The Fashion Brand Clinic Podcast - Season 4 Episode 03:Stop Chasing the Algorithm. Nobody Can Copy Your Personality.

There's a particular kind of tiredness that only people who run brand social media accounts understand.

You spend your nine-to-five scrolling — but it's research, obviously. You spend your five-to-nine scrolling — because apparently that's what you do with a free evening now. You catch a trend one week and it flies. You catch it a week late the next and it's already dead, replaced by something you'd never heard of. And underneath it all is this nagging feeling that if you could just crack the algorithm, it would all get easier.

Sophie Milham stood on stage at Fashion Marketing Live and said the quiet bit out loud: nobody has cracked it. Not her. Not anyone.

And Sophie has form. She grew Odd Muse from 90,000 to 500,000 on TikTok and from just under 100,000 to 900,000 on Instagram, in two and a half years, off the back of a fashion styling degree and no marketing training whatsoever. She then went and became the first hire at SULT, an electrolyte brand that launched into Boots on the back of a waitlist built before there was a product, a website, or a sample to photograph.

Her verdict? "I'm trying everything, and I'm like, 'yeah, it'll perform really good.' I have no idea. I don't think anyone has any idea."

So if the algorithm isn't the answer, what is?

Personality. That's it. That's the whole thing.

Sophie's argument is beautifully simple: everything about your brand can be copied. Your product can be copied. Your pricing can be copied. Your photography style, your fonts, your launch cadence, your captions — all of it can be lifted by someone with a bit of nerve and a decent designer.

The one thing that can't be copied is you.

And "you" shows up in a brand in three ways. Pick whichever one fits, because they all work.

Founder-led content is the obvious one. Aimee Smale built her personal profile alongside Odd Muse — she didn't start with a following, she grew both together, sharing the highs and the lows as they happened. At SULT, co-founder Milly Goldsmith brought an existing audience with her and used it as leverage: not to sell, but to invite people in early enough that they felt like part of it.

Employee-generated content is for the founders who don't want to be on camera — and Sophie is very clear that plenty of them don't, and that's fine. Your team can carry the personality instead. Which brings us neatly to the platform Sophie says she will not stop banging on about.

Personal branding — in the old-fashioned sense of colour, font, visual identity — is the third route. At SULT it's a yellow-green Pantone so distinctive that the office still argues about whether it's yellow or green (the room at Fashion Marketing Live couldn't agree either). It sounds like the most basic thing in the world. It's the first thing you learn when you build a brand. It's also the thing that makes someone walking through Boots go "hang on, I know that colour."

LinkedIn is the most untapped platform in fashion

Sophie's pitch for LinkedIn is not the one you're expecting. She doesn't want your promotion announcement. She doesn't want your quarterly report.

"I don't really know about the boring stuff. But I just want to hear about everything. What did you think about this morning when you had your coffee? Or at the weekend when you were sitting with your mum chatting?"

Her most successful recent LinkedIn post was about her boyfriend having a small head. Ten thousand views.

The logic holds up. Instagram and TikTok are saturated. LinkedIn — for fashion brands, at least — is still wide open, and the audience there is genuinely hungry for anyone who'll be a human being on it. PerfectTed reportedly incentivise their whole team to post, with a weekly prize for the best one. Surreal do it brilliantly. Sophie herself won a £50 Tesco voucher by commenting on a Surreal LinkedIn giveaway, which is either a marketing lesson or a very cheap customer acquisition cost, depending on how you look at it.

Storytelling over aesthetic

Here's where Sophie will lose some of the perfectionists in the room, and she knows it.

"I don't like aesthetic feeds. I want it to be messy."

She's not arguing for scruffy. Quality still matters. What she's arguing against is the beautifully arranged grid that says absolutely nothing — the image so obviously staged that the viewer's first thought is "they're selling me something", and their second thought is to keep scrolling. Her split is roughly 20% polished, 80% story. Save the gorgeous imagery for your website and your wholesale deck, where it does a real job.

Because — and this is the line worth writing on a Post-it — people buy from people. They don't just buy a product. If somebody genuinely wants a product, they'll go and buy it. They don't need to be sold to on a Tuesday afternoon while they're procrastinating.

At SULT this looks like a series called Is It a Shit Sandwich or a Special Sandwich?, in which the team review the month while eating a sandwich and then rate the sandwich. It looks like Road to Retail, documenting the whole journey from first Boots meeting to launch. And crucially, when January went badly wrong — delays, empty shelves, an unimpressed Boots — they filmed that too.

"Great views though, 'cause people do love to see when you fail a little bit."

That is the part most brands can't bring themselves to do, and it's exactly the part that builds the community everyone says they want.

Your social media is your CV

Sophie's most quietly radical point is about what your content is for.

When a major partner asked SULT to send over a deck, they didn't send a deck. They sent an email with links to Reels that had performed well or told a story properly, and said: we can do this for you.

That reframes everything. Your grid isn't a shop window, it's a portfolio. So the question stops being "does this look nice" and becomes "what am I actually bringing to the table here?"

And it means the metrics change too. Ten thousand views used to feel like a failure. Sophie's take: that's ten thousand pairs of eyes on you, all of whom cared enough to watch. The algorithm notices that, and it feeds you more of the same audience. Chasing forty million views is a mug's game — the number that counts as "viral" has inflated so much that it isn't a target any more, it's a lottery ticket.

What to actually do on Monday morning

Stop waiting for the perfect posting slot. SULT posted on a Saturday — the day everyone tells you not to — and it did brilliantly, precisely because nobody else was posting.

Stop cutting your videos down to fifteen seconds when the meaning lives in the second thirty. Long form is back.

Start writing down the boring bits. Sophie's team keep a running doc of everything that happens in a month — arguments included — and turn it into a carousel called The Founders Path. The stuff you'd never think to post is the stuff people want most, because people are nosy. They want to know what's going on. So share it.

And post on LinkedIn. Sophie asked the whole room to do it by the next day. Consider yourself asked too.

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If your marketing currently consists of posting and hoping, Magnetic is my six-month accelerator for fashion brands who want consistent sales without wondering where the next order's coming from. Weekly coaching with me, the full training hub, monthly planning so you're never winging it, all my templates, and a community of fashion founders who get it. 25 places per round. → elizabethstiles.co.uk/magnetic-five

And if being in that room sounds like your kind of day out of the office, Fashion Marketing Live 2027 is on Monday 15 March. The last one sold out in 24 hours — get on the waitlist.

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