
The founders I want to work with are the ones who understand this already, because they have chosen substance over visibility in their own businesses. They know what it costs. They know it is worth it.
Care more about substance than metrics? INQUIRE here for my services.
