Social Media and Strategic Relatability: Strawberry Milk Mob’s Story
In the last decade, social media and strategically promoted relatable content have revolutionized how brands connect with their target audience. This evolution has presented a casual, low-stakes way for individuals to release nuanced, direct-to-consumer media. Not everyone is successful in their social media endeavors; however, there are a select few with stellar social media presences from which you can take a minute of your day to learn.
What Are The Best Steps To Utilize Social Media?
Companies have experimented with print, radio, and television for as long as they’ve existed, so what makes social media different? It can be easily molded to meet your needs and provides interactivity that television and print don’t always offer. Profiles can link externally to your website and act as an additional hub for information. Users can play around with what content styles work for them and use the various features to maximize their social media presence.
Live-streaming - A great way to connect personally and candidly with your audience, going live fosters a sense of community, allowing an audience a window into your day-to-day.
Polls - Want help with real-time feedback? A poll might be the way to go. Polls also allow the viewer to have a say in the content they receive and feel a sense of connection and reciprocation from you.
Videos - Low production value content especially can help promote a feeling of relatability and emphasize the importance of supporting you/your brand as a small business.
Certain platforms tend to offer their own niche, but once you get the hang of it, you can begin to build a cohesive multi-platform social media presence that can reach your target audience in a whole new way.
Strawberry Milk Mob
Strawberry Milk Mob, a Toronto-based swimsuit company, has an exemplary social media presence that uniquely balances personality and efficacy. The brand was founded back in 2018 by 26-year-old Georgia Costello, aka “Strawberry,” and is run with the help of her two younger sisters, known as “Coconut” and “Blueberry.” They strive to sell “cute bikinis for cute prices” and carry both men’s and women’s swimwear on their website.
Georgia’s tagline captures it perfectly – “Cute bikinis for cute prices.” Her bikinis are sold for roughly $30 a piece ($60 for a set), and the menswear hovers around $50. Competitors such as Blackbough Swim, Frankie’s Bikinis, and OneOne Swimwear could cost anywhere from $50 to $120 for a single top or bottom.
Cheaper pricing, while certainly appealing, isn’t what makes the Milk Mob so impressive. It’s the way she markets herself on social media.
What The Competition’s Doing
If you were to search the aforementioned brands on social media, or other popular swimwear companies, you’d likely see a similar aesthetic and array of photos across accounts. Instagram feeds are filled with various models posing on the beach in swimsuits. Photos are overlaid with filters to create warm consistent lighting. But what are they doing wrong?
Over-reliance on short-form videos.
Repetitive background/style in campaigns.
Product-centric marketing that leaves the customer feeling distant from the brand.
Lack of creativity and/or constant trend following instead of setting.
Strawberry Milk Mob, however, breaks the mold. While there’s nothing wrong with the beachy bikini photos, Georgia at times uses similar backgrounds, and her accounts are much more playful. The brand has an Instagram, but it’s their TikTok that truly shines and is where an impressive 2.2 million followers enjoy Milk Mob content.
The Milk Mob Instagram
The most immediate difference you’ll notice is that on all the company’s social media, as well as their website, Georgia and her sisters are the only models for all the female clothing, and her boyfriend, known as Brad, models all the menswear. This consistently helps cultivate a concrete “face” of the brand and lets you know immediately that if it’s not Georgia, it’s not her swimwear. This productive usage of social media marketing emphasizes content continuity and reliability.
The Milk Mob Instagram recycles some of the video content used on TikTok with a mix of still images. Though this recycling may seem counterproductive, the photos appear unedited, allowing you to see what the swimwear coloring truly looks like.
There are plenty of beachy pictures, but the brand also experiments with other backgrounds. For example, in February 2024, to celebrate their seasonal drop, they shot a series of images indoors against a pink and red backdrop where Valentine’s Day-themed props surround Georgia. The concept of shooting indoors isn’t frequently seen on competitors’ accounts and allows Strawberry Milk Mob to be creative and deliver unique content.
As the only model, Georgia does a great job of blending her business into her personal life by taking photos that coincide with what she’s doing for fun. Their most recent Instagram posts were taken on her family’s ski trip around Switzerland, promoting a Winter-worthy line of swimwear. This gives her audience a more personal look into how she’s spending her time and helps the photos and videos feel authentic. Not to mention, it spices up their Instagram feed and provides a refreshing new way to model swimwear.
Georgia has cultivated a strong online presence surrounding her personality, her sisters, and her boyfriend on TikTok, which bleeds into the more swimwear-centric Strawberry Milk Mob Instagram. Her audience gets to enjoy fun, playful content on TikTok and more business-oriented, straight swimwear content on Instagram that still feels authentic.
The Milk Mob’s TikTok
If you were scrolling on TikTok’s For You page and had never heard of the Strawberry Milk Mob brand, you may come across one of their videos and have no idea what they’re selling, or that it’s a brand at all. When you then click on the profile, video after video simply shows Georgia. Georgia cooking. Georgia eating. Georgia talking. You might think the profile was her personal account, not one simultaneously associated with a brand – and that is what makes her so special, her brand perfectly unique.
The Strawberry Milk Mob TikTok is not an endless stream of models showing off a swimwear line. It is not posed video content overlaid with generic background music. It’s not all about the swimwear and what they’re selling.
Instead, the account is a place for Georgia to simply be herself – Strawberry, her nickname and the brand’s namesake. She has viral “let’s make a drink” videos where she playfully chats to the camera while making herself a drink, and a recurring “reasons I love men'' series making light-hearted jabs at male traits. She also shares lots of content with her sisters, from storytimes to videos using trending audios, and videos with her boyfriend “Brad,” going golfing or talking about relationship “perks.”
Through these casual and authentic videos, her audience can build a perception of Georgia’s community – her friends, her family, and her boyfriend. You get to see her personality, her style, her likes and dislikes, just as you do with many influencers.
Her infectious high-energy, positive content draws you in and keeps you coming back for more. By offering a little bit of everything – witty jokes, style inspiration, cocktail recipes, and modeled swimwear – her audience simultaneously can consume enjoyable content that promotes her business.
The Website’s Personality
The relatability and authenticity established on the brand’s Instagram and TikTok accounts further extend to their website. On the site’s “Questions <3” and “Contact” pages, Georgia continues to reference her sister as “Blueberry” in regard to who to reach out to with questions. Using these cute nicknames, while some may argue it isn’t the most polished, it’s part of what makes the brand so loveable and contributes to its small business feel. Often, a brand’s success and relatability to customers go hand in hand.
Their use of icons such as “<3,” and “:)” continue to speak to Georgia’s playful personality. Even the drop-down menu to navigate the website isn’t what you’d typically see, with categories such as “Big Boobies” and “Match Brad.” Georgia has created her own Milk Mob world using personal nicknames, unique lingo, and inside jokes that create a strong brand identity and differentiate them from other swimwear brands.
The Main Takeaways
All in all, Georgia has been able to successfully build a 2.2 million follower base by simply utilizing two key devices in order to stand out from the competition:
Strategic Relatability - Her authenticity is refreshing in an industry dominated by similar media tactics. By sharing content that isn’t highly edited or refined and that has personality and variability, she continually stands out and shines in the social media and swimwear world.
Content Continuity - All of her content feels connected and raw, building a community rather than a strictly transactional environment.
About the Writer: Madison Bernabeo is a student at Boston University studying advertising with a minor in business administration. She enjoys spending afternoons reading in the park and dreams of traveling. You can learn more about Madison on LinkedIn.
