How this entrepreneur got Kendall Jenner to wear her bikini brand

Back in 2013, when Instagram was relatively new, things were simpler for users and a bit more challenging for brands. In terms of contacting anyone, my then-partner Craig Ellis and I had to comment on the most recent post of theirs in the hope they’d see it, and ask for their email address, which they then needed to feel comfortable enough to provide. There were no private messages back then, so you had to be really open with your communication, and our comments usually went like this: “Hi (name), we’d love to get in touch, if you can please let us know your email? Erin x.”

Erin Deering will never forget the morning she woke up, checked her emails and found one from Kendall Jenner.

Once I had an email address, the process of sending a Triangl bikini was straightforward. They chose the bikini and size, which was a great opportunity to build a relationship over email.

Our response was immediately positive; a free bikini with no obligation attached, it was an offer most women were saying yes to. This was only the first step of the process, though. Once it arrived, I would often follow up gently with anyone who’d received a bikini. It was more to check in, as at this point I was interested in feedback about the bikini, the packaging, and the delivery time and experience.

As we genuinely didn’t expect an Instagram post in return, we just had to sit and wait and hope that they would feel inclined to share. Often, they did. I discovered these posts by regularly trawling the pages of the girls we’d gifted bikinis to. I had every reach-out recorded on an Excel spreadsheet, tracking all details so as not to miss a single potential photo.

When I did find a photo, it was the start of another process. We had a very strict set of guidelines that Craig and I had decided on between ourselves. What we’d already noticed on Instagram was that when brands reposted someone wearing their product, they didn’t really care how it looked, the mindset being that the social proof was all that mattered.

Hailey Baldwin (now Bieber) was often photographed wearing a neon-yellow snakeprint bikini from Triangl.

We did not embody this way of thinking at all, and we saw our Instagram page as being more important than our website. It was where we set the tone of our brand. It was our biggest form of advertising, and our greatest opportunity to highlight what we were about, which was, at the time, fashion-forward designer bikinis for under $100.

If we posted a photo that didn’t match this ethos, it just didn’t make sense. It looked misaligned, and undesirable for a potential customer, who really needed every interaction with the brand to match what we were trying to show.

Initially, our guidelines were clear and simple. We wanted the bikini on a body, with white sand and blue water in the picture. We also were happy with blue water and a clean background.

We weren’t able to do photo shoots often – in fact we did them only rarely – in the early months after launch, so these images had to have the same mood as a photo shoot. This proved to be quite hard, and we didn’t receive very many photos like this. This resulted in us allowing the addition of a “flat lay” bikini – the placement of a bikini laid flat.

We used to post twice a day, morning and night. Both were set times – the times of most Instagram activity, according to data. This was back in the good old days of the algorithm on Instagram being nothing more than purely chronological, so the more you posted, the more you were seen. We didn’t want to flood our followers’ pages with post after post; we saw other brands doing this, but we thought it felt needy, a bit desperate, so we stuck with 8am and 8pm, every single day.

We didn’t want to go after the three big Ks: Kim, Kourtney and Khloé. We looked to Kendall and Kylie, who were still teenagers at this point.

After several months we had a few girls who were repeatedly posting our bikinis. They were doing a great job, so we kept sending bikinis, knowing it would result in photos we could reuse. Unbeknown to us, this was the start of Triangl’s biggest movement on social media, our #trianglgirls.

After securing a handful of Triangl Girls in Australia (and by securing, I mean sending them bikinis; we never had any kind of formal arrangement in place), we started to look overseas. The pool of suitable girls in Australia was small, and even smaller during our winter. The US, on the other hand, was just starting its summer, and being such a huge market we felt it couldn’t hurt to dip our toe in the deep end.

We wanted to focus on America as we knew the bikini business was a big deal there, but we knew it wasn’t going to be as easy as it was in Australia. Craig and I had a discussion about who was the most well-known person in the online world at the time. It was already all about the Kardashians, who also jumped onto Instagram in the early days and whose numbers were growing rapidly, alongside their reality show.

The very first #triangl girl, Chloe. Triangl named its first bikini style “Chloe” in her honour.

We didn’t want to go after the three big Ks: Kim, Kourtney and Khloé. They were already too old for our main target reach, which was predominantly 15- to 25-year-olds, and would have certainly required payment. We looked to Kendall and Kylie, who were still teenagers at this point but building their personal brands nonetheless. We naturally gravitated towards Kendall; she was the more active of the two sisters and often photographed beside a pool or at the beach.

Now, we knew we weren’t going to be able to get in touch via her Instagram, or even via email – it would have gone unanswered, or with a reply seeking a fee in exchange for posting.

We had to think outside the square, and lure her in somehow. I was very good at playing Instagram detective by this point and often deep-dived on a suitable girl’s profile to find other girls in her group of friends. This also usually assisted in the word-of-mouth flow of energy, because if you gifted a bunch of friends separately, they no doubt spoke of it offline as well and it really helped spread the brand name.

Adopting this process, I went hunting for Kendall’s friends. Going through her page, finding her friends, finding their accounts, trying to match up who was friends with who, and who was in the smaller best-mate circle. It wasn’t too time-consuming; I did it often.

I found about five or six girls who I was sure were her good friends at the time. Funnily enough, two of them were future celebrities in their own right. Hailey Baldwin (now Bieber) and Bella Hadid were relative unknowns back then, and only familiar to me as being friends with Kendall.

Now we just had to sit and wait for Kendall to take the bait. It felt completely far-fetched but completely possible.

In fact, we’d previously gifted Hailey because her sweet girl-next-door vibe exactly matched our usual target girl. Bella was a lot sexier, and I remember wondering if she’d even be interested in our slightly fuller-cut bikini bottoms! However, they were all very happy to be gifted Triangl, and our strike rate among Kendall’s circle, in terms of them replying and also posting in Triangl, was 100 per cent.

Now we just had to sit and wait for Kendall to take the bait. It felt completely far-fetched but completely possible, considering how much I knew about the power of girl talk; surely they’d all be together by a pool at some point, discussing how they all were sent these bikinis.

As much as Craig and I felt this could actually work, I will never forget the morning I woke up, checked my emails as I always did, and found an email from a Gmail account with the name kennykillerrrr or something similar (no, I didn’t keep the email!). I just knew, without even reading it, that it was from Kendall Jenner and that our fanciful plan to woo her had worked.

It said something along the lines of “Hi! My friends were all sent these really cute bikinis. I’d love to get some too!”

BOOM. Hook, line and sinker. This was no doubt one of the most pivotal moments for Triangl.

Craig and I knew this was big. We had a huge opportunity. We sent her the entire collection (we had to make up for being slightly mean and leaving her out!), and, sure enough, she tweeted (her Twitter following was five million – at the time bigger than her Instagram following) and shared our Instagram handle: @triangl.

And that was really it for us. The social proof of Kendall wearing the bikinis created a flow-on effect. Everything Kendall wore and did resulted in publications writing it up, and this small brand “Triangl”, which she was seen wearing, got written up too.

Soon our brand was worn by Kylie, Kim, Kourtney and even Kris. The Kardashian effect was, indeed, very real. We were being written up daily by all the social commentary sites, as well as constantly reposted by fan pages, and their apparent authority in popular culture paved the way for every other celebrity to accept and embrace Triangl as the go-to bikini brand.

Edited extract of Hanging by a Thread (Affirm Press) by Erin Deering, out September 26.

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