Bottega Veneta left social media in 2021, and the conversation stayed

In the first week of January 2021 Bottega Veneta, the Italian leather house owned by Kering, deactivated its accounts on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. The Instagram account alone had about 2.5 million followers. The brand gave no reason and declined to comment. Its creative director, Daniel Lee, had no personal Instagram and had said several times that social media was not his focus. Trade coverage split between two readings, a digital detox and a clever marketing move, and the deletion came only weeks after the brand had shown a collection digitally.

In spring 2021 Bottega launched Issue, a quarterly digital journal on its own website timed to its collections, with contributors from music, fashion and photography. Lee was quoted describing social media as a homogenisation of culture. The house kept growing: Kering reported Bottega Veneta revenue above 1.5 billion euros for 2021, up about a quarter on 2020. In November 2021 Lee left in what Kering called a joint decision, and Matthieu Blazy, already in the design team, took over. When Louise Trotter made her debut for the house in 2025, coverage still described a brand working without a social media presence of its own.

The channel as a statement

Our books treat every channel as a triplet of subject, value and proof, with a role to play in conquest, proof or belonging. Read that way, the Instagram account of a luxury house was carrying a value as well as content: availability, the same scroll and the same format as every other brand.

Leaving it was therefore a value decision. A luxury house that declines the feed tells its customers something about pace, attention and taste before any product is shown. In the method that is an antithesis, a value the market treats as central and the brand openly refuses. Antitheses are proven by omission: every month without an account is evidence, and the proof grows with time as long as the brand stays consistent.

Letting others carry the brand

The exit did not remove Bottega from social media. Fans, press, stylists and resellers kept posting the bags and the shoes, and later reporting noted that the brand’s visibility on Instagram had only increased. The brand gave up control of the message and kept its presence through other people.

Our books draw this as a shift from a value sequence to a value network, where customers and communities produce value as well as receive it. The backward links, the posts a brand did not pay for, are much harder for a competitor to copy than a media plan. They only appear when the product gives people something worth showing, which Bottega’s bags and shoes evidently did.

What the experiment cannot prove

Outside readers should be careful about cause. Bottega’s growth in 2021 came in a year when luxury rebounded strongly after the first pandemic year, on the back of designs that were already in demand. The social media exit may have helped the brand’s image, and it may have been close to neutral commercially. Public numbers cannot separate the two.

The decision also had costs that do not show in revenue: no direct line to customers when something goes wrong, no control over how the product is shown, and dependence on the press and the fans. A house with a strong product and a loyal following can afford that trade. A young brand that still needs to be discovered usually cannot, which is why the move rarely travels well.

The useful exercise is to look at each of your channels and ask what value it says about you, separate from the content you put into it. If you want to map your channels this way and decide which ones to keep, see what we do and how we run that review with you.