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Time of India
20-07-2025
- Business
- Time of India
The great thrift valley: How the Northeast became India's style underground
LINE FROM MANIPUR Live Events NE LINE TO MAINLAND (You can now subscribe to our (You can now subscribe to our Economic Times WhatsApp channel Online thrift is not for the faint of heart. In the fastest-fingers-first world, you have to call dibs on an item the moment it is released on the Gram. The drop is announced via Stories. You set the alarm, turn on notifications and still you might miss what you had set your heart on after seeing it in a sneak-peek. There are no pre-bookings and no favourites. But that is the thrill of thrifting—the one that got thrifting—a common term for buying second-hand, preloved goods—gains traction in India, the Northeast is emerging as the hub. A lack of retail shops in the past has created a culture of thrift in northeastern states where secondhand goods arrive in bales. Add to this their unique sense of style— and urban audiences in the rest of the country can't get enough of thrift lines from the north eastern states have secondhand markets—from Fancy Bazaar in Guwahati and Police Bazaar in Shillong to Bara Bazaar in Aizawl, Sunday second-hand market in Imphal and Hong Kong market in Dimapur Manipur-based Ngahon Tungshangnao , who set up his store Mirinwon in 2019, says it takes days to find the right products. He visits every thrift store in his hometown Ukhrul and travels to Imphal city and even other states to source. The clothing usually arrives in bales of 80-100 kg. 'I do drops twice or thrice a week on Instagram , sourcing items according to the seasons.'Tungshangnao, who loves his bucolic life with a side of high fashion, says it is convenient to start an online thrift store in the Northeast , but it has not been easy of late. 'Political instability poses challenges. And the internet gets banned whenever there's a riot. With no private couriers, one can't make quick deliveries either,' he Rachel Gwanile Thong started her store Assortments2.0 in 2016. 'I began by selling pieces from my wardrobe that I didn't wear anymore. To my surprise, people were interested. That encouraged me to start thrifting and sourcing pieces,' she says, adding that the interest has only grown of who runs the operation with her partner Limatenzuk Ozukum, sources everything from Nagaland—mainly Kohima and Dimapur. 'In the early days, I used to go around second-hand shops and dig through everything myself. Now, we have vendors who give us a heads-up when they open a new batch and we get the first pick. We source in bulk,' says says logistics is a challenge, but her customers have come to realise that quick shipping and fast deliveries are not possible from does two-three drops a week. 'I don't always follow themes, unless I happen to have a good collection of similar pieces. Otherwise, it's more of a 'what caught my eye' approach,' she contrast, Folkpants, run by the sisters Linno and Lumri Jajo, from Ukhrul, puts out thematic drops. Lumri Jajo says thrifting was a natural progression of their love for clothes and fashion. 'During college, we organised successful garage sales at our home in Delhi,' she says they observed a lack of quality and unique clothes at affordable prices for conscious consumers. As they sourced for their personal wear, they decided to curate items that didn't fit their style but were too good to pass up. Folkpants has recently done an all white edit for summer, a linen edit and even a vest edit. Jajo says, 'There are many thrift shops but some sell cheap items without quality or authenticity, while others have high prices but less curated selections. We stand out by offering quality products at reasonable prices.'With thrift shops launching on Instagram on a daily basis, curation, quality control and deliverables are the way risk analyst Aparna Balaji has thrifted from shops in Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh, and says they understand the meaning of thrifting. 'They carefully choose the pieces they put up. So, it's unique. It is sent through India Post , making it even lighter on the pocket and truly sustainable, what thrifting is meant to be,' says bag designer Sudha Sekhar has faced some issues. 'I am particular about the cut and fabric. These pages mostly get products from East Asian countries that almost always have smaller sizes. But some experiences have been good, like my footwear picks. I have been wearing some for three years,' she says. An abundance of polyester also bothers Shaingam Mashangva who runs The Mellow Lane says she tries to curate according to her clientele. 'One needs to really do some homework for the business to thrive. Understanding the customer's choice is very important. Since 90% of my clients are from places that are hot and humid, I mostly source comfortable natural materials,' says Mashangva, a physics teacher-turned-thrift business says sourcing good pieces has become tough: 'Sometimes after going through 1,000-3,000 items, we end up with just 40-90 good pieces.' She does a drop of 20-25 pieces. She sells 30-50% of clothes on the day of the drop but ends up with a lot of unsold items, which are put on sale after a couple of says, 'When you are selecting from 100 kg bales, you end up with a lot of defective pieces.' Most thrift shops, while selling items, mention even a small defect in products and that is reflected in the owners confirm demand from the mainland. Thong, who is a lawyer, says that even though Assortments2.0 is a side hustle, she has seen steady growth and strong support over the years. 'With more people embracing sustainable fashion, we are seriously thinking of scaling this into something bigger, hopefully a full-fledged brand.' Most of her buyers—from teens to people in their 40s and 50s—are from metro Tungshangnao started Mirinwon as a side hustle, but now it's a full-time business, thanks to the growing demand. He says, 'Thrifting has become cool. My consumers are from all over India, and they are 18 to 45 year olds.'Yet challenges remain. Mashangva says that each year the price of thrifted clothes is increasing as bad-quality thrift bales make it harder to get good pieces: 'While it's easy to set up an online thrift store, it is difficult to build followers because of the Instagram algorithm. And the number of followers matters a lot for this business.'Jajo says that whether the thrift stores will succeed depends on the individuals running it. 'We started small but have grown into a sustainable business over the past six years. Demand and growth have been steady, with 80% customers returning.' Jajo says many find the process of searching for unique items interior designer Lorraine Kerr told The Cut in 2013 on why she thrifts: 'The chase is the most fun part…. It's about the hunting and gathering!' The thrill of discovery is just a fingertip away.


Time of India
12-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
Ashish Chanchalani and Elli AvRam break the internet with one word, are they the internet's newest 'it' couple?
Move over soft-launches, Ashish Chanchlani and Elli AvRam have just gone full public with their romance. The duo dropped a picture-perfect moment on Instagram: Elli in Ashish's arms, flowers in hand, golden sunlight kissing their beaming faces, and a stone bridge lurking romantically in the backdrop. Caption? Just one word: Finally. The Insta post of Ashish Chanchalani that broke the internet That one word sent fans spiralling into an emotional meltdown. Heart emojis, "we been knew" comments, and memes exploded within minutes. It was subtle yet loud, casual yet iconic, and undeniably official. Ashish and Elli first set the gossip grapevine on fire back in February at the Elle List 2025 event. They arrived together, posed like seasoned pros, and sparked theories of everything from secret dating to a sizzling collab in the works. The chemistry? Undeniable. The vibes? Off the charts. People could not decide whether this was a PR tease or a romantic build-up. But with this post, it seems the duo have confirmed it's not just for the 'Gram, it's real, it's happening, and fans are here for it. A content creator and a cinema queen, power couple alert While Ashish is a YouTube OG and comedy royalty, Elli has carved her niche in Bollywood with her glam presence and versatile roles. Together, they blend virality and elegance like a match made in influencer heaven. Rumour mills still speculate whether there is a creative project brewing behind those dreamy eyes, but for now, it is love that is stealing the spotlight. Whether it is a rom-com or a reel series in the works, this love story already has the internet's vote. Fans go feral in comments As expected, the comments section is pure chaos. From 'FINALLY A REAL SHIP' to 'my timeline is healing,' fans cannot get enough. One thing is clear: this couple did not just break the internet, they mended hearts in the process.


Tom's Guide
10-07-2025
- Business
- Tom's Guide
Get it before Prime Day ends: This LG Gram 17 Pro is one of my favorite laptops and it's over $500 off right now
I've been reviewing laptops for years here at Tom's Guide, and one of my favorites has to be the ultra-light LG Gram 17 Pro. I love how capable this Windows 11 laptop is, and at just 3.2 pounds heavy it's probably the lighest 17-inch laptop you can get. If that sounds good to you, good news: Prime Day drops the LG Gram 17 Pro to $1,684 at Amazon, which is nearly 25% off. That knocks over $500 off the cost of this LG Gram, making it one of the best Prime Day laptop deals I've seen all week. However, be aware that you must be an Amazon Prime member to take advantage of this deal! Prime members only: You can save over $500 on this ultra-light Windows 11 laptop sporting a 17-inch (2560 x 1600 pixels) display, an Intel Core Ultra 7 CPU, 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD for storage. Plus it weighs 3.2 pounds, making it one of the lightest 17-inch laptops you can buy. As i wrote in my LG Gram 17 Pro review, I really like this laptop because you get all the benefits of a 17-inch laptop—a big, bright display, a full, comfy keyboard, plenty of ports and good battery life—in a surprisingly lightweight and sturdy design that's roughly 0.7 inches thin. Thin-and-light design is the whole selling point of LG's Gram laptops, of course, so if you're shopping for a lightweight laptop to tote around for work and want more than the usual 13-15 inches of screen you get on something like a MacBook Air, this is the laptop for you. And while the LG Gram 17 Pro's 17-inch WQXGA (2,560 x 1,600 pixels) display isn't quite as lush as an OLED screen or as bright as a MacBook's display it's plenty bright for use in all but direct afternoon sunlight. This laptop's Intel Core Ultra 7 255H CPU and 16GB of RAM are great for browsing the web and getting work done, and the 1TB of storage space gives you all the room you need. So if you want a great, lightweight productivity laptop with a big keyboard and an awesome 17-inch display, make sure to nab this killer LG Gram 17 Pro Prime Day deal before it's gone. Just be aware that, in my experience, the Gram's attractive matte black chassis attracts fingerprints like nobody's business.


Atlantic
24-06-2025
- General
- Atlantic
How Did Design Become the Solution to Everything?
On the first day of a required class for freshman design majors at Carnegie Mellon, my professor stood in front of a lecture hall of earnest, nervous undergraduates and asked, 'Who here thinks that design can change the world?' Several hands shot up, including mine. After a few seconds of silence, he advanced to the next slide of his presentation: a poster by the designer Frank Chimero that read, Design won't save the world. Go volunteer at a soup kitchen, you pretentious fuck. My professor wasn't the first person to deliver such discouraging news. In 1971, the design educator Victor Papanek began his best-selling book, Design for the Real World, with a similar message. 'There are professions more harmful than industrial design,' he wrote, but 'very few.' By designing and popularizing products that 'pollute the air we breathe'—including cars, which are responsible for 'murder on a mass-production basis'—he argued, 'designers have become a dangerous breed.' But design was capable of inflicting such harm, he wrote, only because it had so much potential, and therefore also the capacity for immense good. For Papanek, it was 'the most powerful tool with which man shapes his tools and environment (and, by extension, society and himself).' Many working designers today echo Papanek's ambivalence about the profession. In her fascinating, rigorously researched new book, The Invention of Design, the designer and educator Maggie Gram shows how the field transcended its humble origins as the mere art of decoration and became a more ambitious, and more conflicted, discipline. Designers are responsible for more things than ever before: hardware, software, services, infrastructure. Many designers aren't just trying to beautify the world; they want to make it a better place. In the process, they have tackled societal issues such as racial injustice and economic inequality, with mixed results. Design works best when it knows what it can achieve and what it can't; the history of design is full of utopian projects that failed to make a difference. Gram's book is critical of the hubris and techno-optimism that have led design thinking astray, but it is also hopeful, imagining how the discipline might eventually live up to its stated ideals. In the 19th century, designers were typically commercial artists who worked to make everyday objects more attractive to consumers. But Gram's book shows how, over the course of the 20th century, practitioners such as Eva Zeisel helped shape a new way of thinking about the profession. Born in 1906 to a highly educated Hungarian Jewish family, Zeisel became, at 18, the youngest woman to join the potters' guild of Budapest. Her first job was to make prototypes of pots to be mass-produced at a factory—a skill that brought her to Berlin and then the Soviet Union. But her career there was cut short by Stalin's Great Purge, and Zeisel moved to New York in 1938, where she taught at the Pratt Institute and designed dinnerware that was exhibited and sold at the Museum of Modern Art. Her work married Old World craftsmanship with industrial-manufacturing practices, and showed that popular modernist styles, which were often seen as rigid and circumscribed, could be executed with what Zeisel called 'real elegance.' Zeisel was one of many European émigrés who shaped American design culture. In 1919, the German architect Walter Gropius founded the Staatliches Bauhaus, an art school where first-year students were given a foundation in color, form, and fundamental aesthetic principles. The school was initially funded by the German state of Thuringia, but when the government began shifting to the right in the 1920s, the Bauhaus had to find a different business model. It began to partner with companies to sell its own products, which made the curriculum more explicitly pre-professional. As Gram writes, the Bauhaus began 'using machines to mass-produce objects that worked,' including chairs, lamps, and other household items. When the school eventually closed and Gropius fled Nazi Germany for America, he brought the Bauhaus's ideas to Harvard's design school as a professor. Gropius's approach to industrial design—epitomized by the famous dictum 'Form follows function'—was enormously influential; the Bauhaus's synthesis of art, technology, and practicality shaped America's understanding of design over the following decades. In a 2003 interview, Steve Jobs, then the CEO of Apple, remarked that 'most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like.' But, as he argued, 'it's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.' Jobs's reframing marked the culmination of a decades-long cultural shift. By the end of the 20th century, design students were typically categorized into one of two buckets: industrial designers who made physical, mass-produced products, and graphic designers who communicated information with visuals. But following the rapid rise of the technology sector during the early 21st century, many design students gravitated toward careers in that industry, where they worked on intangible products such as interfaces and software systems. As Gram writes, designers need more than just craftsmanship skills; they should 'be students of human culture.' Here, the field benefited from another kind of émigré: social scientists who, faced with a declining academic-job market, entered the tech industry instead. One contributor was Lucy Suchman, who graduated from UC Berkeley in 1984 with a Ph.D. in anthropology, then took a job at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center as a researcher. In an influential study, Suchman placed two successful computer scientists in a room to see whether they could, as Gram writes, use 'a brand-new, feature-rich Xerox photocopier' without issues. They couldn't. It turned out, as Gram observes dryly, that learning how to use an unfamiliar machine 'is never as simple as technologists want it to be.' Other tech companies also hired social scientists, who became a new kind of design professional: user researchers. In theory, they were meant to instill a more 'human-centered' approach to technology. In practice, however, they were pressured to solve problems quickly and prioritize profit over the ideal experience. Eventually, some designers and design educators grew to feel that the 'problems worth solving,' as Gram writes, were the 'wicked problems' of society—a term coined by the design theorists Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber in 1973 to include issues such as crumbling public infrastructure, education inequality, and poverty. Teachers encouraged their students to apply design to things that really mattered—not just the creation of mass-produced consumer goods. And companies such as Ideo, a design consultancy founded in 1991 in Palo Alto, helped turn design from a specialist skill into a general-purpose one, selling the concept of 'design thinking' to corporate America. Design thinking, as Ideo's CEO, Tim Brown, wrote in 2008, 'uses the designer's sensibility and methods to match people's needs with what is technologically feasible.' While Ideo employed design thinking to invent user-friendly insulin pens and an updated PalmPilot, the company also suggested that its approach to identifying issues and brainstorming solutions could be applied to all kinds of problems—including the 'wicked' ones plaguing corporations, educational institutions, health care, and government. Corporate America fell in love with the idea, and Gram describes how design thinking became an almost 'spiritual movement,' with Brown's 2009 book, Change by Design, as its bible. Its influence extended around the world: In 2006, an advertising agency in Bogotá, Colombia, was asked by the government to research, prototype, and launch an ad campaign imploring a group of Marxist-Leninist guerrilla fighters to demobilize. But design thinking often disappointed its disciples. Take Gram's example of Gainesville, Florida, where in the 2010s, about a third of the city's residents lived below the poverty line. In 2013, the city's mayor asked Anthony Lyons, the director of a newly formed economic-development committee, to turn the city's prospects around. Lyons looked to Silicon Valley for inspiration and hired Ideo for a two-month, $200,000 project to research how Gainesville could become a more 'competitive' city. Lyons soon became city manager, and quickly implemented Ideo's suggestions—including creating a new logo, establishing trainings for city employees in design thinking, and renaming the Department of Planning and Development the Department of Doing. These sorts of changes, Gram writes, had a 'tenuous relationship' to the real challenges facing Gainesville, one of the most racially unequal places in the country. Black residents had lower high-school-graduation rates and higher unemployment rates than white residents, and Ideo's more surface-level solutions could do little to address that reality. Lyons's eagerness to redesign Gainesville to be 'the most user friendly city in the world,' as Ideo advocated, ignored the expertise of existing city employees. There was low morale and high turnover, and when Lyons himself resigned after a few years, a resident told a local university's newspaper, 'Gainesville is not a Silicon Valley startup.' The trouble, as The Gainesville Sun 's editorial board wrote, was that Lyons, despite being an 'agent of change' in the city, failed to 'build consensus.' He didn't have a design problem to solve; he had a political problem. The concept of design, as the French philosopher Bruno Latour observed in a 2008 lecture, has had an 'extraordinary career.' No longer is design about making objects more beautiful and useful; instead, he suggested, 'design is one of the terms that has replaced the word 'revolution'!' That might be the problem. 'Our contemporary idea of design,' Gram writes, is often used to convince ourselves 'that positive social change could be achieved without politics and government action; that problem solving could be both generative and profitable.' But most ambitious changes on the societal level require political consensus, and what's profitable for some may not be beneficial for all. Design may be a distraction from the real work. The solution, though, isn't to stop trying to change the world. What could a more beautiful, user-friendly, accessible, and egalitarian society look like? When it comes to making the world a better place, Gram writes, 'design can contribute to that project, and it should.' In 2000, the designer Sylvia Harris helped revise the U.S. census to be more accessible and comprehensible, leading to a 2 percent higher participation rate compared with the 1990 census. This meant that more Americans, especially those from marginalized and undercounted communities, were represented. In her work, Harris exemplified a different path for the profession: one that seeks to understand the needs of the community being served and emphasizes participatory design. Designers' instincts for aesthetics, utility, and usability can play a crucial role in addressing society's 'wicked problems.' But they can't solve them alone.


Tokyo Reported
13-06-2025
- Business
- Tokyo Reported
Here's Why You Should Always Buy Instagram Followers
Now that we've gotten your attention, we have to admit that not everyone should always buy Instagram followers. If you don't have an Instagram account, you'd have nowhere to send your purchased followers. If you only use Instagram to chat with friends or spend your spare time watching videos, you don't need new followers. If it doesn't matter to you how many people see your Instagram posts, or you don't want to earn money from your Instagram presence, there's no need for you to buy followers. For everyone else? Purchasing followers can make Instagram users more popular, more influential, and more important on the Gram, and can let them build their follower count high enough to become Instagram influencers. Why Buying IG Followers Makes Such a Difference More than 100 million videos and photos are posted to Instagram every day, and standing out among that huge influx of content is virtually impossible. The content you upload is likely to be lost in the shuffle. It won't even help very much to create the highest-quality content possible, load your posts with hashtags, and optimize your Instagram profile to make it easier for people to find your account. The competition for exposure is much too strong. There's one method that lets you elevate your Instagram pages above the pack, however, and it involves the way the Instagram algorithms work. Playing Nice with Instagram's Algorithms The social media platform realized they needed some way to decide which Instagram users received large audiences for their posts, so they programmed the system's algorithms to prioritize content uploaded by the app's most popular users. While that rule favors accounts with a huge number of followers, there's a loophole. The algorithms consider both follower count and follower growth when awarding visibility; if your account is quickly adding followers, that's good enough to impress the Instagram algorithms and earn you a larger audience. That's your real goal. All of the people in your new audience have their first chance to see your content, like it, and decide to follow you. Your posts must be compelling enough to make your new viewers want to see more of what you create, but buying followers is the step that triggers powerful organic growth on Instagram. Why should you always buy Instagram followers? It's simple. Your first purchase will only start your growth. As you continue to buy more followers, it will continue at a greater rate until you're popular enough to be influential on the app. Keep buying followers, and you'll keep growing. Just one caution: be careful where you purchase your Insta followers. The Importance of Real Instagram Followers Not everyone plays by the rules — or by Instagram's terms and conditions. Many fly-by-night websites generate fake Instagram followers with bots and link them to fake accounts. But the algorithms can detect and delete fake followers right away, and accounts receiving fake interactions can be penalized or banned. You can only grow your online presence on Instagram by being smart. Some legitimate social media marketing services sell real Instagram followers, who are real people with real accounts on the app. They aren't deleted because they're simply follows from real users, your account stays safe, and you'll start attracting new organic followers quickly. Where do you buy them? These are the best sites to use. Twicsy: The Long-Time Leader It was more than 12 years ago when Twicsy began providing real followers to Instagram users, and their interactions have been providing their customers with the strongest organic growth available ever since. There's a large menu of follower packages available, starting at 100 follows that can start new users' growth, and increasing to 20,000 legitimate IG followers that take influencers' accounts to even higher levels. You can also upgrade to more powerful active followers (other services call them premium followers) for an extra charge. Twicsy followers come with instant delivery and are sold at prices no higher than those charged by top competitors. The user experience is outstanding and secure with encryption and secure servers protecting information, and only an Instagram username is needed to order. Customer support can be reached quickly, night or day. Twicsy's stayed ahead of the competition for long for one big reason: results. You should see 100 new organic followers for every 100 you buy, with stronger performance from active followers. No one else can do better. (Twicsy now offers TikTok services, too.) Visit Twicsy now to buy real Instagram followers Buzzoid: The Strong #2 Choice Buzzoid jumped into the IG provider world right after Twicsy and has been right on our #1 supplier's heels since then; their real followers, service, and support are just as good, and the organic growth their interactions trigger is on the same level. The majority of power users say Twicsy's results are a bit better, but a large minority insist Buzzoid provides stronger growth. Buzzoid's service details are just about the same as Twicsy's: 100-20,000 real followers, fast delivery, simple and secure ordering, and 24/7 customer support. Should you choose Twicsy or Buzzoid? We think the best approach is to try both. Visit Buzzoid now to buy real Instagram followers Rushmax: Coming on Strong This service has just half the experience of the top two providers on this list, but they've quickly built an operation that's close to overtaking one or both of those competitors. The results their real IG followers trigger are only about 5-10% less impressive, but they've been improving every year to become an excellent third option for those needing strong account growth. The other reason Rushmax is a notch behind Twicsy and Buzzoid is that they can't deliver 10,000- and 20,000-follower packages just yet. With high-end service and support, however, and with the yearly improvement in performance they've shown, Rushmax has become not a viable Instagram growth service, but a terrific one. Visit Rushmax now to buy real Instagram followers InstaPort: A Real Surprise With just a few years under their belt delivering real Insta followers. you wouldn't expect InstaPort to wind up on a list of recommended service providers. But here they are. You can receive 100-5,000 legitimate follows in a single, fast delivery from InstaPort; prices are quite reasonable, ordering is simple and safe, and there's 24-hour support to handle issues or questions. What is surprising to see, though, is that InstaPort's real followers already provide growth that approaches the levels that Rushmax delivers. They're worth checking out. The Enormous Benefits of Buying Instagram Followers Instagram is a fun place to spend (or waste) some time. There's a huge amount of interesting, fun, and touching content, it's easy to keep in touch with family and friends, and the many celebrities who've made the Gram their home often share information that you can't find elsewhere (until it's rewritten, compressed, and often misquoted). You don't need a large follower count for that, only an IG account. The benefits of purchasing genuine followers from a trustworthy Instagram service provider come into play when you want to become more popular, more influential, and more important on the app. Here's a look at what buying followers can do for users and their accounts. More visibility for their content: We've already discussed how this works. When they buy a lot of followers, the algorithms see account growth and respond by awarding larger audiences for their posts. For some users, that's exactly what they're after. They may want to feel good about having a larger follower count (and possibly brag to their friends about being popular), or they may be content creators who simply want more people to see the videos they produce (and hopefully give them encouraging feedback). For some users, that's exactly what they're after. They may want to feel good about having a larger follower count (and possibly brag to their friends about being popular), or they may be content creators who simply want more people to see the videos they produce (and hopefully give them encouraging feedback). An opportunity to earn money: This is the big one. An enormous number of customers who buy followers from high-quality services dream about becoming Instagram influencers and earning big bucks. Of course, not all of them will attract enough organic followers to become macro-influencers with more than 100,000 fans (or mega-influencers with more than a million), but even having between 1,000 and 10,000 followers will let them monetize their accounts with sponsor links and ads and earn hundreds of dollars per sponsored post. Of course, not all of them will attract enough organic followers to become macro-influencers with more than 100,000 fans (or mega-influencers with more than a million), but even having between 1,000 and 10,000 followers will let them monetize their accounts with sponsor links and ads and earn hundreds of dollars per sponsored post. The chance to grow their large or small business: Instagram is one of the best and most diverse social platforms for companies to promote brand awareness, showcase products, and boost sales revenue. Buying followers as part of an Instagram marketing strategy allows them to build a large community in their target audience, convert IG users into customers, boost revenue, and otherwise maximize the benefits of their presence on the app. Buying followers as part of an Instagram marketing strategy allows them to build a large community in their target audience, convert IG users into customers, boost revenue, and otherwise maximize the benefits of their presence on the app. Greater account credibility: This is important to virtually all Instagram accounts. A large follower count can be impressive to other users and provides what marketing experts call 'social proof.' In simple terms, it's a vote of confidence that says an account must be credible and worth checking out since so many others have decided to follow it. That credibility also tells people that the products the account promotes can be trusted. (Additional social proof can be gained by purchasing Instagram likes and views, since high likes and view counts are another vote of confidence for an account's content. They also boost engagement rates and may land posts on the Explore page, of course.) Key Considerations When Buying Instagram Followers Choosing a social media service that sells IG followers can be easy; just use one of the Instagram growth services we've recommended. They meet all of the criteria we'll list below. If you've decided to go looking on your own, here's a checklist you can use to evaluate vendors and determine if they're one of the best sites to use. They must sell real followers: As you've learned, fake Instagram followers won't boost growth and can tank your account. If you're not positive that a site sells genuine Insta followers who are all real users, look somewhere else. They're not worth the risk. They should have a wide range of high-quality follower packages: You'll want small packages when you're just starting your organic account growth (big packages will look unnatural to the algorithms and you may find your growth put on hold); you'll need huge packages when (or if) you become an influencer. They should offer upgrades to premium followers: These follows are a little more expensive, but they come from very active users on the app and carry more weight with the IG algorithms. They should offer reasonable, affordable prices: Most top Instagram follower providers charge approximately the same prices for their services. If a vendor charges a lot more, they're not worth it; if they sell cheap Instagram followers, they're probably selling fakes. They should provide quick delivery: Slow delivery times mean you have to wait for your growth to kick in. They should have a fast, safe, and secure ordering process: The quality of the user experience usually reflects the quality of the followers. They should offer multiple payment methods: PayPal, debit, and credit cards, are the options most commonly available. They should have 24/7 customer support teams: It's crucial that you can always reach a knowledgeable support rep if you need help or have questions. They should provide outstanding results: Aside from delivering real followers, this is probably the most important consideration. The services we recommend trigger the strongest organic account growth available in the industry; you should measure verified results from any other provider against them. Closing Words You can have a great time on Instagram even if you only have a few followers. If you want to put your Instagram account to productive use, however, it's crucial to have a strong follower base and continually work to increase it. That's how ordinary users are able to build large and engaged audiences, earn money from their accounts, and/or promote their businesses. The only fast and effective way to supercharge your growth on the app is to purchase followers from a trustworthy service provider. They're able to deliver legitimate, high-quality Instagram followers that convince the IG algorithms to give your content the exposure you need to attract, keep, and grow that all-important follower base.