Imagine opening your brand's Instagram tomorrow and finding products you've never heard of tagged in your posts. Cheap knockoffs, random brands, zero attribution.

That's what happened to fashion creator Julia Berolzheimer last month. Instagram's new "Shop the Look" AI scanned her content, matched it to products in business catalogues, and started selling off her aesthetic. No consent, no commission, no notification.

She wasn't alone. Creators across the platform found the same thing. As Megan Vasquez at GRIN put it: "It's about preserving what makes social shopping work: the trust between audience and creator."

Instagram rolled it back after the backlash. But platforms will keep testing how far they can go.

You're probably more exposed than you think. Most DTC brands I talk to run 50-70% of their acquisition through platforms they don't control. Meta ads, Instagram organic, TikTok, Google Shopping. And now those platforms are actively inserting themselves between you and your customer.

Instagram tags products on creator posts without consent. Amazon just launched "Buy for Me", an AI agent that scrapes external shops and buys on their behalf, without the shop's participation. Zalando grew retail media revenue to €316M (+42%), meaning brands pay more just to stay visible on a platform they already sell on.

Exciting Commerce reported this month that Pure-Player margins in German e-commerce collapsed from 7.4% in 2021 to 0.8% in 2024. Part of that is marketplace pressure. But a big chunk is the growing cost of renting someone else's audience.

The euros you spend on platforms are rent. Your email subscribers, though? That's equity you actually own.

A quick exercise I'm running regularly for erlich texil.

1. Map your revenue by channel ownership

Open a spreadsheet (or better: your dashboard). Three columns: Owned, Rented, Shared.

Add up the revenue percentage for each column. If Rented is above 60%, you've got a concentration risk that one algorithm change can blow up.

2. Calculate your "platform tax" per channel.

Not just ad spend. Include: the margin you lose on marketplace fees, the data you don't get (Zalando doesn't share customer emails), the creative energy spent adapting to each platform's format. It’s a bit vague because you will be struggling to put hard numbers behind everything but it is a good excercise.

3. Pick one owned channel to invest in this month.

If you have an email list but aren't sending weekly, start there. No WhatsApp presence? Test a small VIP group with your top 100 customers and give them something meaningful, something which brings them closer to your brand. Eye to eye level. Already doing both? Build a good and inspiring referral mechanic that turns your best subscribers into acquisition channels (I wrote about this last week).

I'm not saying quit platforms cold turkey. You can't, and you shouldn't. But you can shift the ratio. Every quarter, move 5% of your time and budget from rented to owned. In 18 months, you'll have a fundamentally different business.

4. Stress-test your "what if Instagram disappears" scenario.

Sounds dramatic, but if Meta changed their algorithm tomorrow and your organic reach dropped 80% (which has happened before), what would your revenue look like next month? Brands that survived previous algorithm shifts (Facebook organic reach collapse 2018, iOS 14.5 in 2021) had one thing in common: they'd built owned audiences before they needed them. Tricky but needed.

5. Use social for discovery, connection and brand equity

You don't have to leave Instagram or TikTok or Pinterest or Facebook. But you can change how you use it for your brand. Stop treating it as a sales channel and start treating it as a brand channel that lets consumers out there build a first connection with you and your product. Then gently move to your owned channels. Build in content formats with one job: move people from rented to owned. Gradually get them off your Instagram feed and onto your email list, off TikTok and into your WhatsApp group. The content lives on the platform, but the relationship lives with you.

I'm not anti-platform. We run Meta ads at erlich, we post on Instagram, we sell on Zalando, we do pinterest tests (jesus, that plattform is hard to get profitable). But the "Shop the Look" situation is a reminder that you're a tenant, not an owner. And tenants can get kicked out at any time, for minimal reasons, with short notice.

The brands that will be fine in 5 years are the ones building owned audiences today. Platforms aren't evil. But depending on someone else's algorithm for your business is a risk you can reduce. And reducing it costs less than you think.

Quick gut check: if Instagram disappeared tomorrow, would your business be fine, shaky, or in serious trouble? Reply with one of those three words. Or more ;). I'm curious where most of you land.

have a wonderful day,

Philipp