Why We Never Used Paid Advertising—Until Now

If you follow me on Instagram, you may have spotted a little update in my stories last weekend… For the first time ever, we have embarked on some paid adverts. There was great excitement among the team and me as we spotted our ads appear on Instagram.

Five years into running The Fabled Thread, the decision to finally embark on paid advertising is one I have been umming and ahhing over for months, if not years, but have never taken the leap. In fact, when I first launched The Fabled Thread in February 2020, I did run a few small adverts just to find some initial followers on Instagram. We're talking about an overall budget of probably £500. But once I hit 1,000 followers, I stopped and haven’t paid for advertising since.

That means we’ve done no paid advertising or marketing in any capacity—no gifted kits, no trade shows, no paid editorials, no agencies. Until this summer, there was also no marketing support beyond me! But this year, we’ve been changing tack—after four years of reinvesting everything into product, we have finally started investing in marketing too.

That means I now have marketing support in the form of Jen, we have booked our first trade show (Chelsea Flower Show in May!), we worked with an agency on our SEO in the summer, and… as of last week, we now have two amazing women working with us to run adverts.

Since I know this is the kind of thing I would love to understand if I suddenly started seeing a brand I like advertising, I thought I’d explain:

• Why I’ve been so against paid advertising in the past
• Why we’ve decided to invest in marketing now
• What we hope to achieve through it