The manic precision with which Laguna~B has archived its past activities on Instagram—with thousands of posts, videos, and captions neatly stored inside countless four-terabyte hard drives—cuts against the general lack of enthusiasm towards social media that I’ve witnessed since I began working here.
I never worry about what to post on my own account: I simply don’t do it. Marcantonio doesn’t have a personal profile (although he has one for his art studio.) My colleague Alessandro does, but never posts. In the past two years, at Laguna~B, too, we’ve never worried about such things as ‘content calendars’ or ‘marketing reports’ for social media. We had a formula that relieved us from the struggle of planning and promoting in pre-packed formats: collectors and friends would send us pictures of our tumblers via DMs and we simply shared them whenever we felt like.
But scrolling the colorful pictures and graphics in the back-up folders, I realize that’s not always been the case.
The one with Instagram—the only platform we’ve ever used—has been a troubled, love-hate relationship. The company’s first account, @lagunab_official, launched in 2017, only a few months after Marcantonio had taken over Laguna~B. It thrived for years by sharing a miscellanea of highly creative, strikingly colorful content—including audio and video artwork, as well as professional photography. Tommaso Cazzaro, a digital artist and the creative executive at the time who also curated Laguna~B’s Instagram wall, created wild illustrations and collages as updates on the ongoing projects, and released monthly animated gifs with surreal interpretations of our most iconic drinking glasses. Pristine still-lifes were commissioned to Enrico Fiorese, a renowned name in the field of glass photography, for the sole purpose of feeding the wall.
An instagram post was the first thing I wrote when I joined the company as a copywriter in 2021. It announced that the stocks of Verde Erba—a pigment employed as the Green Goto’s background color—were running short. Therefore, the amount of glasses we would be able to produce in that particular shade was limited, and their price was bound to increase. That was also the first time Marcantonio and I discussed the writing style he wanted for Laguna~B: simple, factual, with short sentences and lots of paragraphs “to facilitate the readers.” One year before we released our first newsletter, that’s how we began developing our (still evolving) tone-of-voice.
The profile was widely loved and quickly gained over 10,000 followers. But as algorithms increasingly took over the platform’s feed, and the ‘Enshittification’ era of social networks began (with users’ attention spans drastically shrinking,) it seemed absurd to invest so much time and creativity into an endless scroll where our creations would appear for a few seconds in low-res, only to be forgotten a few instants later.
We held workshops and conducted research on independent social media looking for alternative platforms, and for a brief time we even considered creating our own to be embedded onto our website. It wasn’t eventually (and perhaps obviously) a viable idea, but the concept later evolved into the Everyday Life newsletter, a monthly format allowing us to share intimate, behind-the-scenes pictures collected from our team’s phones. (Should we bring it back?) Painstakingly long meetings discussing the future of our communications on social media resulted in Marcantonio’s verdict: “This is not what our work deserves.” I agreed.In December 2021, a post announced our final year on Instagram: the account was going to shut down, making space for editorial newsletters—which we identified as the best destination for our content, offering readers more space and time to enjoy it.
The feed turned into a single slideshow—a selection of casual snapshots of our daily life and inspirations—which was weekly replaced by a new one. Our first newsletter, Onda, debuted at the beginning of 2022, and our social media presence consequently shrank. Laguna~B said goodbye to Instagram with a series of video artworks by our artist friends Francesca Albergo, Francesco Ninno, and the collective Altremuse: on January 1st, 2023, our official account was gone. The profile’s feed materialized months later in the form of a thick printed publication titled 2022.
As Alessandro Trevisan, Laguna~B’s in-house photographer and content manager, points out, “In those years, many fashion brands were questioning their presence on social media: experimenting with forms of ‘digital minimalism,’ like Balenciaga, or opting out of Instagram entirely, like Bottega [Veneta].” Cult brands were going stealth mode, and we admired their brave choice. “The stakes were high, but we decided to try, and personally I was really excited.”
Refusing to conform to the algorithmic feed was coherent with Laguna~B’s countercurrent spirit and approach based on questioning the use of modern marketing tools. (That year, products never appeared in the newsletter campaigns advertising the limited editions. Instead, they were playlists, videos, illustrations, diary pages, erotic collages.) Yet, we knew it was also potentially risky—“How are people even going to find you now?” was the most frequent comment we received. After a few months of shutdown, we realized being without any Instagram presence wasn’t sustainable. We came up with a compromise that allowed us to showcase our glasses without investing much time into the content creation: conceived as an Instagram-based project, Everywhere Laguna~Bposted pictures of our glasses in use from collectors around the world.
The story of how Laguna~B has expressed itself on social media throughout the years is convoluted, at times contradictory, but mirrors Laguna~B’s commitment to experiment and ‘change one’s mind’ as a fruitful, driving force, instead of something to be scared of. With the new year, we decided to bring back not only our editorial newsletters but a renovated Instagram presence, too. Laguna~B’s universe is expanding beyond just glassware, and @everything_lagunab — as the new account is called — will be the destination to sneak peek into our journey.
We also decided to resume our archive work, to examine a more recent chapter of our history. We’ve been scavenging hard drives, website backups, and dormant folders in our laptops to retrace the evolutions of the company’s digital identity and communications online. The Archive Stories are back!