Why Our Instagram Is So Sparse Right Now

As of the time of me writing this post, our @terlinguathreads Instagram account has just one post and under one hundred followers – so if you came across the brand and went to look at our social media, you probably wondered what was up. I understand that. In 2026, an empty-looking Instagram page makes a statement, and it’s usually not a good one. The reason for it is real, though, and a little complex, so I thought I’d share some thoughts via a stream of consciousness.

What I keep trying to deal with is this: I really do think that, as it exists today, social media does more damage than benefit. Not in a fuzzy, roundabout way – I mean specifically that it misleads people with poor-quality goods shown in polished photos, it gives awards to the people who shout the loudest and make the most trouble, it causes people to put each other into political boxes and then become furious about it, and it makes people waste time scrolling by themselves instead of being with other people. The longest-running study of happiness ever done – Harvard’s Study of Adult Development, which has been going for over eighty years – found that the biggest thing deciding how satisfied people are with their lives is the quality of their close relationships. Not money, not followers. Deep, meaningful relationship with others. I’ve been mostly away from social media since August 2024, and the approximately eighteen months since have been some of the happiest times of my life. I know that, personally. So if I feel so strongly against the platform, why would I want to spend a lot of time and money on it?

The issue is, we sort of need to.

We could make a moral decision and not post, and in my perfect world, that would be the correct thing to do. Fine – but in the real world, how would anyone find us? And this isn't only about us. The skilled workers in Portugal who make our products, who we pay a proper salary, who are providing for their families – if we get fewer orders, we’ll have less work to give them. I don’t want to grandstand or virtue signal and in turn not be good stewards to them. So we are here, starting our Instagram, with reluctance, trying to work out what form of this makes sense.

Then there’s the financial part, which I honestly find very annoying. One of close contacts who works closely with another DTC outdoor brand (I won’t say which one, because if I have nothing nice to say, I keep it anonymous) showed me what goes on behind the scenes with that brand a few months ago. They make polyester sun shirts, sell them for approximately $90, and their Instagram looks wonderful. The material (cheap, polyester) costs less than a dollar a yard. They manufacture somewhere far less expensive than Portugal. Their cost of getting customers through Meta ads: about $45 a shirt.

Half of what their customers pay goes directly to Meta. The actual garment is almost unimportant. You’re buying a $90 product where $45 is a fee for the brand’s reliance on paid social media. You’re paying, to a large degree, for the honor of being shown an ad. That is not being a good steward to your customers.

We are not going to do that. We spend far, far more on materials. We produce in Portugal at higher labor costs because the quality is genuine and the people making our products deserve to be paid fairly (and hey, it turns out not being rushed is great for quality-control). That leaves us with less for marketing, which means we do all our posts ourselves in-house, and with finite time, our page looks bare. But hey, I would much rather us have an emptier Instagram and a product that’s been heavily iterated upon and worth buying, than 50,000 followers and a $45 CAC on something made from a dollar’s worth of fabric.

Oh, and PS - I absolutely refuse to use AI post generators to create AI slop to our feed automatically. It takes time to write these articles or to create the reels you see in Adobe Premiere Pro (I've only recently begun to upskill with the Adobe Suite). But my conviction is that these things are worth getting right and adding our personal flair to it rather than just taking the output from entering a prompt. 

But I should also say this: I have delayed and delayed and delayed posting (not even just for Terlingua Threads, but also for my personal Instagram page) because I actually find it unpleasant. Some of it is probably anxiety. Some of it is struggling with the temptation for perfectionism. Some of it is that sitting down to work on product design, or sort out a problem with the supply chain, or take care of accounting stuff, or write a blog post, or photographing the garments – let alone my personal matters, such as being present with friends or making progress on the book I’m writing on about the national parks – all of it seems a better use of my time than thinking about what caption to say or turning the selfie camera doing around doing a “Day In My Life as a Founder.” This isn’t a problem with an easy solution. It’s a tightrope I have to walk, and I’m historically awful at tightropes (found this out during undergrad at UCLA at the slacklines between the trees near Janss steps).

So: we are going to get better at this. We’ll post more. We’re working on it. But please have some patience with us and understand that the bare page is not a reflection of the work that has gone into this brand over the last two years. My cofounder once described our startup as a duck – calm on the surface, legs moving like crazy underneath. That’s been us. The supply chain work, the failed designs, the fabric tests, the manufacturing connections in Portugal – none of that is readily apparent from not posting frequently.

We do have one part of the internet where I am more at ease: I just set up a Reddit community (r/TerlinguaThreads) for questions, product suggestions, gear discussions, and just a place for people to share adventure recs. Reddit rewards real content over looks, and the algorithm isn’t trying to make anyone angry (or at least, not as angry).

Anyways, our Instagram will catch up over the course of the next few months. We’re working on it.