What Losing My Instagram Account Taught Me

The class I never expected to teach.

This is not a class I planned to teach.

When I first imagined Luxury Summer School, I pictured a series about vintage bags, about sourcing, about the craft and the stories and the history behind the things we carry. I did not picture ending with a founder essay about losing an Instagram account and rebuilding a business from the ground up.

But here we are. And I think this might be the most honest and useful thing I have shared with this community.

In October 2024, I Lost the Original It Must Be Loved Instagram Account

I was completely blindsided.

I had spent years building that account and the community around it. Instagram had become such a normal part of running my business that I had stopped seriously thinking about what would happen if I could no longer access it. Looking back, I was running my business a little fast and a little dangerously, and I did not fully see it at the time.

During the pandemic, business was incredibly busy. People were spending, bags were selling, and Instagram worked. Because it worked so well, I did not think deeply enough about what I actually owned. I did not prioritise building an email list. I did not focus enough on creating ways to stay connected with my customers outside of social media. I had built real relationships with people, but I had not built enough ways for those relationships to continue independently of Instagram. I assumed my account would always be there. I thought, "That won't happen to me." Until it did.

What Happened: Intellectual Property and the Lesson I Had to Learn

The account ultimately ran into issues connected to intellectual property and trademark enforcement. One contributing factor involved upcycled Louis Vuitton watch bands and keychains I had previously made and sold. I want to address this directly, because I think there is an important lesson here for anyone working in luxury resale or operating a small business.

Working with authentic materials does not automatically give a person unrestricted permission to create a new product using another company's trademarks or branding. There is a meaningful distinction, in commerce and in platform policy, between reselling an authentic pre-owned item and modifying branded materials into a new product. I did not fully understand how significant that distinction could be at the time.

I am not sharing this as a legal conclusion about my specific situation, because trademark law is nuanced and context-dependent. What I can say is that if you create, alter, or upcycle products using components bearing another company's trademarks, it is worth genuinely understanding the implications before you sell, regardless of where the original materials came from. When in doubt, speak with someone who understands intellectual property.

Social media platforms also use automated systems to monitor for counterfeit goods, intellectual property issues, and commerce policy violations. These systems are imperfect. A legitimate reseller can still encounter content removals, restrictions, or account flags. To this day, I occasionally experience restrictions after posting authentic designer bags, which is genuinely frustrating. I can only describe that as my observation, not as evidence that platforms intentionally treat businesses unfairly.

The Appeals

The appeals process  •  October 2024

I appealed. Then I appealed again. I contacted Meta. I had calls. I reached out to people who might be able to help. I tried every legitimate avenue I could find to understand what had happened and recover what I had built. For a while, I was in denial. I kept believing there had to be someone I could reach who would look at my account and understand and restore everything.

Eventually, after months of trying, I arrived at a realisation that was equal parts devastating and liberating: I could not build my future around waiting for someone else to give me my past back. That realisation changed everything.

One Week

I gave myself one week. One week to be upset. One week to feel sorry for myself. One week to fully sit with what losing something I had spent years building actually meant. I took that week seriously. I let myself grieve it. And then I got to work.

I love this business. I love vintage luxury. And I love the community that has formed around It Must Be Loved. I loved it too much to disappear because an Instagram account disappeared.

Rebuilding Forced Me to Become a Smarter Businesswoman

Your Instagram account is something you have access to. Your business is something you build. Your community is something you earn.

It changed how I structured everything. My brand, my infrastructure, my priorities, and my understanding of what I was actually building. I realised that I never wanted the survival of It Must Be Loved to depend on one platform again. Instagram can be an extraordinary tool. But Instagram does not own It Must Be Loved. I do.

My website matters. My customer relationships matter. My email list matters. The LOVED Club matters. My reputation matters. The experience my customers have with me matters. The knowledge and education I share matter. And the relationships I have spent years earning matter in a way that cannot be reset when a platform changes its terms.

Luxury Summer School itself is part of that rebuild. It represents my desire to create something deeper than a feed of bags for sale. I want people to open my emails because they enjoy hearing from me, because they learn something, because they feel part of a community, and because they know the person and the thinking behind It Must Be Loved. That is not something an algorithm controls.

Sometimes I wonder what I would do if someone handed me my original account back tomorrow. There are memories attached to it. Years of work. Content I will never fully recover. But I am genuinely proud of what I have rebuilt. The new account represents perseverance and everything I learned the hard way. And most importantly, my customers and community never really left. That taught me something a follower count never could.

Graduation

We started this summer talking about love. About what it means to be drawn to an object not for what it costs, but for what it carries. For the decades of hands that have held it, the stories embedded in its wear, the craft that went into making something beautiful enough to outlast every trend it was never trying to follow.

We talked about how professional vintage buyers think, about the discipline of patience and the courage to say no to the wrong piece. We talked about the modern resale landscape, about who is standing behind a listing and why that question matters as much as what is in the photograph. And now we end here, with perhaps the largest lesson this business has taught me.

Things change. Platforms change. Accounts disappear. Businesses evolve in directions you never planned. And none of that takes away what you have genuinely built.

Rebuilding did not give me back what I lost. It gave me clarity about what I wanted to build differently. I am not grateful that I lost the account. I am grateful for what I learned and built because I had no choice but to respond to losing it. Those are different things.

My account disappeared. My community did not. And that is the thing a follower count was never going to teach me.

© It Must Be Loved Inc  •  itmustbeloved.com  •  Luxury Summer School, Semester Two  •  The Final Class